I participated in an open hearing (in Norwegian only, sorry) on this very topic last year in Oslo. Participants included representatives from telecom companies, top IT companies, government agencies, interest groups, etc. While there was sympathy for the need to fight terrorism, nobody was in favor of long-term storage of traffic data. The reasons varied, all from privacy concerns to costs to contractual expectations. Nobody was able to see how this long-term data storage would be useful for fighting terrorism. Yes, they understood the alleged theories, but were able to slam these theories with real world examples.
Even if such an approach could be demonstrated to have potential benefits these need to be weighed against the risks relating to the data being available to any entity with the resources to get hold of it. Which includes organised crime, terrorists and foreign governments. If police forces can't keep criminals out of their databases it's unlikely that telecoms companies will be able to do so.
Some people see tons of rules and regulations as a way to "fight" the big corporations. In reality it makes it much harder for the little guys to jump through the loopholes with their smaller pockets.
It's not unknown for rules and regulations to be deliberatly intended to stifle potential competition.
They drive which shows stay and which ones get cancelled. If a show you like is cancelled based on this incorrect data, that's enough reason to care.
A fundermental problem is that a lot of TV programming ends up being "test marketed" in one market. That of the US. Even though US broadcasting is out of step with the rest of the planet.
I wouldn't see an ethical problem with leaving the ads in...but it rarely ever happens, and the only times I've seen it were in cases where the person who encoded the original show were too lazy (or inept) to cut the ads out.
The reason for cutting the ads is that they can increase the size of the resulting file by around a third. Also they are likely to be of little interest to anyone doing the downloading. After removing promotion of other programmes on the same (or related) channels; time specific advertising and geographic specific advertising (which includes ads mentioning prices) all that would be left is advertisments of the "brand awareness" type for globally sold products.
If those pirated copies are full scans that contain the ads, then what's the difference between taping them off the air (legal) versus off the internet (not legal)? If the ads pay for the content, then it does not matter what means are used to send them to you.
An ad for a product or service only available from a great distance away (and possibly only in exchange for foreign currency) isn't very useful to anyone.
The recording industry needs to get off of their collective ass. While they have wasted a decade hemming and hawing about how to control, encrypt and restrict an entire ad hoc global network has arisen to encode and distribute content via digital means.
Part of the issue is that they still want to use regionalised business models in what is effectivly a global market place. Even though the corporations involved are very much global in their operations.
We download arrested development, and when the DVD came out we bought that.
Though depending where you might happen to be on the planet the time you might have to wait for the DVD to come out can vary between "months" and "years"...
MPAA and RIAA need to wake up and kick start digital distribution, or it will just be more of the same for years to come.
The real issue here isn't "digital", it's "global". People are not happy waiting days, let alone months/years, to be able to watch a movie or TV show which people elsewhere have already seen. Especially where there are global forums for discussing just about everything. It's not as if it would be that difficult to create a global TV network where ads are inserted on a local basis.
I predict that the old adage "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" will hold true. The more restrictions on copyrighted movies are created, the less people will want to see them, and the more chance for smaller copylefted films will be created.
Or the more people will tend to ignore copyright completly. Which appears to already be happening.
So, the MPAA is putting comercials in the movies, sueing people that might help support the effort for movie sharing. Are they hurting for money????? I have not seen any reports on it.
IIRC both the MPAA and RIAA groups of companies are continuing to make healthy profits. Even extreremly healthy profits compared other industries.
MTV was originally advertised as being "24hour music commercial free" hosted by VJ's who really did not waste much time in-between videos. Pretty cool. However, I made the mistake of tuning in to MTV a couple of months ago and I can certainly say that it is not "My MTV". Most of it is an ad for something including all of their product placements, and What happened to the videos?
This dosn't appear to be a specific MTV issue. Quite a few people have complained about specialist cable and satellite channels losing whatever unique identity which made them attractive in the first place. As well as "advertisment creep".
Is it the author or the editor who's claiming that patents are difficult to obtain? Haven't we been seeing patents being awarded left and right for the most mundane industry processes?
Is it individuals and small corps which are filing these daft patents though? One obvious problem is that such a scheme would appear to greatly favour existing "players" in a market.
