The UB study just goes to underline why the RIAA is fighting so hard to prevent P2P sharing. It is well-acknowledged that the current business models of RIAA members is superstar-driven.
It's an oft-repeated fact that record labels lose money on 90% of their roster of artists, and make it all up and then some on the 10% of artists and records that become blockbusters. Thus, if P2P sharing is primarily undercutting the superstars (as the UB study states), that's the logical attack point for the RIAA.
There's no question that a new business model is needed, not just because of P2P, but because the idea of an industry where 10% of a company's products underwrite the losses on the other 90% is inherently unsound. The music industry managed to make it work for a while, but the inefficiencies and alternatives have caught up, and the RIAA is going to have to adapt or die.
You make a good point-- for all the nostalgia being thrown around on the topic of old computer games, it might be nice once in a while for someone to summarize for those of us who weren't there.
MULE, however, was a game I recall from my childhood. Both the idea and the execution were quite simple-- the premise was that you were part of a 4-person colony on a distant planet called "Irata." (Get it?) The game proceeded in 12 rounds-- each round began with a land grab, in which each player would select a parcel of land on the planet's surface, although some parcels were more desirable (and thus, more contentiously sought after) because of the natural resources they contained. Once the land grab was completed, each player would have the opportunity to exploit the resources on his or her plots of land by purchasing, equipping, and deploying MULEs ("multiple use labor elements"-- i.e. robots). Each parcel could be used to either grow food, generate energy, or mine Smithore.
After each player had his or her turn to deploy MULEs, the game yielded a harvest on each parcel, depending on the suitability of each parcel for the use it was put to, various economies of scale, and random events that increased or decreased the production of certain goods planetwide or on a local level. Phase 2 of the round-- the auction-- then began.
Each commodity was placed up for auction, and a player could either elect to buy or sell that commodity in that round. Thus, if you produced only food, you'd need to buy energy during the auction, since you need energy to run your MULEs. While the colony maintained a store which bought or sold excess quantities of each commodity at fairly reasonable prices, because of supply and demand, predatory buying or selling, or a disaster at the store, players would often find that the store was out of stock and their fellow competitors were the only source of necessary commodities. Consequently, you would wind up paying exorbitant prices demanded by the monopolist with the goods. In this regard, the game rewarded, at least on the surface, highly cutthroat play. I say "on the surface," because the game also required the players to achieve a colony-wide level of success by the end of the game, and a player who extorted his fellows might become the richest player in the game, but the colony might be declared a failure overall, making the victory phyrric.
That's the general outline of the game, although there were lots of little touches that made it more complicated. The reason most people recall t fondly was because it was because it was a game that required some critical (and fast) thinking, but was designed to support lots of different strategic approaches-- you could be a land baron, keeping other players from obtaining important parcels, even though you never developed them yourself; you could focus your strategy on one commodity and hope to control the market; you could play a balanced approach; you could screw people surreptitiously, etc. The game was simple to learn, and primitive in its execution, but was conceptually rich and rewarded those who planned ahead. It also introduced a lot of interesting competitive economic concepts like economies of scale, supply and demand, monopolies, etc., that had not been incorporated into computer games before. And although the graphics were primitive, the characters involved had a whimsical feel to them and it had a funky little theme song that was catchy.
Emusic.com is one of the first companies to Get it Right(tm).
They've struck deals with artists and/or labels to provide subscirbers with unlimited downloads of good-quality, non-crippled mp3's. Subscribers pay in the ballpark of $15 a month, and royalties get paid to labels out of those funds based on the number of downloads a track has.
The doenside is that their catalog is sketchy, since only those labels willing to offer their wares up on such an expirmental basis participate. They Might Be Giants are one of the biggest names, making almost their entire catalog available. There are also some offerings from Elvis Costello, Matador Records, and a few other prominent names, along with lots of people you've never heard of, but who are cross-referenced to similar, well-known bands, allowing easy sampling of content suitable to your tastes.
Even if their offerings are only mildly interesting to you, I encourage you to subscribe for a few months. Success by emusic.com might help open the eyes of the bigger labels to an online business model that actually works.
