You nailed it. Copyright and intellectual property laws are evil--until the next GPL violation article. Witness entire thread discussions about how "piracy isn't theft" and then witness those same people referring to "stolen" GPL code.
I just think it would be helpful for people to think through their previous positions before firing off another reactionary post to a Slashdot article. It would be helpful because it would strengthen and refine your position rather than invalidate it through contradictions.
Now that people are using copyright law to protect ownership of GPL source code, people can no longer in the next breath defend copyright infringement on P2P networks.
If you use intellectual property and copyright law to defend the GPL and go after infringers, then there is nothing wrong with the RIAA protecting its intellectual property using copyright law and going after infringers.
Have you ever checked the prices they charge? Comparing prices for online music with the price of store bought CDs one gets the impression that the manufacture and distribution of CDs has a negative cost.
DVDs typically cost $20. An album on iTunes is.99 per song, and typically nine bucks to buy the entire album. I honestly don't see how you could possibly consider that overpriced. It's half the normal cost of a CD at the store.
Unfortunately--at least on/., anyway--the loud opinions of those "freeloaders" usually makes rational discussion of copyrights, intellectual property, and DRM meaningless. You can't get past the "RIAA IS EVIL AND I AM A FREEDOM FIGHTER" mindset. I think we'll start seeing some real progress and some valid compromises made by both sides if we can get past the reactionary attitudes that really only exist to shift blame away from downloaders and onto some faceless corporate entity, because demonization is easier than acknowledgement of one's own guilt.
The truth is that the portrayal of both sides is usually wrong. Most companies aren't big, evil, cigar-smoking Republicans sitting in dark rooms plotting economic takeovers to maintain their monopolies. They're just companies trying to protect their media content because of the explosion of piracy. And pirates aren't freedom fighters riding the wave of a big cultural movement. Most are just freeloaders looking to get stuff without having to pay for it (it's basic human nature).
So far, iTunes has been a big success, so apparently a lot of consumers have no problem with DRM and online legal music-downloading. So to be quite honest, I don't know why people still complain about an "obsolete business model" when record labels have already embraced services like Napster and iTunes. Legal online music is already here, which makes the argument for piracy appear even more self-serving.
Do I pirate music? Yes. Do I know it's technically wrong? Yes. Am I sympathetic to an industry which has stolen from me and everyone else for years and now has the tables turned? No fucking way.
Then don't piss and moan when the GPL gets violated. It makes you and other Slashdotters look hypocritcal to give these rallying cries over ripping off artists (face it, that's all you're doing...a group of real people rented out a studio and spent months making music in order to make a living, and you're not paying them for it...congratulations on that "movement"), and then bitch and moan when a company uses GPL code.
The industry didn't steal from you. A bunch of execs didn't show up to your door and hold a gun to your head to force you to buy their overpriced CDs. You willingly gave your money to the store. You didn't have to do it. It's easier to play victim, however, and pretend the big, evil RIAA is the bad guy, and you're just some freedom fighter sticking it to them. In reality, you're just another guy who doesn't want to have to pay money for something.
I think that's the thing that strikes me most about these discussions. So many people try to portray themselves as battle-ridden freedom fighters leading a culture movement against some corporate-controlled society. In reality, you're nothing more than one more person sitting on P2P getting music for free so you don't have to actually shell out money for it. The motive is totally selfish, but justifications have been invented so that you don't feel guilty over it.
It doesn't matter if the RIAA overprices products. That means you...gasp...don't buy them. The only logical conclusion is that you feel you have some sort of inherent right to someone's produced media content, which is completely silly. Does that mean I have an inherent right to use any GPL code I want in any way I want?
I will start buying music again when I can pay between 40 and 50 pence per track for a file without DRM. Until then, I'll steal.
Then go on stealing. The rest of us will note that you have absolutely zero moral ground to stand on as a result. I'm a musician, and fuck you if you're stealing my music too.
Oh, I forgot, the actual human beings behind the music being taken never get mentioned in these discussions. It's always the evil RIAA who gets painted as bad guy in order to shift blame away from downloaders. Lame.
By the way, how can you demand DRM-less music with no restrictions in one breath, and then demand everyone follow the license of the GPL in another? If nobody wants the usage limitations DRM, then why should we have to follow the usage limitations of the GPL?
This juvenile sort of thinking is really holding actual progress back on creating a legal online music market. At the end of the day, it's time to realize a lot of people--many of them posters on Slashdot--don't care about legal online music downloading. They are only in it for one thing. Freeloading. Not free speech.