I think he brings up some good points but I think the bloat and draconian nature of the copyright system would simply move to the patent system.
To some extent it already has. With patents being granted for the trivial. The only real difference is that patents have not massivly increased in length, yet.
Only if you haven't used Unix extensively. Compared to Windows managing multiple computers in Unix/Linux is trivial. You scripts don't care how many computers they connect to after all.
Especially when you consider how easily unix type systems support graphical, even text, terminals. A concept which Microsoft still appear to have difficulty with.
TCO includes: the cost to initially purchase the software, the cost in lost time as users and admins to learn new interfaces, the cost in paying employees in maintaining the system, the cost in purchasing obscure or less capable hardware supported by the technology, the cost in lost time in porting/writing/purchasing applications to run in the environment, and on and on.
Very often so called TCO studies are anything but Total. Some of the factors come into play only when changing an existing system or in setting up a new system. Others are going to exist regardless of if you change a system or not. Things like the purchase of "obscure/less capable hardware" can be a cost of not changing. Or they can be a consequential cost of the task in hand (e.g. embedded systems may use old hardware, which has been been proven and certified to be reliable. Especially it's going to wind up in a location where servicing is very expensive.)
The best example is the "malware" cost of billions which quite frankly no CIO or CTO has seen within well managed policied deployments of Windows desktop OS.
To do this requires appropriatly qualified admins. Who tend to be expensive. Windows is hardly "admin" friendly, typically the assumption tends towards the idea that the end user should be carrying out sysadmin type tasks. Then there's applications which "need" to be run as administrator with the vendors advice being to add the relevent users to the "administrators" group. Does your company have people with the relevent expertise to work out how to get some "business critical" piece of software to work whilst leaving security in place. (Then play games with the vendor if it dosn't work...)
Change costs more money.
Which is why you will find plenty of Win9X, NT4, MS Office 97, even older MS software in use. However much Microsoft would like people to "upgrade", aka "change".
If memory serves--I'm trying to remember where I read this, and it may be obsolete--an MS Word document file is simply a dump of its in-memory representation, so one would expect it to be gratuitously large.
Which also makes maintaining backwards compatability difficult and means that the document can contain all sorts of unexpected data. (If the program uses "malloc" rather than "calloc" to assign it's space.)
Speaking of superior file formats, has anyone else noticed just how much smaller OOo files are than the comparable MS Office documents? I routinely have to export files to MSO formats for peer review, and I have always marvelled at the amount of space a.doc takes by comparison.
OOo uses ZIP compression by default. Also MSO is likely to make use of unicode (16 bit) characters even in places where ASCII would be fine.
That's the one thing I don't like about Firefox - so many useful options are hidden in about:config instead of being in the GUI configuration settings management tool.
This is not always a bad thing. It helps prevent the GUI becoming cluttered. Also provides for demarkation between user alterable and admin alterable settings.
I utterly despise US style copyright. It's a travesty of freedom.
Copyright should be there to encourage authors - how does paying their publisher 70 years yonder help the author?
The biggest irony here being that US copyright only exists in order to promote publication in the first place...
Under the previous Australian system authors got 50 years after their death,
Are there actually any recorded cases of authors saying, "I'm not going to write, unless the copyright outlives me by X decades"?
Joke aside, Australia has a good reason to play nice with the United States. Remember that Australia has vast resources, is much richer than neighboring countries AND has very little in the way of a defense force. Compare it to Indonesia, and guess which would have reason to conquer the other.
This puts a pressure on Australia to either build a greater army (not much chance with 20 million people vs 240 million) or seek powerful allies...
There is a third option. Have suitable WMDs. Governemnts tend to be reluctant to invade states capable of obliterating them. It's one thing for a head of state to order soldiers (especially conscript soldiers) to war, but quite another issue when such people are putting their own lives on the line. Give the RAAF the ability to destroy harderned bunkers and Indonesia having a bigger army becomes a lot less relevent.
But unfortunately the US Government controls access to a large number of the worlds consumers. So if you want to be in business, you have to pay attention to their requirements.