So the benefits to businesses that are making use of Altnet is being passed on to end users, through a program based around "Altnet resource dollars." Those resource dollars are essentially a reward mechanism for end users who have opted in to the program, to gain a continuous benefit from making their resources available.
That benefit will manifest in
inventory provided by Altnet marketing partners who are gaining bandwidth reduction costs and cost savings through the use of Altnet.
Use KaAzalite and you'll miss out on all that free herbal viagara, low-rate home mortgages, and personalized merchant accounts you'll rack up just for spending a few hours downloading tunes.
Re:I love it when the editors admit....
on
BBC interview with RMS
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Doesn't really say much of anything that you haven't heard before but it's a nice little interview, and its not like much else is happening today.
Slashdot: Filler for Nerds. Stuff that doesn't really matter.
It is a federal crime to _require _ your SSN for any reason other than social security.
Incorrect. Cite me a statute if you can.
Social Security cards used to say "Not to be used for identification" on the front, but what the Government meant was that the cards themselves were not supposed to be used as proof of someone's identity. Back then, SSNs weren't really used for anything other than Social Security, so the dissemination of cards wasn't controlled very well.
These days, the Government requires people to use their SSN as an i.d. number in the military, and the IRS uses it as your taxpayer i.d. number, two clearly non-SS purposes. Private buisnesses are perfectly entitled to ask for it, and if you want to refuse to give it, fine. But if they don't want to do business with you as a result of your refusal, there's nothing you can do about it. You'll also notice that your SS card no longer says anything about it not being used for identification purposes.
The bottom line is, use of the SSN as an identifier is so common in the U.S. that it is, for all intents and purposes, a national i.d. number. Encoding it on a card isn't going to change-- for the better or worse-- that fact.
Fair use is a defense to a charge of copyright infringement. You do not have an entitlement to access copyrighted information in any manner you want to.
Maybe it's the "fair" that throws everybody off. "Fair use" just means that there are some situations in which it is acceptable for you to reproduce copyrighted information, even though such reproduction would otherwise be infringing.
Why not make it available for sale? Who says that shows need to be off-the-air for a couple of years before they're made available? Who says that only the most popular shows should be made available?
Syndicators, that's who. The real money in producing t.v. shows is getting enough episodes of a show ordered that you can then turn around and sell them as a syndication package.
Think about it-- the major networks really only supply prime-time programming-- 8p.m. to about midnight. Everything else that shows on network affiliates (and non-affiliate stations) is either locally generated programming or syndicated stuff. That's why you get The Simpsons or ST:TNG showing every day on a given channel-- because the channel bought the syndication rights for that package of shows. Syndications of popular shows can reap a bloody fortune in revenues for the production company-- in the hundreds of millions of dollars for a reasonably successful comedy. (Typically because an affiliate in every market will buy a syndication package for a successful show, rather than having the network pay for it once for first-run.)
Anyway, the reason shows aren't released to video shortly after they finish their first-run is because the money to be made in syndication is so staggering. If Paramount sold ST:TNG videos of the most recent season's episodes 6 months after the end of each season, they'd have a much harder time pitching the entire series in syndication to the local stations-- after all, the fans of the show (who translate to eyeballs watching the local station's advertising) already have permanent copies of the episodes that are being offered as a syndication package.
That's why you're only seeing Seasons 1 & 2 of The Simpsons on DVD now: because the syndication package that features those episodes doesn't command much of a price from local stations any more. Fox (or, more accurately, Gracie Films, the producer of the show) waits to release videos until it has gotten maximum value from syndication of those episodes because syndication offers a bigger revenue stream than video sales.
For shows that don't (or won't) make it into syndication (typically, you need in the neighborhood of 100 episodes or about 5 seasons to make it attractive to an affiliate who will run 5-7 shows a week), a video release can occur much faster. (Witness South Park, which Comedy Central knows damn well won't run on a broadcast station because of its content. You can buy videos of SP now, because those sales aren't cannibalizing potential syndication revenue.) Of course, if a show wasn't popular enough to survive for 100 episodes, it's unlikely to have a big enough market to make a video release financially viable. There may be 10,000 people who loved the live-action Tick series, but even if all 10,000 people buy the DVD set, will that cover the cost of pressing and marketing the discs?
