The real problem with a suitcase nuke is that once turned loose, the carrier becomes one of the world's nuclear powers.;p Even a fanatic might not be trustworthy with that leverage...
And if the guy turns, or is intercepted, it's STILL a nuclear attack, and an open invitation to genocidal retaliation. A failed suitcase bombing attempt is the ultimate license for your opponent.
Couldn't you game a system like this? Twelve of your best buddies gather in front of six cameras and simulate beating the crap out of each other, and while the camera operator manually checks each of those, you roll some poor sod for his wallet. By the time the op filters out the crap that his computer is throwing up at him, you've already gotten away with it.
In fact, the Dr. Pepper factory here still has the old, cane-sugar-formula stuff in cans. It's only sold at the factory, though, not shipped anywhere. Dad brought home a couple of six-packs, because I didn't believe there was a difference... but man, you can really tell!
How about 3), "they're the best people to sue because it can't be dismissed for lack of direct controversy"? The courts don't like issuing advisory opinions, and it's a lot easier to get them to start with the facts of a specific case (in this case, a party harmed by the extension) and go general from there, rather than to just get them to declare it null and void by the public interest alone.
Well, speaking not as a programmer, I hang around longer because I'm an hourly employee with not much social life; an extra ten hours a week means my pay goes up by almost forty percent.
It's not ALWAYS bad for the consumer. (At least, not all of them.)
We release Japanese animation at work. We also happen to release it for a -lot- cheaper than the Japanese release their own product in their own market. This brings up the question of reverse importation... they don't want their customers buying our DVDs.
Region coding means that there's a fairly simple means to prevent this. Their customers buy their discs and our customers buy our discs, and the Japanese companies don't worry about reverse importation. Our customers get a lower-priced product that way.
It also means that we're not pressured into doing OTHER things that would make our product unappealing to the Japanese audience, like adding hard subtitles to the video or removing the Japanese language track. These are, of course, things OUR consumers don't want to happen! But if they didn't have the region coding to fall back on, they'd settle for screwing up our version of the product, even if it meant our customers wouldn't be as happy with it.
Personally, I don't believe that we need to enshrine it in law; it's not meant to work in every case anyway, so why worry? But then again, we don't even use CSS, so we're not your typical DVD manufacturer.
"Sure, I can connect you to that person, but we have a fifty-dollar solicitation fee; can I get some information for billing purposes first?"
I get the amusement of the poor schmuck flailing around for an answer that can't be construed as "okay", and who knows? Maybe one of these days I'll actually get paid by accident.
Well, if you're trolling for dollars, you'd darned well better make sure that your site stays up and that it's always got fresh strips up on time. If somebody donates a buck and you proceed to take a week off, that's not so good, is it? At least with swag, you've got a t-shirt (I own two, which I often wear to work... but I have an odd workplace.)
In the absence of a donation box, if you need some time away from updates, it's no big deal... technically, you don't OWE the fans anything. (This doesn't mean that it doesn't bug Fred when he skips a day, but what hey, you know what I mean.)
No, seriously. I know a lot of people that constantly have to replace their credit cards and what have you because of EM exposure (hard to remember to take your wallet out every morning at the lab, ain't it?), and that's certainly enough to wipe the stripe on the license. Don't deface it, just set a magnet on it for a few hours. Poof! Blank slate.
Possible downside - "Geez, officer, I dunno why it doesn't work. Try it again!" The more information that's on these things, the less the officer is going to trust the information actually printed on the card, without support.
C) Increase the use of "parting the corporate veil" regulations.
The function of a corporation isn't so much to protect from legal liability as it is to protect from financial liability. Investors invest in corporations because their potential losses are limited to the amount invested - they won't have to pony up for the company's debts.
The protection from legal liability shouldn't be trashed completely, of course... if Willy the Mail Boy runs a company truck into a schoolbus, you can hardly demand that the CEO be dragged off in chains. But there is plenty of room to nail an exec on his own behavior, if fraud is involved.
Even if we increase prosecution of corporate officers (and my goodness, Enron is just a tailor-made example here for reasons why this could be desirable), the investor-protecting financial aspect of the corporate model will still function.