RIAA and the MPAA refuse to acknowledge the existence of the market of legitimate downloaders, since it would eliminate much of their middle management and executive staffs, and have thus made it artificially difficult to legally obtain these materials.
I keep hearing how the RIAA is afraid of legal downloading and wonder why people keep ignoring iTunes. Hell, people on Slashdot seem to be doing everything in their power to fuck up legal downloading by cracking the DRM.
Computers in general are very logical and so most geeks are logical.. so we work things out and can adapt to most things.. where as the people you've mentioned and things don't work the same.
I call bullshit. What difference is there between a guy who knows the engines of various makes and models of automobiles inside out, and some geek who knows operating system design of various computers inside out?
This is exactly what I was talking about. Computer geeks like to make themselves out to be God's gift to the earth. Try coaching a baseball team to victory or fixing an old Camaro. They take skills you don't have, and they take just as much logic and creativity to do successfully as it takes for you to know Linux inside out.
Have you ever sat around and listened to car guys talking with each other? The use of arcane terminology and knowledge is just the same as computer geeks sitting around talking.
The explosion of PC-compatibles guaranteed that the operating system running on it would be the dominant operating system. Microsoft used that to create a monopoly platform.
Linux does not win over Windows because of a different factor--it is harder to use, has less applications, etc. Macs were the better computers with more apps to start with but lost out to PCs because PCs were cheaper and therefore more widely available, furthering software development for that platform.
The argument that Macs were less open and expandable and therefore that's why the PC won is even more silly when you consider that Macs hooked up to more devices than PCs did at the time. Because of expansion devices, Macs were hooked up to all kinds of custom hardware, which is one of the reasons why Macs first became entrenched in the media content creation industry.
History shows us that a more polished desktop does not always win. The Mac is a perfect example of this. During the 80s the mac was a slick polished interface while the PC had an ugly DOS command line. The PC won handily. Why is that?
This is a classic logic fallacy in that you pick and choose the factors that support your argument. The PC didn't win because it was more "open." It won because it was cheaper than the $2000+ priced Macintosh, fueled by commodity PC-clones (remember the phrase "PC-compatible"?) that competed with each other and brought prices down each year.
I've known people who were complete morons. Until you got them underneath a truck or at a baseball game, where they would know an engine inside out or remember the details of entire decades of team statistics. We've all got our specialties.
Just something to keep in mind...a lot of times, computer geeks think they're God's gift to the earth. There are lots of people smarter at you when it comes to things you know nothing about. I don't know a damn thing about making really good spaghetti or building a car engine. Variety and the collective versatility it creates is what makes society great.
Clearly Internet Explorer cannot create a real HWND for every element in an HTML page. There is a limit of 10,000 USER handles per process, and you are likely to run out of desktop heap long before then.
They reimplemented them to avoid sucking up user RAM. The widgets look and behave exactly as other Windows widgets, so the point is completely moot.
Because the corporate fat cats and megalomaniacs don't get their chance to screw the customer and line their pockets in the progress?
How are they screwing the customer? Nobody is putting a gun to the customer's head to force you to buy this DRM music online. Go back to buying CDs then.
I'm just saying, everyone bitches that they embrace an "obsolete business model." So they test the waters with a new one, and people just crack it. Regardless of how you feel about DRM, it's not going to put online music in a good light at the labels.
This is nice and all, but don't you guys realize you're hurting the chances for the music industry to finally fully adopt online music buying?
It's like you guys bitch when they don't embrace, then they start doing it, and you guys bitch and find ways to break their copy protection. If you don't like the DRM, don't buy the online music. Doing stuff like this just makes legal online music downloading look like it will always fail, because hackers will continue to keep cracking it.
When I saw this story, I was reminded of all the pro-piracy articles this site trumpets out. I haven't yet heard a valid reason for the double-standard. Why is piracy not theft, but GPL violations are often referred to as such? Why is respecting intellectual property important for the GPL, but not for the RIAA? If infringing copyrights against the MPAA and RIAA is a "gray area," why are GPL violations so clear-cut and enforceable? And finally, why is the RIAA bad for going after individual P2P infringers, but guys like this can go after individual GPL infringers?
There still isn't really a clear victor... or is there?
Spec-wise, Blu-Ray wins. Blu-Ray also has the support of Sony (and therefore will be in the PS3), has Apple supporting it (and therefore will be in future Macs by default...and Macs are used in the media content industry), and it supports all the codecs and specs that HD-DVD supports. In addition, it has larger storage space. Even Dell and Disney are supporting it.