Movies often come out on DVD before they come out on pay TV, I believe that the benefits of the DVD far outweight the value of taking the movie from HBO and storing it somwhere on a disk. I also believe that most people who would buy a Simpsons DVD set would still buy one, owing to the fact that syndicated episodes are cut for time.
You've pretty much stumbled onto where the entertainment industry is being driven to. If you can't stop people from sharing t.v. shows (and like the Hydra, cutting off ReplayTV's head doesn't stop P2P services and other options from growing), the industry is going to have to find a way to get people to want to buy the same thing they can get on t.v. for free. How?
Value added is one way-- how do you get people to buy the same Beatles CD they already own a copy of? Remaster it "for cleaner sound"; add new liner notes, bonus tracks, etc. Give people a reason to buy it (again), and many will. The Simpsons DVDs are a must-have for Simpsons fans because they have Matt Groening doing commentary tracks. Many people will buy those DVDs even if they can get the same epsiodes off Channel 2 or Tivo or Morpheus for free.
Time shifting is the other-- not in the "tape on Thursday, watch on Friday" sense, but in the "see new episodes first" sense. Right now, with advertiser supported t.v., the shows go on network t.v. for free first, then show up on video. Movies go the other way. Expect to see t.v. shows following the movie route in the future-- the new Sopranos season might come out first on DVD for those willing to pay for it, and those who aren't will just have to wait until HBO gets around to showing it. Voila! Customers paying for television content that they can get for free.
The argument that "Linux has a smaller installed base, so its security holes are less important" sounds like a paraphrasing of the old "security through obscurity" canard.
After all, aren't you really saying that those security flaws are less critical because script kiddies and crackers are less likely to come across a Linux box than a Windows one?
Well, if you can afford a few months of fighting to get the computers back, you stand to make a great deal of profit by suing the police (or the Federal Marshals, or whoever did the confiscating), since an "anonymous tip" from a website is in no way sufficient to go get a warrant to seize property.
Think about it-- if it was, I could phone in an anonymous tip to the BSA that Microsoft was pirating my very first program, the one that prints "Hello World" over and over again, and that they'd be likely to delete it if the police came knocking. Bingo, the cops have a nice warehouse full of neato computers, and no more monopoly for a while.
A warrant can only issue if the police have "probable cause" to believe a violation is being committed. If cops go to a judge with a warrant application based on an anonymous tip, they have to have additional evidence to show why they believe this particular tipster is reliable. The "someone--we don't know who-- submitted a report on our website" argument isn't going to get them very far.
The court is basically saying that if you can do "everyday life tasks" (brushing your hair, cooking dinner, whatever), you're not disabled for the purposes of the ADA. But on my disability policy, it states that if I can't do my regular job, they consider me disabled. Since my job (like most of yours) involves lots of typing, losing both legs wouldn't make me disabled, but C-T would. So now the question is, how does this court decision affect my policy? Can I expect a call from my agent telling me they've changed their definition to line up with the court?
One has practically nothing to do with the other. The notion of "disability" is used in many places in the law, and it is defined differently in each one of those places.
For example, to be "disabled" under the ADA, you need to be impaired in your ability to work. (An oversimplification, but suitable for purposes of this example.) On the other hand, to be eligible for Social Security Disability payments, you have to be completely unable to perform any meaningful work. Same notion of "disability"; two very different meanings.
The way "disabled" is used in your policy is yet a third meaning-- that is, how your insurance company defines you as being eligible for a payout. Their definition of "disability" should be spelled out in your policy-- most often in Long Term Disability policies, it means an inability to perform your current occupation. Your policy being an agreement between your insurance company and you ("I will pay you premiums if you promise to pay me benefits if I become unable to perform my current occupation") will not be affected at all by this decision. Although your insurance policy uses the same word "disability" as the ADA, it never incorporated the ADA's (or SSI's, or anyone else's) definition of the word, and is thus unaffacted by this decision.
If you use a touch-screen, it'll become impossible to hide what you're typing, so you pretty much have to stick numbers up there and have people type the number of the correct picture. You'll have to swap the pictures around if you want to prevent people from just writing the numbers down, so you'll end up with it being harder to remember because the pictures are all on screen at once and in a different place every time.