What the Berne convention establishes is a mutual system of copyright recognition. The US doesn't recognize British statutory perpetual copyright because it doesn't recognize British statutory -anything- copyright; British works get the same protections in the US that the US affords to US works.
Just as an aside... there's only 32 million Afghans, period. Do you really believe that there are less than 32 terrorists in Afghanistan? (Of course, that would only result from a completely random dropping of bombs, or a complete extermination bombinb... sure, our bombs miss sometimes, but they don't ALWAYS miss.;p)
Exaggeration is a good thing in moderation, but overdoing it makes you sound uninformed.
Except, of course, that you have to qualify that statement with a "supposedly". Be honest - the school doesn't give a flip whether you knew the material before going into the class or not. Nor do they care if the professor teaches YOU anything, because they're only responsible for teaching classes in the aggregate.
You can indeed test out of certain classes, but only the most common ones, and then only in situations where it's easy to quantify the knowledge into a standardized test. I tested out of Physics I, but there's no way around the Introduction to Public Speaking course, even if I've got a dozen trophies for that from back in high school. (Obligatory reality check - I don't have a dozen.;p)
Therefore, I'll spend an hour and a half this afternoon in a class I won't learn anything from, except how to do a task I already know how to do, but not as well as I already know how to do it. Who says that college isn't a certification program?
Most college classes get around this problem by encouraging students who don't need instruction -not- to attend. Problem is, these policies also enable students who merely think they don't need instruction to split as well, and then they flunk the course. The opposite extreme is pretty bad as well, though, as enforcing attendance just means that you have bored students that have to be present, just like in high school.
I'll be frank - I am indebted to a large number of teachers from HS that were as happy to have me asleep and learning as awake and bored. I've had college professors tell me "look, don't even come to class, there's no point for you to hear these lectures, here's a lot of good books I would like to recommend instead, call me and we can talk about them". These are the best teachers I have had.
Problem is, I'm a freak who enjoys reading and learning, and if the schools were oriented towards people like me, most everybody else would flunk horribly. ^_^;;
Really? We release a good percentage of our discs without CSS encryption, and haven't had any reports of player problems. Either this is a REALLY tiny minority of players, or it's just not true.
Not every art form can be reproduced by four guys in a garage!
I work in the anime industry; good example. Anime -is- a corporate art form. Large companies employ vast numbers of artists in a collective endeavor to produce a single finished product, adhering more-or-less to a very limited number of creative visions. This isn't like music, where a garage band can sound better than a touring rock group, or like software, where an agglomeration of independent workers can evolve a working code base. It -would not exist- if it wasn't somebody's job to make it.
Even on the micro scale... I know my job can be reproduced by somebody working with a home computer, especially because I use more or less the same tools they would. But I also know that the hobbyists out there don't -do- as good of a job as I do, simply because I'm paid to sit here and put the time in, and they aren't. Even the most dedicated otaku start to glaze over after the fifth subtitling pass.
I'm not saying that the DMCA is a good law. Heck, we don't even -use- CSS if the licensors let us get away without it. But not everybody producing good art is looking for fame; some of us just want a paycheck, so we can spend our time making art and not flipping burgers. They have to get paid too!
Lots of anime, no kidding. "Never released in the US", my hairy butt. The vast majority of fserves on IRC couldn't care -less- whether a title is licensed or even released in the US; a lot of them are distributing rips of the domestic DVDs.
Exactly so. The idea is that a policeman shouldn't have to close his eyes to something that everybody else can see; if I have a big bag marked "hash", "contains dope", and "weed here", that alone is probable cause for me to get my bag searched. Similarily, if I'm standing in my living room and flashing passersby out my front window, that's "public" indecency even though I'm in my own home.
Likewise, if everybody on your block has X-ray glasses that can see through your walls, you don't have an expectation that what takes place behind those walls is private, and thus it's not any greater of an intrusion for a policeman to look.
You're overstating the case a bit. Anime isn't inseparable from the Japanese culture. (Manga? Perhaps.) The guy out in the costume in Tokyo isn't taking part of a revered cultural heritage program, he's a geek in a costume. They aren't much kinder to their shut-ins than we are.