Actually there are more people in the European Union, even eithin the "Euro Zone". Even if the US did comprise more than a few percent of the world's population there is the little problem of the US Doller being a weakening currency.
That's the next thing the US will demand you change if you want free trade.
It's kind of ironic that "free trade" involves all sorts of changes and restrictions.
It's too much of a burden on US companies who want to sell stuff in Australia to have to relabel everything in metric units.
Except that US companies would have to do this if they export to their neighbouring North American countries anyway. When it comes to measurements Australia is already in step with most of the planet...
Just because I will retain my version of the material while you pilfer a copy of it does not make it right. It is called information theft - it happens all the time, even before there was electricity available, let alone the Internet.
The concept of copyright simply didn't exist for most of human history. It actually comes from the state attempting to control the technology of printing. To pretend that copyright infringement (an idea which has only existed for a few hundred years) is equivalent to theft (a concept which has existed for several thousand years) dosn't really make much sense.
I created something. I want to keep it private, or limit distribution. I invested my time and possibly my money - I want to recoup this investment.
Nothing guarentees that you will "recoup this investment". It's possible that you might be able to sell your whatever. The amount of money you will make depends on what people are prepared to pay, you might make a profit, "break even" or make a loss.
Someone out there likes my idea - my work - but they do not want to pay for it.
What copyright effectivly says is "if there is money to be made from selling copies then the rights holder then that money should go to the rights holder.
Let me put it in another way - -- you go to work everyday (i presume) - would you appreciate it if your boss said "you are not getting paid for your work"?
Copyright, as it now stands, enables you to derive an income from work you did years ago. Even your parent or grandparent may have done decades ago.
Copyright infringement is stealing someone elses work - it may not be tangeable like a car - but that should not demean its value.
The difference between copyright infringement and theft is that in the former case you have still have the original in the latter case you don't. It would be as if someone had duplicated your car, without changing (even moving) the original.
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Also, the ICBM was a dummy... no worries.
You mean no worries about radioactive contamination. Solid fuel rockets are not exactly "environmentally friendly".
I participated in an open hearing (in Norwegian only, sorry) on this very topic last year in Oslo. Participants included representatives from telecom companies, top IT companies, government agencies, interest groups, etc. While there was sympathy for the need to fight terrorism, nobody was in favor of long-term storage of traffic data. The reasons varied, all from privacy concerns to costs to contractual expectations. Nobody was able to see how this long-term data storage would be useful for fighting terrorism. Yes, they understood the alleged theories, but were able to slam these theories with real world examples.
Even if such an approach could be demonstrated to have potential benefits these need to be weighed against the risks relating to the data being available to any entity with the resources to get hold of it. Which includes organised crime, terrorists and foreign governments.
If police forces can't keep criminals out of their databases it's unlikely that telecoms companies will be able to do so.
Some people see tons of rules and regulations as a way to "fight" the big corporations. In reality it makes it much harder for the little guys to jump through the loopholes with their smaller pockets.
It's not unknown for rules and regulations to be deliberatly intended to stifle potential competition.
They drive which shows stay and which ones get cancelled. If a show you like is cancelled based on this incorrect data, that's enough reason to care.
A fundermental problem is that a lot of TV programming ends up being "test marketed" in one market. That of the US. Even though US broadcasting is out of step with the rest of the planet.
I wouldn't see an ethical problem with leaving the ads in...but it rarely ever happens, and the only times I've seen it were in cases where the person who encoded the original show were too lazy (or inept) to cut the ads out.
The reason for cutting the ads is that they can increase the size of the resulting file by around a third. Also they are likely to be of little interest to anyone doing the downloading. After removing promotion of other programmes on the same (or related) channels; time specific advertising and geographic specific advertising (which includes ads mentioning prices) all that would be left is advertisments of the "brand awareness" type for globally sold products.
If those pirated copies are full scans that contain the ads, then what's the difference between taping them off the air (legal) versus off the internet (not legal)? If the ads pay for the content, then it does not matter what means are used to send them to you.
An ad for a product or service only available from a great distance away (and possibly only in exchange for foreign currency) isn't very useful to anyone.
The recording industry needs to get off of their collective ass. While they have wasted a decade hemming and hawing about how to control, encrypt and restrict an entire ad hoc global network has arisen to encode and distribute content via digital means.