HD-DVD's only benefit is that there won't be a need to alter today's manufacturing processes as much as Blu-Ray will require.
I predict (and hope) Blu-Ray will win. I know people love to cite Betamax in these articles, but just because Betamax died out doesn't mean the better format will die out in this case either. There's a lot of important backing for Blu-Ray.
Taco basically responded that they should submit the code as a Slashcode patch, and he would consider it. I guess that didn't pan out. Basically what they did was use already rendered HTML output from Slashdot and used it to craft a CSS for. What will actually require changes, however, will be that underlying, godawful, horrible mess of Perl code that powers Slashdot.
Taco has been hyping a new layout for Slashdot for years, along with that mysterious new moderation system we've been hearing about that never comes. I won't get my hopes up.
Why was I modded "flamebait?" Internet Explorer's broken support of CSS2 has hindered its full adoption for years. Microsoft now controls the standards of the Web unless web developers speak out VERY loudly to drown out their press releases.
"I'm Microsoft, and I'm a big monopoly, so I'm arbitrarily deciding not to support standards I don't like. For no other reason than I don't like them. Secretly, it's just because I don't want to adopt standards that compete with my own, but my managers have told me to tell everyone I just think it's a buggy implementation. I never make any of those..."
Someone should start an organization that publicly hands out awards to companies that severely hinder the progress of technology. Microsoft would win every year. The web has been held back for seven years now because IE won't properly support CSS2. That's like someone developing an improved version of gasoline that costs and pollutes less, and then none of the gas stations adopting it for close to a decade even though it's cheap and available. You look back and shake your head that all this time, people could have been saving money and polluting the air less and they have no idea.
The general public doesn't even realize the web would look and interact much better than it does now. We should have been visiting more advanced websites years ago. But the web still looks and functions the way it did in 2000, because the majority browser IE doesn't adopt technological progress. It's times like these I wish I was rich enough to run public service commercials that stated all this, just to inform people how they're being hindered without even knowing it.
Seeing as how Dreamweaver and GoLive use Opera's engine for their web development apps, and all those mobile devices and general users who run Opera every day, it's hard to believe anybody on Slashdot (which is rabidly pro-Firefox no matter what) when there are comments like "Opera is dead" that actually get modded up.
Opera has long been one of the better and faster browsers. Not only does it take up half the memory of Firefox, but it takes up half the file size.
Slashdot Mirror
You nailed it. Copyright and intellectual property laws are evil--until the next GPL violation article. Witness entire thread discussions about how "piracy isn't theft" and then witness those same people referring to "stolen" GPL code.
I just think it would be helpful for people to think through their previous positions before firing off another reactionary post to a Slashdot article. It would be helpful because it would strengthen and refine your position rather than invalidate it through contradictions.
Now that people are using copyright law to protect ownership of GPL source code, people can no longer in the next breath defend copyright infringement on P2P networks.
If you use intellectual property and copyright law to defend the GPL and go after infringers, then there is nothing wrong with the RIAA protecting its intellectual property using copyright law and going after infringers.
DVDs typically cost $20. An album on iTunes is
Unfortunately--at least on /., anyway--the loud opinions of those "freeloaders" usually makes rational discussion of copyrights, intellectual property, and DRM meaningless. You can't get past the "RIAA IS EVIL AND I AM A FREEDOM FIGHTER" mindset. I think we'll start seeing some real progress and some valid compromises made by both sides if we can get past the reactionary attitudes that really only exist to shift blame away from downloaders and onto some faceless corporate entity, because demonization is easier than acknowledgement of one's own guilt.
The truth is that the portrayal of both sides is usually wrong. Most companies aren't big, evil, cigar-smoking Republicans sitting in dark rooms plotting economic takeovers to maintain their monopolies. They're just companies trying to protect their media content because of the explosion of piracy. And pirates aren't freedom fighters riding the wave of a big cultural movement. Most are just freeloaders looking to get stuff without having to pay for it (it's basic human nature).
So far, iTunes has been a big success, so apparently a lot of consumers have no problem with DRM and online legal music-downloading. So to be quite honest, I don't know why people still complain about an "obsolete business model" when record labels have already embraced services like Napster and iTunes. Legal online music is already here, which makes the argument for piracy appear even more self-serving.
Then don't piss and moan when the GPL gets violated. It makes you and other Slashdotters look hypocritcal to give these rallying cries over ripping off artists (face it, that's all you're doing...a group of real people rented out a studio and spent months making music in order to make a living, and you're not paying them for it...congratulations on that "movement"), and then bitch and moan when a company uses GPL code.