Somebody's already made the sports analogy, which is very fitting. What's the difference between two guys, one of which is a sports trivia buff and the other an anime otaku? (Well, in my experience, the first guy showers more often! ^_^) Seriously, obsessed devotion happens.
Avatar
just spent a weekend at A-kon, so it's not like I don't side with the anime fans...
This came up when we were reviewing that case in my constitutional law class. (Oddly enough, we were in the middle of a bunch of search-and-seizure cases when it happened.) Remember, this decision was 5-4 and a surprise at that, without any sort of "illegal search" problem thrown in.
So posit a case with that as a complicating factor. Somebody gets pulled over on a traffic stop, cop writes the ticket, asks to search the vehicle, person answers "no", cop arrests person and searches the vehicle anyway, finds pot, case goes to trial. How does it turn out? Well, the court has ruled fairly consistently that refusal to consent to a search is not probable cause to effect a search, and you could REALLY easily argue that this is, in effect, what just happened.
Would it turn out that way? Who knows? The SC is disturbingly fickle lately. However, you can bet that some police organizations have already thought of this possibility, and (not wanting to see their discretionary arrest power revoked over something like this) I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were counseling officers to scrupulously avoid asking about searches in any case that looks like it might end up in an arrest...
Too shallow of an analysis. The US isn't fully WIPO-compliant in areas of copyright that have nothing to do with the DMCA, such as in the denial of moral rights protection. (Not that I'm arguing that we should have such protection - if I want to use a Terry Brooks novel for its best purpose... as toilet tissue... then I ought to be free to do that!)
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Well, we haven't used Macro for a while now. Doesn't stop anybody, costs money, pisses off some legit customers, so why bother?
OTOH, we don't use CSS either. (Doesn't cost money, but doesn't stop anybody, and pisses off some legit customers...)
The real problem with a suitcase nuke is that once turned loose, the carrier becomes one of the world's nuclear powers. ;p Even a fanatic might not be trustworthy with that leverage...
And if the guy turns, or is intercepted, it's STILL a nuclear attack, and an open invitation to genocidal retaliation. A failed suitcase bombing attempt is the ultimate license for your opponent.
Couldn't you game a system like this? Twelve of your best buddies gather in front of six cameras and simulate beating the crap out of each other, and while the camera operator manually checks each of those, you roll some poor sod for his wallet. By the time the op filters out the crap that his computer is throwing up at him, you've already gotten away with it.
In fact, the Dr. Pepper factory here still has the old, cane-sugar-formula stuff in cans. It's only sold at the factory, though, not shipped anywhere. Dad brought home a couple of six-packs, because I didn't believe there was a difference... but man, you can really tell!
How about 3), "they're the best people to sue because it can't be dismissed for lack of direct controversy"? The courts don't like issuing advisory opinions, and it's a lot easier to get them to start with the facts of a specific case (in this case, a party harmed by the extension) and go general from there, rather than to just get them to declare it null and void by the public interest alone.
So, your counter to the weak argument is... er... "well, so what, it's not as bad as murder!"?
Well, duh. If we had murders at the rate we get copyright infringement, we'd depopulate the planet in a matter of hours.
Except, you know, the federal marshals can't go around acting on state enforcement actions. You'd need the help of Washington (state) law enforcement.
Well, speaking not as a programmer, I hang around longer because I'm an hourly employee with not much social life; an extra ten hours a week means my pay goes up by almost forty percent.
It's not ALWAYS bad for the consumer. (At least, not all of them.)
We release Japanese animation at work. We also happen to release it for a -lot- cheaper than the Japanese release their own product in their own market. This brings up the question of reverse importation... they don't want their customers buying our DVDs.
Region coding means that there's a fairly simple means to prevent this. Their customers buy their discs and our customers buy our discs, and the Japanese companies don't worry about reverse importation. Our customers get a lower-priced product that way.
