I get tired of defending a position that I don't support fully, but not everything is black and white as you seems to think. Why should Google make money from news that they didn't collect? Newspapers pay for information (by paying for AFP for exemple, and by sending journalists collecting information around the world, checking this info, analysing it, commenting it,...). Why could Google just aggregate those bits of information, and profit from them, without paying their sources?
Now, can we consider that the added value of Google News is such that users will stop at their page, and not click on the links? If users click, Google brings traffic to the newspaper sites, and thus money to them. If Google takes enough information, and displays it on their pages, such that users don't feel a need to click through the links to come to the newspapers sites, then those have lost revenue due to Google, when Google gained revenue from those information. And that's not fair.
Note: I know that Google News doesn't have commercials (yet), but they might have later. Also, Google News push the brand of Google, and as such brings revenue to Google. If it didn't bring them any revenue, why would they do it?
The 1million/day was if they didn't remove content from Google News. The 500k/day was for the case where they didn't print the judgment on their front page.
It seems to me that you fail to get that belgian newspaper get very little from, e.g., American people stumbling randomly through a Google link on their sites. They get revenue through advertisement made for Belgian readers. If no belgian newspaper is on Google anymore, lot of Belgians will just cease to use Google, and go to another search engine, which still indexes the content of '.be' sites.
Among all the possible search engines, I guess that at least one will pay the editors for their content. If you imagine that all others stop indexing Belgium, that one (if there was only one) would be sure to become known as the most complete one. It would have token the whole (tiny) market of Belgium.
And who knows what country will follow?
Of course, this path of action is flawed. If Google (and only them) is paying, and indexing, the newspaper, and if e.g. only MSN Live indexes the official sites (and pay them?), and only Yahoo indexes (and pay) the television sites,... we'll have no way to get a global search on everything.
Maybe not the front page, but when big companies lose a trial, they are routinely ordered to publish the judgement in a few major newspapers. IMHO it seems to be the best way to let the public know. Of course, it's only done for cases where the public, or a high number of shareholders, was directly affected.
If a newspaper prints an incorrect information about somebody, get sued for it, and loose, the newspaper is also often required to print a correction.
Well, it's not one newspaper suing Google, its the association of French-speaking newspapers of Belgium. If Google News doesn't index any of them anymore, news.google.be will rapidly become irrelevant for French-speaking belgian people. Those will just go to other search engines (Yahoo, MS Live,...) At least one of them will make an agreement with those newspapers, and that one search engine/news aggregator will become the reference in Belgium.
So, if Google doesn't want then Belgian market, they can drop it. But they'll face the prospect of having another engine become strong in this (tiny) market. If Google made news.google.BE in the first place, it's that they didn't want to exclude themselves from this market.
Other European countries are following the current matters with great interest, and might take the same path in a near future. Could Google ignore the whole of Europe? And whose going to be next?
Actually, I submitted the story, previewed it, to only discover later that I typed 'Belgian' instead of 'Belgium'. Sorry for the confusion. Sorry also if the text was not clear. Wouldn't it be good if there were any editors at Slashdot to correct obvious mistakes?;) And yes, I'm not a native english speaker. Thanks for defending me!
it will look sexy, but will be crippled by some DRM, I'm afraid.
The article is slashdotted already, but what DRM will it have? Sony has too much to protect (Sony Music) to allow people to enjoy their hardware fully.
I've had a Sony MD, you could transfer from your PC to the MD with the USB cable, but what you recorded on the MD (even if recorded with an analog device, you couldn't transfer it back to your PC...)
I hope they haven't done the same kind of mistake: making a great hardware, with functionalities crippled by some DRM.
As far as I understand, this decision doesn't mean anything about DeCSS being legal or not, it is just about the fact that the injuction for stopping publication on Bunner's site was an abuse of the trial's court discretion.
It doesn't even say that distributing it is legal. As I understand, it does just say "Bunner distributed that when it was already public knowledge, so an injunction against that was innapropriate".
You bought it a couple of month ago ? That's difficult to believe since it went out only end of June...
I pre-ordered one in person in Japan, and got it first week of July. I used it from that time, and I'm very satisfied with it.
I installed Perl to be able to play with it, installed a few games dowloaded for free, use its 'ebook-like' mode to read Project Gutenberg files when travelling by train (very easy to read 640x480 screen, back-lighted).
The Clie series was fine too, but it wasn't clear for me if they had a developper pack, in case I really wish to program it myself. Also the Zaurus community seems to be well alive.