The industry didn't steal from you. A bunch of execs didn't show up to your door and hold a gun to your head to force you to buy their overpriced CDs. You willingly gave your money to the store. You didn't have to do it. It's easier to play victim, however, and pretend the big, evil RIAA is the bad guy, and you're just some freedom fighter sticking it to them. In reality, you're just another guy who doesn't want to have to pay money for something.
I think that's the thing that strikes me most about these discussions. So many people try to portray themselves as battle-ridden freedom fighters leading a culture movement against some corporate-controlled society. In reality, you're nothing more than one more person sitting on P2P getting music for free so you don't have to actually shell out money for it. The motive is totally selfish, but justifications have been invented so that you don't feel guilty over it.
It doesn't matter if the RIAA overprices products. That means you...gasp...don't buy them. The only logical conclusion is that you feel you have some sort of inherent right to someone's produced media content, which is completely silly. Does that mean I have an inherent right to use any GPL code I want in any way I want?
Then go on stealing. The rest of us will note that you have absolutely zero moral ground to stand on as a result. I'm a musician, and fuck you if you're stealing my music too.
Oh, I forgot, the actual human beings behind the music being taken never get mentioned in these discussions. It's always the evil RIAA who gets painted as bad guy in order to shift blame away from downloaders. Lame.
By the way, how can you demand DRM-less music with no restrictions in one breath, and then demand everyone follow the license of the GPL in another? If nobody wants the usage limitations DRM, then why should we have to follow the usage limitations of the GPL?
This juvenile sort of thinking is really holding actual progress back on creating a legal online music market. At the end of the day, it's time to realize a lot of people--many of them posters on Slashdot--don't care about legal online music downloading. They are only in it for one thing. Freeloading. Not free speech.
I keep hearing how the RIAA is afraid of legal downloading and wonder why people keep ignoring iTunes. Hell, people on Slashdot seem to be doing everything in their power to fuck up legal downloading by cracking the DRM.
I call bullshit. What difference is there between a guy who knows the engines of various makes and models of automobiles inside out, and some geek who knows operating system design of various computers inside out?
This is exactly what I was talking about. Computer geeks like to make themselves out to be God's gift to the earth. Try coaching a baseball team to victory or fixing an old Camaro. They take skills you don't have, and they take just as much logic and creativity to do successfully as it takes for you to know Linux inside out.
Have you ever sat around and listened to car guys talking with each other? The use of arcane terminology and knowledge is just the same as computer geeks sitting around talking.
The explosion of PC-compatibles guaranteed that the operating system running on it would be the dominant operating system. Microsoft used that to create a monopoly platform.
Linux does not win over Windows because of a different factor--it is harder to use, has less applications, etc. Macs were the better computers with more apps to start with but lost out to PCs because PCs were cheaper and therefore more widely available, furthering software development for that platform.
The argument that Macs were less open and expandable and therefore that's why the PC won is even more silly when you consider that Macs hooked up to more devices than PCs did at the time. Because of expansion devices, Macs were hooked up to all kinds of custom hardware, which is one of the reasons why Macs first became entrenched in the media content creation industry.
This is a classic logic fallacy in that you pick and choose the factors that support your argument. The PC didn't win because it was more "open." It won because it was cheaper than the $2000+ priced Macintosh, fueled by commodity PC-clones (remember the phrase "PC-compatible"?) that competed with each other and brought prices down each year.
Maybe these upper-echelon factions battle each other in roving street gangs and hold random dance-offs whenever they meet each other on the street.
"You got SERVED!" -- random uber-dork wearing Harry Potter glasses and cape
I've known people who were complete morons. Until you got them underneath a truck or at a baseball game, where they would know an engine inside out or remember the details of entire decades of team statistics. We've all got our specialties.
Just something to keep in mind...a lot of times, computer geeks think they're God's gift to the earth. There are lots of people smarter at you when it comes to things you know nothing about. I don't know a damn thing about making really good spaghetti or building a car engine. Variety and the collective versatility it creates is what makes society great.
This will have what...zero effect?
People love Google. I actually saw Jay Leno mention Google as part of a related joke, and some in the audience began cheering and applauding.
Makes one think Mensa is rather...retarded.
From the link:
Clearly Internet Explorer cannot create a real HWND for every element in an HTML page. There is a limit of 10,000 USER handles per process, and you are likely to run out of desktop heap long before then.