It also means that we're not pressured into doing OTHER things that would make our product unappealing to the Japanese audience, like adding hard subtitles to the video or removing the Japanese language track. These are, of course, things OUR consumers don't want to happen! But if they didn't have the region coding to fall back on, they'd settle for screwing up our version of the product, even if it meant our customers wouldn't be as happy with it.
Personally, I don't believe that we need to enshrine it in law; it's not meant to work in every case anyway, so why worry? But then again, we don't even use CSS, so we're not your typical DVD manufacturer.
I prefer this method:
"Sure, I can connect you to that person, but we have a fifty-dollar solicitation fee; can I get some information for billing purposes first?"
I get the amusement of the poor schmuck flailing around for an answer that can't be construed as "okay", and who knows? Maybe one of these days I'll actually get paid by accident.
Well, if you're trolling for dollars, you'd darned well better make sure that your site stays up and that it's always got fresh strips up on time. If somebody donates a buck and you proceed to take a week off, that's not so good, is it? At least with swag, you've got a t-shirt (I own two, which I often wear to work... but I have an odd workplace.)
In the absence of a donation box, if you need some time away from updates, it's no big deal... technically, you don't OWE the fans anything. (This doesn't mean that it doesn't bug Fred when he skips a day, but what hey, you know what I mean.)
Name one.
No, seriously. I know a lot of people that constantly have to replace their credit cards and what have you because of EM exposure (hard to remember to take your wallet out every morning at the lab, ain't it?), and that's certainly enough to wipe the stripe on the license. Don't deface it, just set a magnet on it for a few hours. Poof! Blank slate.
Possible downside - "Geez, officer, I dunno why it doesn't work. Try it again!" The more information that's on these things, the less the officer is going to trust the information actually printed on the card, without support.
Dude, you licensed Adobe's technology? ^_^
What about:
C) Increase the use of "parting the corporate veil" regulations.
The function of a corporation isn't so much to protect from legal liability as it is to protect from financial liability. Investors invest in corporations because their potential losses are limited to the amount invested - they won't have to pony up for the company's debts.
The protection from legal liability shouldn't be trashed completely, of course... if Willy the Mail Boy runs a company truck into a schoolbus, you can hardly demand that the CEO be dragged off in chains. But there is plenty of room to nail an exec on his own behavior, if fraud is involved.
Even if we increase prosecution of corporate officers (and my goodness, Enron is just a tailor-made example here for reasons why this could be desirable), the investor-protecting financial aspect of the corporate model will still function.
What the Berne convention establishes is a mutual system of copyright recognition. The US doesn't recognize British statutory perpetual copyright because it doesn't recognize British statutory -anything- copyright; British works get the same protections in the US that the US affords to US works.
Just as an aside... there's only 32 million Afghans, period. Do you really believe that there are less than 32 terrorists in Afghanistan? (Of course, that would only result from a completely random dropping of bombs, or a complete extermination bombinb... sure, our bombs miss sometimes, but they don't ALWAYS miss. ;p)
Exaggeration is a good thing in moderation, but overdoing it makes you sound uninformed.
Except, of course, that you have to qualify that statement with a "supposedly". Be honest - the school doesn't give a flip whether you knew the material before going into the class or not. Nor do they care if the professor teaches YOU anything, because they're only responsible for teaching classes in the aggregate.
;p)
You can indeed test out of certain classes, but only the most common ones, and then only in situations where it's easy to quantify the knowledge into a standardized test. I tested out of Physics I, but there's no way around the Introduction to Public Speaking course, even if I've got a dozen trophies for that from back in high school. (Obligatory reality check - I don't have a dozen.
Therefore, I'll spend an hour and a half this afternoon in a class I won't learn anything from, except how to do a task I already know how to do, but not as well as I already know how to do it. Who says that college isn't a certification program?
Most college classes get around this problem by encouraging students who don't need instruction -not- to attend. Problem is, these policies also enable students who merely think they don't need instruction to split as well, and then they flunk the course. The opposite extreme is pretty bad as well, though, as enforcing attendance just means that you have bored students that have to be present, just like in high school.