I have a recollection of some touch-screen ATMs in Ithaca, N.Y. using something like that. Instead of keying in your PIN on a keypad, you had to touch the simulated keypad on the screen, but that made it easy for shoulder surfers to see what your PIN was.
In an effort to increase the security of these machines, the ATM put up a keypad on the screen that jumbled the numbers around-- instead of 1,2,3 in the top row, it might have 5,2,7. You had to hunt and peck out the numbers of your PIN, but because the machine scrambled the arrangement with each user (or maybe even each login attempt), someone couldn't stand behind you and just push the same buttons that you did to recreate your PIN. It was certainly slower than using plain old muscle memory, but at least one step more secure.
I haven't seen an ATM anywhere else that did this. (Of course, I haven't seen too many purely touch-screen ATMs, either.)
You missed the really scary quote from that article:
Disney's Padden wasn't buying it. "There is no right to fair use," Padden said at the event. "Fair use is a defense against infringement."
What's so scary about that? I mean, besides the fact that it's legally accurate?
Section 107 of the copyright at, which describes the doctrine of "fair use," sets for particular instances where reproduction of a copyrighted work is "not an infringement of copyright." Specifically, reproducing some portion of a copyrighted work is not considered a violation of Section 106 of the Act (which vests exclusive rights in copyright holders to control the reproduction and distribution of their work) where, among other things, the purpose of the reproduction is for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research."
In other words, when I publish a review (i.e. criticism or commentary) of the new Britney Spears album, I can quote lyrics from the songs without infringing on the copyright in those lyrics held by the author, but can't republish those lyrics in part of my novel about a young teen pop star. I can use clips of the "Lord of the Rings" movie in a news story (i.e. news reporting) about the advances in movie technology, but I can't videotape the whole movie and give copies of it to my friends.
Granted, the concept of a "right to fair use" and fair use being a "defense against infringement" is subtle, and probably just semantics. But the doctrine of "fair use" isn't the idea that you have a right to do whatever you want with a copyrighted work, as long as you consider what you're doing to be karmically "fair."
At least on a web page of your own creation you have the ability to tear it down and recreate it as you see fit. Newsgroups are forever.
Web pages are not so etherial and fleeting. With a quick trip through the Google cache or one of the handful of projects that involve caching "backups" of the entire Web from time to time, a tech-savvy employer could find many previous iterations of your web site. A gross disparity between the current version and a historical one would probably only prompt a more searching review of the original one.
Face it, this is the Information Age, which means that storage and retrieval of information, including such trivial stuff as what some nerd at thinks of Star Trek, is fast, easy, and publicly available. Even your visits to the convenience store are typically recorded and, in some cases, retained indefinitely. It is impossible these days to know with any degree of assurance that things you say will not be recorded and archived, possibly to be used against you in the future.
I'll grant you, only the most forward-thinking (or paranoid, or both) people would have thought this way 20 years ago, but, hey, Orwell was thinking along those lines back in the 1940s.
Business as usual in the judicial system
on
Felten vs. RIAA Hearing
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· Score: 5, Insightful
But taking a look at the hearing might provide some insight into how the judicial system works. . . Normally, the judge might now take the case for decision, then some time later issue a written decision - instead, he decides (obviously he planned to do this in advance, since he has notes prepared) to render his decision in the case orally and immediately
Deciding a case from the bench isn't the norm, but it's definitely not ususual. Long before the oral argument, the parties file extensive written briefs setting forth arguments and case citations, and the Judge (or, more likely, his clerk) has already reviewed those submissions in detail. Many judges believe that oral arguments by the parties don't typically clarify the case beyond what's in the briefs, and thus, decide the case before oral argument even begins. (Some judges even have a full written decision ready before oral argument-- sounds like this judge did.)
The very factors that made Felten a "good" subject for a civil liberties case allowed the judge to rule that there wasn't a case at all.
There's an old lawyer's addage that "easy cases make bad law." (Typical of the profession, there's also an addage that "hard cases make bad law," but let's ignore that one for the moment.) In other words, a judge faced with a situation where one party is clearly right, it's tempting to decide the case favorably to that party, even though the legal reasoning to get there is not the most sound. Here, there is no question that Felten was not subject to any continuing threat from the RIAA, and thus, there was no existing controversy. (The "chilling effect" argument was more interesting, but that goes to show you why easy cases make bad law.)
