If anything, large ISPs are more likely to oversell because they aren't so nimble. Just because you have a trillion dollars up your ass doesn't mean you'll do backflips to please your customers.
Also the more customers a company has the less each individual customer matters to them. To a company with 100 customers if 10 of them take their business elsewhere then they have just lost 10% of their business. If they started with 1,000,000 then 10 dissatisfied customers is.001%
And the most cost effective way of stimulating competition is to create it. Make a municipal Internet company that provides unlimited Internet with low speed for a low price at ANY point in the country and you will instantly see the corporation raise above that minimal level of service. OR die. Which would be a good thing.
There's other possibilities. Including sueing the potential competition and even trying to get it declared illegal.
People, in general, know what TV shows they watch. The amount of people browsing Hulu looking for new shows is maybe 5%, and everyone else is looking for a specific show, usually a specific episode of that show. There is no logical reason for 95% of 'streaming TV' to stream.
A trivial solution is to just have them all up as torrent that get downloaded via rss or something.
If the networks want to retain control over said videos, it would be easy enough to encrypt them and provide proprietary player software. And, if they do that, they can actually let people download them well before the broadcast, and then release the encryption key whenever so they can actually be watched. They could even not have 'skip' buttons on their interface, so everyone watches commercials.
An alternative would be to have a machine which records a broadcast then can replay at a time determined by that machine's user. Though currently freely radiating RF might work better for this broadcasting than most ISP connections.
Limiting the total data volume per month doesn't help either, because that doesn't keep people from using their quota at the same time as everybody else, so it doesn't prevent congestion.
An ISP defining some times as "peak" and "offpeak" may actually make things worst. Especially if customers automate things to specific times they would previously have done manually.
Terms of Service would generally allow a company to do whatever they please. I imagine somewhere in there it says they reserve the right to terminate any customer account at any time for any reason.
Just about anywhere such a term would come up against the "law of the land". For one thing a company generally can't take someone's money to provide a service then not provide said service.
The fact that methane can be made from cow dung(among a large number of other things) doesn't mean that slapping a methane engine or fuel cell on a vehicle amounts to producing a "vehicle powered by cow dung".
About a year ago there was a Mythbusters special. In that episode they ran a lawnmower (apparently with an unmodified engine) on methane produced from cow dung. The farm they got this from apparently uses gas from the waste as a source of fuel. There are also sewerage treatment plants which use gas produced by bacterial decomposition to reduce their need for "natural gas" and/or electricity. As well as landfill sites collecting methane from rotting garbage to fuel the trucks which bring if there in the first place.
By limiting the scope of distribution and introducing products into different markets at different times, big publishers can manipualte the market to get bigger profits.
Or rather they believe they can. It's quite possible that doing this can result in less total profit. Because people who can't buy the whatever get it by other means. In the past these means tended to include books being smuggled in tourists' luggage.
The price a market in another country pays might be a lot higher. If they could just buy from overseas distributors (i.e. in the US), those profits would go away.
Many times people will not "shop around". Especially if there is a local supplier. The other thing is that such price fixing often involves bending, if not breaking, laws.
For example the NAFTA requires that once you start selling a product to one of the member countries you have to keep selling it unless you also restrict selling to customers in the home country - i.e. no discriminating against the consumers in other countries.
Except that there in practice appear to be all sorts of exemptions. e.g. all the fuss made by the US over pharmacuticals, the difficulty Canadians have subscribing to US satellite TV, even the US having different Harry Potter books from the rest of the world...
The movie industry needs to realise that the rental and sales models are doomed. Few people watch the same movie over and over again (small children excepted)
Obsessive fans will often do so before the DVD is out too.
and so the benefit in owning a copy of a film is small.
If that copy has political messages or trailers for other films which cannot be skipped that actually counts against it's value since these will annoy people.
Rental simply can not work for soft copies, because rental requires a scarcity that is not applicable.
That hasn't stopped people trying to come up with ways of making such copies behave like physical copies. A problem is that the idea of copyright is based around a situation of copies being cheap only if you make a lot of copies in one go. Be it with a printing press, DVD factory or even a broadcasting station.
In Australia, we're lucky to get some series half a year or more after they start airing in the US, and even then there are heaps of hiatuses and breaks.
Which makes little sense, since the hiatuses and repeats in US showings tend to be to spin out both showing and production to last a year. Anything made in the rest of the world and even in some cases in North America tends not to start showing until it's complete (or at least to the point where episode 5 requires less than a month's post production after the airdate for episode 1).