Part of the issue is that they still want to use regionalised business models in what is effectivly a global market place. Even though the corporations involved are very much global in their operations.
We download arrested development, and when the DVD came out we bought that.
Though depending where you might happen to be on the planet the time you might have to wait for the DVD to come out can vary between "months" and "years"...
MPAA and RIAA need to wake up and kick start digital distribution, or it will just be more of the same for years to come.
The real issue here isn't "digital", it's "global". People are not happy waiting days, let alone months/years, to be able to watch a movie or TV show which people elsewhere have already seen. Especially where there are global forums for discussing just about everything.
It's not as if it would be that difficult to create a global TV network where ads are inserted on a local basis.
I predict that the old adage "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" will hold true. The more restrictions on copyrighted movies are created, the less people will want to see them, and the more chance for smaller copylefted films will be created.
Or the more people will tend to ignore copyright completly. Which appears to already be happening.
So, the MPAA is putting comercials in the movies, sueing people that might help support the effort for movie sharing. Are they hurting for money????? I have not seen any reports on it.
IIRC both the MPAA and RIAA groups of companies are continuing to make healthy profits. Even extreremly healthy profits compared other industries.
MTV was originally advertised as being "24hour music commercial free" hosted by VJ's who really did not waste much time in-between videos. Pretty cool. However, I made the mistake of tuning in to MTV a couple of months ago and I can certainly say that it is not "My MTV". Most of it is an ad for something including all of their product placements, and What happened to the videos?
This dosn't appear to be a specific MTV issue. Quite a few people have complained about specialist cable and satellite channels losing whatever unique identity which made them attractive in the first place. As well as "advertisment creep".
Is it the author or the editor who's claiming that patents are difficult to obtain? Haven't we been seeing patents being awarded left and right for the most mundane industry processes?
Is it individuals and small corps which are filing these daft patents though? One obvious problem is that such a scheme would appear to greatly favour existing "players" in a market.
I think he brings up some good points but I think the bloat and draconian nature of the copyright system would simply move to the patent system.
To some extent it already has. With patents being granted for the trivial. The only real difference is that patents have not massivly increased in length, yet.
Only if you haven't used Unix extensively. Compared to Windows managing multiple computers in Unix/Linux is trivial. You scripts don't care how many computers they connect to after all.
Especially when you consider how easily unix type systems support graphical, even text, terminals. A concept which Microsoft still appear to have difficulty with.
TCO includes: the cost to initially purchase the software, the cost in lost time as users and admins to learn new interfaces, the cost in paying employees in maintaining the system, the cost in purchasing obscure or less capable hardware supported by the technology, the cost in lost time in porting/writing/purchasing applications to run in the environment, and on and on.
Very often so called TCO studies are anything but Total. Some of the factors come into play only when changing an existing system or in setting up a new system. Others are going to exist regardless of if you change a system or not. Things like the purchase of "obscure/less capable hardware" can be a cost of not changing. Or they can be a consequential cost of the task in hand (e.g. embedded systems may use old hardware, which has been been proven and certified to be reliable. Especially it's going to wind up in a location where servicing is very expensive.)
The best example is the "malware" cost of billions which quite frankly no CIO or CTO has seen within well managed policied deployments of Windows desktop OS.
To do this requires appropriatly qualified admins. Who tend to be expensive. Windows is hardly "admin" friendly, typically the assumption tends towards the idea that the end user should be carrying out sysadmin type tasks. Then there's applications which "need" to be run as administrator with the vendors advice being to add the relevent users to the "administrators" group. Does your company have people with the relevent expertise to work out how to get some "business critical" piece of software to work whilst leaving security in place. (Then play games with the vendor if it dosn't work...)
Change costs more money.
Which is why you will find plenty of Win9X, NT4, MS Office 97, even older MS software in use. However much Microsoft would like people to "upgrade", aka "change".
If memory serves--I'm trying to remember where I read this, and it may be obsolete--an MS Word document file is simply a dump of its in-memory representation, so one would expect it to be gratuitously large.