Free OSes (Linux, BSDs,...) have a lot of values, _one_ of which is their large library of free applications.
By bundling those for windows, people will have less reasons to switch to one of those free OSes. Of course, there are still reasons, but there is one less.
People who don't matter for ideology behind free OSes won't bother switching. ANd I'm afraid this means a lot of users...
There is some momentum which is needed with free OSes to have the attention span of big companies, and convince them to throw resources at supporting their products under those OSes. Having less people switch to those means less momentum, and therefore less attention.
On the other end, using those tools under Windows will at least render much easier data exchanges, and is therefore a first step in breaking the dependency on those proprietary and more or less closed formats.
I'm not sure if this is ideologically good or not. It will for sure be usefull for those who have no possiblity to switch of OS (because of job requirements, or games,...).
I haven't seen the suppressed sites, but there has been anti-abortion sites giving names of the doctors practising abortion and saying "Here are the adresses of murderers to kill".
A site which makes it easier to kill somebody by giving private information like home adress,... should be banned IMHO. Of course, some fanatics will dig the web and find that information anyway, but it is no reason to allow to publish it anyway.
If the site is hosted in a country which doesn't ban it, then it is IMHO perfectly legitimate to try to ban it from other countries, even if it is not 100% effective. Removing it from Google is not 100% effective, but it makes it a bit less accessible.
Being about anti-abortion, pro-terrorism or anything else doesn't change the fact: there are some sites which should be banned. But they should not be banned too lightly, and there should be ways to defend oneself against being banned,...
Are people smarter because they don't follow the masses, and buy something that suit's them better, or did they get smarter because they had a look to another OS ?
Same goes for Unix-like OSes,...
In case of Mac, I though that Mac's were easier to use than Windows PCs?
I sure find Win WP easier to use than Linux, but far less configurable.
A mainstream OS (like the Windows series) is easier for people because they can buy software anywhere, and know that it's (probably) going to work (more or less). So dumber people can afford Windows, but couldn't afford the complexity of a configurable OS.
Note: I've never used a Mac, so I'm not saying anything against Macs here.
Ideally, we'd have an OS which can be configured easily and fully, but easy to use anyway. Mandrake for one is going that way, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
I get tired of defending a position that I don't support fully, but not everything is black and white as you seems to think. Why should Google make money from news that they didn't collect? Newspapers pay for information (by paying for AFP for exemple, and by sending journalists collecting information around the world, checking this info, analysing it, commenting it,...). Why could Google just aggregate those bits of information, and profit from them, without paying their sources?
Now, can we consider that the added value of Google News is such that users will stop at their page, and not click on the links? If users click, Google brings traffic to the newspaper sites, and thus money to them. If Google takes enough information, and displays it on their pages, such that users don't feel a need to click through the links to come to the newspapers sites, then those have lost revenue due to Google, when Google gained revenue from those information. And that's not fair.
Note: I know that Google News doesn't have commercials (yet), but they might have later. Also, Google News push the brand of Google, and as such brings revenue to Google. If it didn't bring them any revenue, why would they do it?
Yes, same case, next step.
The 1million/day was if they didn't remove content from Google News. The 500k/day was for the case where they didn't print the judgment on their front page.
It seems to me that you fail to get that belgian newspaper get very little from, e.g., American people stumbling randomly through a Google link on their sites. They get revenue through advertisement made for Belgian readers. If no belgian newspaper is on Google anymore, lot of Belgians will just cease to use Google, and go to another search engine, which still indexes the content of '.be' sites.
Among all the possible search engines, I guess that at least one will pay the editors for their content. If you imagine that all others stop indexing Belgium, that one (if there was only one) would be sure to become known as the most complete one. It would have token the whole (tiny) market of Belgium.
And who knows what country will follow?
Of course, this path of action is flawed. If Google (and only them) is paying, and indexing, the newspaper, and if e.g. only MSN Live indexes the official sites (and pay them?), and only Yahoo indexes (and pay) the television sites,... we'll have no way to get a global search on everything.
In short: yes.
Maybe not the front page, but when big companies lose a trial, they are routinely ordered to publish the judgement in a few major newspapers. IMHO it seems to be the best way to let the public know. Of course, it's only done for cases where the public, or a high number of shareholders, was directly affected.
If a newspaper prints an incorrect information about somebody, get sued for it, and loose, the newspaper is also often required to print a correction.
Well, it's not one newspaper suing Google, its the association of French-speaking newspapers of Belgium. If Google News doesn't index any of them anymore, news.google.be will rapidly become irrelevant for French-speaking belgian people. Those will just go to other search engines (Yahoo, MS Live,...) At least one of them will make an agreement with those newspapers, and that one search engine/news aggregator will become the reference in Belgium.