"Have you tried hiring an immigration expert to help get you into the United States?" -- Movie studio exec, speaking on condition of anonymity
"If you have enough money we may have a solution for you" -- Airbus/Boeing exec, speaking on condition of anonymity. At least until they know that there is a market for an A380/744 with the cargo section converted into a fuel tank, thus avoiding the hassle of having to actually land in the US.
So, some Canadians drive down to the US, buy a US satellite dish, and bring it back.
Possibly more useful would be the box of electronics which connects to the dish:)
While this is illegal in Canada, I feel no moral or ethical guilt.
Presumably for similar reasons that Americans arn't ment to buy their pharmacuticals from Canada or the US is kicking up a a fuss about Canadian wood. All this dispite NAFTA...
Like retroactive copyright extension. The second that was passed, the second that things produced decades ago, and granted copyright for a specific time, had their copyright extended, copyright was demonstratably broken, and operating entirely outside the bounds of the public opinion.
Or indeed outside the bounds of rational thinking. Especially somewhere like the US where the reason for copyright is explicit in the constitution. IIRC such extensions even resulted in things which had passed into the public domain becoming copyright again.
It's not so much the different price that's annoying. It's not having the chance to watch some things because of where you live.
Except that you do have that ability. Due to the "pirates". In much the same way that the original pirate radio ships allowed you to listen to music other radio stations wern't broadcasting...
We need to put an end to regional distribution deals for the internet.
The last 3 Harry Potter books (which are larger and heavier than the typical DVD box set) had one release date around the world. Also there were two regional distributions, USA and rest of the planet. On the other hand you have DVDs of 30 odd year old Dr Who stories released months apart in different parts of the world.
As I wrote several times before about TV shows, game releases and cinema starts this is all about segmentation.
At least part of this has as much to do with "fragmentation". Indeed things like former Warsaw Pact countries joining the EU have made something of a mess of the DVD region codes idea.
Putting up an international one-price-for-all platform for movie purchases would undermine the local market branches the industry has elaborately established over the past decades. You can charge different prices for movies in the EU, Asia, US and so forth.
Time is probably more of an issue than price. Given a choice between pirate copy now and non-pirate copy some unspecified time in the future it's something of a "no brainer" what will happen.
The differences make for additional profit. They would never give that up voluntarily.
There's a very conservative element within the entertainments industry. Which has existed for a long time. Just about any "new thing" has been resisted until the industry has been dragged literally kicking and screaming that the sky was falling.
The only thing I pirate are episodes of a TV series, it only started showing here about a month ago (5 months after it started showing in the US).
What those involved don't appear to understand is that this kind of "staggered release" actually encourages piracy.
At the end of the first series I bought the DVDs of the season, and I intend to do the same for the second. I've tried to find a legit way to watch it, mainly because I would like to contribute towards the ratings of the series.
The way ratings are typically gathered you'd need to be in the right place for starters. Anyway the primary purpose of ratings in commercial television is to set rates for ads. However advertisers don't care much about viewers who couldn't actually buy what they are advertising.
I've tried watching it through NBC's website, Amazon, Hulu, and many other websites but no one will offer it to viewers outside of the US.
Though you could watch the broadcasts in parts of Canada, Mexico and possibly Russia.
Lets start taking DNA from all illegal's before sending back. If they cross over a second time, then a year in prison.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just send them back? Taxpayers might rightly object to their money being spent on the DNA tests and prisons for people who shouldn't be in the country in the first place.
This was an example where exorbitant ressources were wasted although everything indicated that there went something wrong:
Resources which could have been put to better use
no investigator ever thought about the possibility that eventually the DNA evidence might be void. So, your point is moot, investagtors obviously take a DNA sample for as the perfect evidence and stop every logical reasoning as soon as DNA evidence is present.
This implies that these investigators may be capable of making other fundermental errors.
Now, apart from that I worry about the power of the government. You might assume that the government and its institutions like the police or the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. always play fair and nice. However, I find this to be a very big assumption.
Especially when you look at what these kind of people have done in the past.
Because people have some strange belief in the infallibility of:
#1. The people taking the DNA sample at the crime scene.
As well as the tools they are using. As was recently the case in Germany.
#4. DNA samples being completely unique.
Identical twins have the same complete genome, someone who has received a transplaned organ may in some cases show the genome of the doner. The big problem is that what gets compared is a tiny piece of the genome. Which can produce a match between people who are not closely related.