They reimplemented them to avoid sucking up user RAM. The widgets look and behave exactly as other Windows widgets, so the point is completely moot.
It's not like Fridays are slow news days or anything. Steroids is now biotech?
Slashdot needs open voting on the submission queue.
Thank you; that is my point. If someone doesn't like DRM, they shouldn't bother buying it.
Since when was Firefox a standard?
Because the corporate fat cats and megalomaniacs don't get their chance to screw the customer and line their pockets in the progress?
How are they screwing the customer? Nobody is putting a gun to the customer's head to force you to buy this DRM music online. Go back to buying CDs then.
I'm just saying, everyone bitches that they embrace an "obsolete business model." So they test the waters with a new one, and people just crack it. Regardless of how you feel about DRM, it's not going to put online music in a good light at the labels.
This is nice and all, but don't you guys realize you're hurting the chances for the music industry to finally fully adopt online music buying?
It's like you guys bitch when they don't embrace, then they start doing it, and you guys bitch and find ways to break their copy protection. If you don't like the DRM, don't buy the online music. Doing stuff like this just makes legal online music downloading look like it will always fail, because hackers will continue to keep cracking it.
When I saw this story, I was reminded of all the pro-piracy articles this site trumpets out. I haven't yet heard a valid reason for the double-standard. Why is piracy not theft, but GPL violations are often referred to as such? Why is respecting intellectual property important for the GPL, but not for the RIAA? If infringing copyrights against the MPAA and RIAA is a "gray area," why are GPL violations so clear-cut and enforceable? And finally, why is the RIAA bad for going after individual P2P infringers, but guys like this can go after individual GPL infringers?
I'm genuinely curious to hear people's answers.
Spec-wise, Blu-Ray wins. Blu-Ray also has the support of Sony (and therefore will be in the PS3), has Apple supporting it (and therefore will be in future Macs by default...and Macs are used in the media content industry), and it supports all the codecs and specs that HD-DVD supports. In addition, it has larger storage space. Even Dell and Disney are supporting it.
HD-DVD's only benefit is that there won't be a need to alter today's manufacturing processes as much as Blu-Ray will require.
I predict (and hope) Blu-Ray will win. I know people love to cite Betamax in these articles, but just because Betamax died out doesn't mean the better format will die out in this case either. There's a lot of important backing for Blu-Ray.
Taco basically responded that they should submit the code as a Slashcode patch, and he would consider it. I guess that didn't pan out. Basically what they did was use already rendered HTML output from Slashdot and used it to craft a CSS for. What will actually require changes, however, will be that underlying, godawful, horrible mess of Perl code that powers Slashdot.
Taco has been hyping a new layout for Slashdot for years, along with that mysterious new moderation system we've been hearing about that never comes. I won't get my hopes up.
I hereby nominate this as the ugliest headline and submission on Slashdot ever. And that's not even getting into the bizarre grammar of the submitter.
Why was I modded "flamebait?" Internet Explorer's broken support of CSS2 has hindered its full adoption for years. Microsoft now controls the standards of the Web unless web developers speak out VERY loudly to drown out their press releases.
"I'm Microsoft, and I'm a big monopoly, so I'm arbitrarily deciding not to support standards I don't like. For no other reason than I don't like them. Secretly, it's just because I don't want to adopt standards that compete with my own, but my managers have told me to tell everyone I just think it's a buggy implementation. I never make any of those..."
Someone should start an organization that publicly hands out awards to companies that severely hinder the progress of technology. Microsoft would win every year. The web has been held back for seven years now because IE won't properly support CSS2. That's like someone developing an improved version of gasoline that costs and pollutes less, and then none of the gas stations adopting it for close to a decade even though it's cheap and available. You look back and shake your head that all this time, people could have been saving money and polluting the air less and they have no idea.
The general public doesn't even realize the web would look and interact much better than it does now. We should have been visiting more advanced websites years ago. But the web still looks and functions the way it did in 2000, because the majority browser IE doesn't adopt technological progress. It's times like these I wish I was rich enough to run public service commercials that stated all this, just to inform people how they're being hindered without even knowing it.
Seeing as how Dreamweaver and GoLive use Opera's engine for their web development apps, and all those mobile devices and general users who run Opera every day, it's hard to believe anybody on Slashdot (which is rabidly pro-Firefox no matter what) when there are comments like "Opera is dead" that actually get modded up.
Opera has long been one of the better and faster browsers. Not only does it take up half the memory of Firefox, but it takes up half the file size.