So, if Google doesn't want then Belgian market, they can drop it. But they'll face the prospect of having another engine become strong in this (tiny) market. If Google made news.google.BE in the first place, it's that they didn't want to exclude themselves from this market.
Other European countries are following the current matters with great interest, and might take the same path in a near future. Could Google ignore the whole of Europe? And whose going to be next?
Actually, I submitted the story, previewed it, to only discover later that I typed 'Belgian' instead of 'Belgium'. Sorry for the confusion. Sorry also if the text was not clear. Wouldn't it be good if there were any editors at Slashdot to correct obvious mistakes? ;) And yes, I'm not a native english speaker. Thanks for defending me!
it will look sexy, but will be crippled by some DRM, I'm afraid.
The article is slashdotted already, but what DRM will it have? Sony has too much to protect (Sony Music) to allow people to enjoy their hardware fully.
I've had a Sony MD, you could transfer from your PC to the MD with the USB cable, but what you recorded on the MD (even if recorded with an analog device, you couldn't transfer it back to your PC...)
I hope they haven't done the same kind of mistake: making a great hardware, with functionalities crippled by some DRM.
(IANAL but)
As stated at the end of the PDF:
It is not a final adjudication on the merits
As far as I understand, this decision doesn't mean anything about DeCSS being legal or not, it is just about the fact that the injuction for stopping publication on Bunner's site was an abuse of the trial's court discretion.
It doesn't even say that distributing it is legal. As I understand, it does just say "Bunner distributed that when it was already public knowledge, so an injunction against that was innapropriate".
Now, he could be sued for distributing it, no?
You bought it a couple of month ago ? That's difficult to believe since it went out only end of June...
I pre-ordered one in person in Japan, and got it first week of July. I used it from that time, and I'm very satisfied with it.
I installed Perl to be able to play with it, installed a few games dowloaded for free, use its 'ebook-like' mode to read Project Gutenberg files when travelling by train (very easy to read 640x480 screen, back-lighted).
The Clie series was fine too, but it wasn't clear for me if they had a developper pack, in case I really wish to program it myself. Also the Zaurus community seems to be well alive.
Aren't you just trolling ?
Free OSes (Linux, BSDs,...) have a lot of values, _one_ of which is their large library of free applications.
By bundling those for windows, people will have less reasons to switch to one of those free OSes. Of course, there are still reasons, but there is one less.
People who don't matter for ideology behind free OSes won't bother switching. ANd I'm afraid this means a lot of users...
There is some momentum which is needed with free OSes to have the attention span of big companies, and convince them to throw resources at supporting their products under those OSes. Having less people switch to those means less momentum, and therefore less attention.
On the other end, using those tools under Windows will at least render much easier data exchanges, and is therefore a first step in breaking the dependency on those proprietary and more or less closed formats.
I'm not sure if this is ideologically good or not. It will for sure be usefull for those who have no possiblity to switch of OS (because of job requirements, or games,...).
My 2 cents...
I haven't seen the suppressed sites, but there has been anti-abortion sites giving names of the doctors practising abortion and saying "Here are the adresses of murderers to kill".
A site which makes it easier to kill somebody by giving private information like home adress,... should be banned IMHO. Of course, some fanatics will dig the web and find that information anyway, but it is no reason to allow to publish it anyway.
If the site is hosted in a country which doesn't ban it, then it is IMHO perfectly legitimate to try to ban it from other countries, even if it is not 100% effective. Removing it from Google is not 100% effective, but it makes it a bit less accessible.
Being about anti-abortion, pro-terrorism or anything else doesn't change the fact: there are some sites which should be banned. But they should not be banned too lightly, and there should be ways to defend oneself against being banned,...
Are people smarter because they don't follow the masses, and buy something that suit's them better, or did they get smarter because they had a look to another OS ?
Same goes for Unix-like OSes,...
In case of Mac, I though that Mac's were easier to use than Windows PCs?
I sure find Win WP easier to use than Linux, but far less configurable.
A mainstream OS (like the Windows series) is easier for people because they can buy software anywhere, and know that it's (probably) going to work (more or less). So dumber people can afford Windows, but couldn't afford the complexity of a configurable OS.
Note: I've never used a Mac, so I'm not saying anything against Macs here.
Ideally, we'd have an OS which can be configured easily and fully, but easy to use anyway. Mandrake for one is going that way, IMHO.