Your finger prints can not be used against your children and grand children.
As well as your parents, nieces, nephews, etc.
Once they have the database, health cost containment will be the excuse for accessing the information for use by non-judicial agencies and then later by non-governmental agencies.
In the case of the British Government it will likely be put on DVD or USB drive and "lost" before any such official handover...
Fingerprints are a match or not, period. DNA matching requires experts, with their own agenda, and results are probabilities, not absolutes.
Actually much the same issues come up. Since a match is likely to be made with the prints of only some fingers and possibly only partial prints (even without knowing which fingers).
Just a few months age a researcher in the US noticed two identical samples, one was from a black man, one from a white man.
DNA testing uses bits of DNA, not the whole genome.
I know this is highly improbable - but it happened.
Without more studies we just don't know how many such matches in "DNA fingerprints" might exist.
I do think the UK has some privacy issues but people in the US shouldn't laugh as they always end up following the UK's lead.
So how long before filming police officers breaking the law is illegal in the US. As part of what Bruce Schneier has called "The War of Photographers". Also the move towards authoritarianism appears to be endemic throughout the "first world".
I'm going to sue the governing body responsible for roads. Because most people speed in my city when driving, this will eliminate their ability to do it. Therefore without roads, driving will be safer.
There are a whole set of offences specific to driving. No doubt lots of other criminals also make use of roads in some way or other...
On another hand, there are still plenty of jurisdictions in which it will be much harder to take such a website down, either because the legal system is not on par with that, or because corruption level is high enough that there is no need to bother with the laws at all.
Or even because the corruption level is not high enough for external agencies to have laws ignored...
I'm still of the opinion that there shall be limitations on copyright:
* Copyright to expire five years after the creator's death.
How about 5 years after first publication subject to depositing an unencrypted copy with any applicable copyright libraries. "Starting the clock" with the creator's death has all sorts of problems like what happens where there is more than one "creator" as well as even finding out when someone dies (especially if they used a alias).
* Copyright can only be held by creator as a person, not by a company and never be transferred to another person.
Who's the creator of a pop song, the composer, the lyric writer, singer(s), musician(s), producers, etc? Ditto for a movie...
Slashdot Mirror
If anything, large ISPs are more likely to oversell because they aren't so nimble. Just because you have a trillion dollars up your ass doesn't mean you'll do backflips to please your customers.
.001%
Also the more customers a company has the less each individual customer matters to them. To a company with 100 customers if 10 of them take their business elsewhere then they have just lost 10% of their business. If they started with 1,000,000 then 10 dissatisfied customers is
And the most cost effective way of stimulating competition is to create it. Make a municipal Internet company that provides unlimited Internet with low speed for a low price at ANY point in the country and you will instantly see the corporation raise above that minimal level of service. OR die. Which would be a good thing.
There's other possibilities. Including sueing the potential competition and even trying to get it declared illegal.
People, in general, know what TV shows they watch. The amount of people browsing Hulu looking for new shows is maybe 5%, and everyone else is looking for a specific show, usually a specific episode of that show. There is no logical reason for 95% of 'streaming TV' to stream.
A trivial solution is to just have them all up as torrent that get downloaded via rss or something.
If the networks want to retain control over said videos, it would be easy enough to encrypt them and provide proprietary player software. And, if they do that, they can actually let people download them well before the broadcast, and then release the encryption key whenever so they can actually be watched. They could even not have 'skip' buttons on their interface, so everyone watches commercials.
An alternative would be to have a machine which records a broadcast then can replay at a time determined by that machine's user. Though currently freely radiating RF might work better for this broadcasting than most ISP connections.
Limiting the total data volume per month doesn't help either, because that doesn't keep people from using their quota at the same time as everybody else, so it doesn't prevent congestion.
An ISP defining some times as "peak" and "offpeak" may actually make things worst. Especially if customers automate things to specific times they would previously have done manually.
Terms of Service would generally allow a company to do whatever they please. I imagine somewhere in there it says they reserve the right to terminate any customer account at any time for any reason.
Just about anywhere such a term would come up against the "law of the land". For one thing a company generally can't take someone's money to provide a service then not provide said service.
The fact that methane can be made from cow dung(among a large number of other things) doesn't mean that slapping a methane engine or fuel cell on a vehicle amounts to producing a "vehicle powered by cow dung".