Which also makes maintaining backwards compatability difficult and means that the document can contain all sorts of unexpected data. (If the program uses "malloc" rather than "calloc" to assign it's space.)
Speaking of superior file formats, has anyone else noticed just how much smaller OOo files are than the comparable MS Office documents? I routinely have to export files to MSO formats for peer review, and I have always marvelled at the amount of space a .doc takes by comparison.
OOo uses ZIP compression by default. Also MSO is likely to make use of unicode (16 bit) characters even in places where ASCII would be fine.
That's the one thing I don't like about Firefox - so many useful options are hidden in about:config instead of being in the GUI configuration settings management tool.
This is not always a bad thing. It helps prevent the GUI becoming cluttered. Also provides for demarkation between user alterable and admin alterable settings.
I utterly despise US style copyright. It's a travesty of freedom.
Copyright should be there to encourage authors - how does paying their publisher 70 years yonder help the author?
The biggest irony here being that US copyright only exists in order to promote publication in the first place...
Under the previous Australian system authors got 50 years after their death,
Are there actually any recorded cases of authors saying, "I'm not going to write, unless the copyright outlives me by X decades"?
Joke aside, Australia has a good reason to play nice with the United States. Remember that Australia has vast resources, is much richer than neighboring countries AND has very little in the way of a defense force. Compare it to Indonesia, and guess which would have reason to conquer the other.
This puts a pressure on Australia to either build a greater army (not much chance with 20 million people vs 240 million) or seek powerful allies...
There is a third option. Have suitable WMDs. Governemnts tend to be reluctant to invade states capable of obliterating them. It's one thing for a head of state to order soldiers (especially conscript soldiers) to war, but quite another issue when such people are putting their own lives on the line.
Give the RAAF the ability to destroy harderned bunkers and Indonesia having a bigger army becomes a lot less relevent.
But unfortunately the US Government controls access to a large number of the worlds consumers. So if you want to be in business, you have to pay attention to their requirements.
Actually there are more people in the European Union, even eithin the "Euro Zone".
Even if the US did comprise more than a few percent of the world's population there is the little problem of the US Doller being a weakening currency.
That's the next thing the US will demand you change if you want free trade.
It's kind of ironic that "free trade" involves all sorts of changes and restrictions.
It's too much of a burden on US companies who want to sell stuff in Australia to have to relabel everything in metric units.
Except that US companies would have to do this if they export to their neighbouring North American countries anyway.
When it comes to measurements Australia is already in step with most of the planet...
Please, use the word 'narcotics'. I'm so sick of people moronically using the work 'drugs' to mean the same thing.
The term "narcotic" refers to a specific catagory of drugs. Some of which are legal, others of which are illegal.
The vast majority of 'drugs' are useful tools helping people to live their lives and recover from ill health.
This use has nothing to do with a drug's legal status.
Just because I will retain my version of the material while you pilfer a copy of it does not make it right. It is called information theft - it happens all the time, even before there was electricity available, let alone the Internet.
The concept of copyright simply didn't exist for most of human history. It actually comes from the state attempting to control the technology of printing.
To pretend that copyright infringement (an idea which has only existed for a few hundred years) is equivalent to theft (a concept which has existed for several thousand years) dosn't really make much sense.
I created something. I want to keep it private, or limit distribution. I invested my time and possibly my money - I want to recoup this investment.
Nothing guarentees that you will "recoup this investment". It's possible that you might be able to sell your whatever. The amount of money you will make depends on what people are prepared to pay, you might make a profit, "break even" or make a loss.
Someone out there likes my idea - my work - but they do not want to pay for it.
What copyright effectivly says is "if there is money to be made from selling copies then the rights holder then that money should go to the rights holder.
Let me put it in another way - -- you go to work everyday (i presume) - would you appreciate it if your boss said "you are not getting paid for your work"?
Copyright, as it now stands, enables you to derive an income from work you did years ago. Even your parent or grandparent may have done decades ago.
Copyright infringement is stealing someone elses work - it may not be tangeable like a car - but that should not demean its value.
The difference between copyright infringement and theft is that in the former case you have still have the original in the latter case you don't. It would be as if someone had duplicated your car, without changing (even moving) the original.