I'll be frank - I am indebted to a large number of teachers from HS that were as happy to have me asleep and learning as awake and bored. I've had college professors tell me "look, don't even come to class, there's no point for you to hear these lectures, here's a lot of good books I would like to recommend instead, call me and we can talk about them". These are the best teachers I have had.
Problem is, I'm a freak who enjoys reading and learning, and if the schools were oriented towards people like me, most everybody else would flunk horribly. ^_^;;
Really? We release a good percentage of our discs without CSS encryption, and haven't had any reports of player problems. Either this is a REALLY tiny minority of players, or it's just not true.
Not every art form can be reproduced by four guys in a garage!
I work in the anime industry; good example. Anime -is- a corporate art form. Large companies employ vast numbers of artists in a collective endeavor to produce a single finished product, adhering more-or-less to a very limited number of creative visions. This isn't like music, where a garage band can sound better than a touring rock group, or like software, where an agglomeration of independent workers can evolve a working code base. It -would not exist- if it wasn't somebody's job to make it.
Even on the micro scale... I know my job can be reproduced by somebody working with a home computer, especially because I use more or less the same tools they would. But I also know that the hobbyists out there don't -do- as good of a job as I do, simply because I'm paid to sit here and put the time in, and they aren't. Even the most dedicated otaku start to glaze over after the fifth subtitling pass.
I'm not saying that the DMCA is a good law. Heck, we don't even -use- CSS if the licensors let us get away without it. But not everybody producing good art is looking for fame; some of us just want a paycheck, so we can spend our time making art and not flipping burgers. They have to get paid too!
Lots of anime, no kidding. "Never released in the US", my hairy butt. The vast majority of fserves on IRC couldn't care -less- whether a title is licensed or even released in the US; a lot of them are distributing rips of the domestic DVDs.
Exactly so. The idea is that a policeman shouldn't have to close his eyes to something that everybody else can see; if I have a big bag marked "hash", "contains dope", and "weed here", that alone is probable cause for me to get my bag searched. Similarily, if I'm standing in my living room and flashing passersby out my front window, that's "public" indecency even though I'm in my own home.
Likewise, if everybody on your block has X-ray glasses that can see through your walls, you don't have an expectation that what takes place behind those walls is private, and thus it's not any greater of an intrusion for a policeman to look.
You're overstating the case a bit. Anime isn't inseparable from the Japanese culture. (Manga? Perhaps.) The guy out in the costume in Tokyo isn't taking part of a revered cultural heritage program, he's a geek in a costume. They aren't much kinder to their shut-ins than we are.
Somebody's already made the sports analogy, which is very fitting. What's the difference between two guys, one of which is a sports trivia buff and the other an anime otaku? (Well, in my experience, the first guy showers more often! ^_^) Seriously, obsessed devotion happens.
Avatar
just spent a weekend at A-kon, so it's not like I don't side with the anime fans...
Not actually true. Macrovision costs extra, but region coding doesn't.
This came up when we were reviewing that case in my constitutional law class. (Oddly enough, we were in the middle of a bunch of search-and-seizure cases when it happened.) Remember, this decision was 5-4 and a surprise at that, without any sort of "illegal search" problem thrown in.
So posit a case with that as a complicating factor. Somebody gets pulled over on a traffic stop, cop writes the ticket, asks to search the vehicle, person answers "no", cop arrests person and searches the vehicle anyway, finds pot, case goes to trial. How does it turn out? Well, the court has ruled fairly consistently that refusal to consent to a search is not probable cause to effect a search, and you could REALLY easily argue that this is, in effect, what just happened.
Would it turn out that way? Who knows? The SC is disturbingly fickle lately. However, you can bet that some police organizations have already thought of this possibility, and (not wanting to see their discretionary arrest power revoked over something like this) I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were counseling officers to scrupulously avoid asking about searches in any case that looks like it might end up in an arrest...
Too shallow of an analysis. The US isn't fully WIPO-compliant in areas of copyright that have nothing to do with the DMCA, such as in the denial of moral rights protection. (Not that I'm arguing that we should have such protection - if I want to use a Terry Brooks novel for its best purpose... as toilet tissue... then I ought to be free to do that!)