About a year ago there was a Mythbusters special. In that episode they ran a lawnmower (apparently with an unmodified engine) on methane produced from cow dung. The farm they got this from apparently uses gas from the waste as a source of fuel. There are also sewerage treatment plants which use gas produced by bacterial decomposition to reduce their need for "natural gas" and/or electricity. As well as landfill sites collecting methane from rotting garbage to fuel the trucks which bring if there in the first place.
By limiting the scope of distribution and introducing products into different markets at different times, big publishers can manipualte the market to get bigger profits.
Or rather they believe they can. It's quite possible that doing this can result in less total profit. Because people who can't buy the whatever get it by other means. In the past these means tended to include books being smuggled in tourists' luggage.
The price a market in another country pays might be a lot higher. If they could just buy from overseas distributors (i.e. in the US), those profits would go away.
Many times people will not "shop around". Especially if there is a local supplier.
The other thing is that such price fixing often involves bending, if not breaking, laws.
For example the NAFTA requires that once you start selling a product to one of the member countries you have to keep selling it unless you also restrict selling to customers in the home country - i.e. no discriminating against the consumers in other countries.
Except that there in practice appear to be all sorts of exemptions. e.g. all the fuss made by the US over pharmacuticals, the difficulty Canadians have subscribing to US satellite TV, even the US having different Harry Potter books from the rest of the world...
The movie industry needs to realise that the rental and sales models are doomed. Few people watch the same movie over and over again (small children excepted)
Obsessive fans will often do so before the DVD is out too.
and so the benefit in owning a copy of a film is small.
If that copy has political messages or trailers for other films which cannot be skipped that actually counts against it's value since these will annoy people.
Rental simply can not work for soft copies, because rental requires a scarcity that is not applicable.
That hasn't stopped people trying to come up with ways of making such copies behave like physical copies.
A problem is that the idea of copyright is based around a situation of copies being cheap only if you make a lot of copies in one go. Be it with a printing press, DVD factory or even a broadcasting station.
In Australia, we're lucky to get some series half a year or more after they start airing in the US, and even then there are heaps of hiatuses and breaks.
Which makes little sense, since the hiatuses and repeats in US showings tend to be to spin out both showing and production to last a year. Anything made in the rest of the world and even in some cases in North America tends not to start showing until it's complete (or at least to the point where episode 5 requires less than a month's post production after the airdate for episode 1).
"Have you tried hiring an immigration expert to help get you into the United States?" -- Movie studio exec, speaking on condition of anonymity
"If you have enough money we may have a solution for you" -- Airbus/Boeing exec, speaking on condition of anonymity. At least until they know that there is a market for an A380/744 with the cargo section converted into a fuel tank, thus avoiding the hassle of having to actually land in the US.
So, some Canadians drive down to the US, buy a US satellite dish, and bring it back.
:)
Possibly more useful would be the box of electronics which connects to the dish
While this is illegal in Canada, I feel no moral or ethical guilt.
Presumably for similar reasons that Americans arn't ment to buy their pharmacuticals from Canada or the US is kicking up a a fuss about Canadian wood. All this dispite NAFTA...
Like retroactive copyright extension. The second that was passed, the second that things produced decades ago, and granted copyright for a specific time, had their copyright extended, copyright was demonstratably broken, and operating entirely outside the bounds of the public opinion.
Or indeed outside the bounds of rational thinking. Especially somewhere like the US where the reason for copyright is explicit in the constitution. IIRC such extensions even resulted in things which had passed into the public domain becoming copyright again.
It's not so much the different price that's annoying. It's not having the chance to watch some things because of where you live.
Except that you do have that ability. Due to the "pirates". In much the same way that the original pirate radio ships allowed you to listen to music other radio stations wern't broadcasting...
We need to put an end to regional distribution deals for the internet.
The last 3 Harry Potter books (which are larger and heavier than the typical DVD box set) had one release date around the world. Also there were two regional distributions, USA and rest of the planet.
On the other hand you have DVDs of 30 odd year old Dr Who stories released months apart in different parts of the world.
As I wrote several times before about TV shows, game releases and cinema starts this is all about segmentation.
At least part of this has as much to do with "fragmentation". Indeed things like former Warsaw Pact countries joining the EU have made something of a mess of the DVD region codes idea.
Putting up an international one-price-for-all platform for movie purchases would undermine the local market branches the industry has elaborately established over the past decades. You can charge different prices for movies in the EU, Asia, US and so forth.
Time is probably more of an issue than price. Given a choice between pirate copy now and non-pirate copy some unspecified time in the future it's something of a "no brainer" what will happen.
The differences make for additional profit. They would never give that up voluntarily.
There's a very conservative element within the entertainments industry. Which has existed for a long time. Just about any "new thing" has been resisted until the industry has been dragged literally kicking and screaming that the sky was falling.
The only thing I pirate are episodes of a TV series, it only started showing here about a month ago (5 months after it started showing in the US).
What those involved don't appear to understand is that this kind of "staggered release" actually encourages piracy.
At the end of the first series I bought the DVDs of the season, and I intend to do the same for the second. I've tried to find a legit way to watch it, mainly because I would like to contribute towards the ratings of the series.
The way ratings are typically gathered you'd need to be in the right place for starters. Anyway the primary purpose of ratings in commercial television is to set rates for ads. However advertisers don't care much about viewers who couldn't actually buy what they are advertising.
I've tried watching it through NBC's website, Amazon, Hulu, and many other websites but no one will offer it to viewers outside of the US.
Though you could watch the broadcasts in parts of Canada, Mexico and possibly Russia.
Lets start taking DNA from all illegal's before sending back. If they cross over a second time, then a year in prison.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just send them back? Taxpayers might rightly object to their money being spent on the DNA tests and prisons for people who shouldn't be in the country in the first place.
This was an example where exorbitant ressources were wasted although everything indicated that there went something wrong:
Resources which could have been put to better use
no investigator ever thought about the possibility that eventually the DNA evidence might be void. So, your point is moot, investagtors obviously take a DNA sample for as the perfect evidence and stop every logical reasoning as soon as DNA evidence is present.
This implies that these investigators may be capable of making other fundermental errors.
Now, apart from that I worry about the power of the government. You might assume that the government and its institutions like the police or the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. always play fair and nice. However, I find this to be a very big assumption.
Especially when you look at what these kind of people have done in the past.
On the one hand side, power corrupts.
And attracts the already corrupt...
Because people have some strange belief in the infallibility of: #1. The people taking the DNA sample at the crime scene.
As well as the tools they are using. As was recently the case in Germany.
#4. DNA samples being completely unique.
Identical twins have the same complete genome, someone who has received a transplaned organ may in some cases show the genome of the doner. The big problem is that what gets compared is a tiny piece of the genome. Which can produce a match between people who are not closely related.
Your finger prints can not be used against your children and grand children.
As well as your parents, nieces, nephews, etc.
Once they have the database, health cost containment will be the excuse for accessing the information for use by non-judicial agencies and then later by non-governmental agencies.
In the case of the British Government it will likely be put on DVD or USB drive and "lost" before any such official handover...
Fingerprints are a match or not, period. DNA matching requires experts, with their own agenda, and results are probabilities, not absolutes.
Actually much the same issues come up. Since a match is likely to be made with the prints of only some fingers and possibly only partial prints (even without knowing which fingers).
Just a few months age a researcher in the US noticed two identical samples, one was from a black man, one from a white man.
DNA testing uses bits of DNA, not the whole genome.
I know this is highly improbable - but it happened.
Without more studies we just don't know how many such matches in "DNA fingerprints" might exist.
I do think the UK has some privacy issues but people in the US shouldn't laugh as they always end up following the UK's lead.
So how long before filming police officers breaking the law is illegal in the US. As part of what Bruce Schneier has called "The War of Photographers".
Also the move towards authoritarianism appears to be endemic throughout the "first world".
I'm going to sue the governing body responsible for roads. Because most people speed in my city when driving, this will eliminate their ability to do it. Therefore without roads, driving will be safer.
There are a whole set of offences specific to driving. No doubt lots of other criminals also make use of roads in some way or other...
On another hand, there are still plenty of jurisdictions in which it will be much harder to take such a website down, either because the legal system is not on par with that, or because corruption level is high enough that there is no need to bother with the laws at all.
Or even because the corruption level is not high enough for external agencies to have laws ignored...
I'm still of the opinion that there shall be limitations on copyright:
* Copyright to expire five years after the creator's death.
How about 5 years after first publication subject to depositing an unencrypted copy with any applicable copyright libraries. "Starting the clock" with the creator's death has all sorts of problems like what happens where there is more than one "creator" as well as even finding out when someone dies (especially if they used a alias).
* Copyright can only be held by creator as a person, not by a company and never be transferred to another person.
Who's the creator of a pop song, the composer, the lyric writer, singer(s), musician(s), producers, etc? Ditto for a movie...