There's no question that Felten's case would have been far more effective a vehicle to challenge the DMCA if he had gone ahead and published the paper under the RIAA's threat, and then litigated the consequences (if any). But to put one's self in that position requires a martyrdom complex that Felten (and even Sklyrov) doesn't have.
Nice try, but you're only reading 17 USC 1008, not the rest of the act that contains it.
The Audio Home Recording Act, 17 USC 1001-1010, provides for the manufacture and importation of "digital audio recording devices" under certain conditions. Any such device-- that is, one that permits digital-to-digital copies (but excluding computers and some other messy technical points)-- must contain the Serial Copy Management System. 17 USC 1002(a), and the manufacturer or importer must report quarterly on sales and pay a royalty of 2% of the price of the devices. 17 USC 1004. The royalties are then distributed to certain parties under a tedious statutory scheme. 17 USC 1006-1007.
Don't fall asleep yet, because here's the interesting part: "No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings." Whoo! That's a mouthful. What does it really mean?
Let's let the 9th Circuit explain that:
"As the Senate Report explains, '[t]he purpose of [the Act] is to ensure the right of consumers to make analog or digital audio recordings of copyrighted music for their
private, noncommercial use.'" Recording Indus. Ass'n of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc., 180 F.3d 1072, 1078 (9th Cir.1999) (emphasis in original).
Wait a minute! Who stuck "private" in there? There's nothing "private" about distributing (even non-commercially) copyrighted recordings to the public. The quoted case, upholding the distribution of the Diamond Rio mp3 player, goes on to state that the primary use of the device is to "space-shift" music-- that is, move music from your computer to a Rio player to go for a walk. It then explains that "Such copying is paradigmatic noncommercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act." Id. (emphasis added).
There is a huge difference between the concept of permitting unlimited copying for "personal" or "private" use, and permitting copying for noncommercial-but-public distribution. The language of the 9th Circuit in interpreting section 1008-- the only court to do so (the Napster court didn't really address the issue we're discussing here)-- clearly proceeds under an expectation that copying under the AHRA be for "private" use.
The law directs that individual statutory sections be interpreted as part of a unified whole. The fact that Section 1008 is part of a larger statute involving digital copying in compliance with the Serial Copy Management System suggests that Section 1008's freewheeling permission to make digital copies extends only to those digital recordings that preserve the SCMS limitations.
Maybe I'm overstating the clarity of the law in asserting that copying for friends-- noncommercial, public copying-- is absolutely prohibited under the AHRA, since there isn't a case that definitively establishes that proposition. But at the same time, it is misleading to suggest that the AHRA explicitly permits scuh copying. There is a significant indication from the Court in the Diamond Rio case to suggest that noncommercial distribution of copyrighted recordings is not within the scope of Congress' intent in passing the AHRA.
Bzzzt. It is technically legal to make a free copy for a friend. This only applies to music, and dates back to bad analog copies and a different revenue system in the music industry.
Sounds fascinating. You wouldn't, by any chance, happen to have a citation for this "law," would you?
Didn't think so.
It is not "legal" to make a copy of a copyrighted work-- be it analog music, digital music, a book, whatever-- "for a friend." I don't know where this myth got started (Audio Home Recording Act, maybe?), but it's wrong.
The "tied an onion on my belt" line wasn't from Grampa's story about Hitler stealing the number 20, it was from his strategy for dealing with striking power plant workers:
Burns: Smithers, get me some strikebreakers. The kind they had in the '30s.
[Grampa speaks for an assemblage of senior citizens]
Grampa: We can't bust heads like we used to, but we do have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I took the ferry over to Shelbyville: I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickle, which in those days had pictures of bumblebees printed on 'em. 'Gimme five bees for a quarter,' you'd say. Now where was I? Oh, the important thing was, I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
One of the categories that WebSENSE enables blocking of is "proxy avoidance systems." All of the anonymous surfing tools like Safeweb that I am aware of are blocked, as are many web page translators like Babelfish (and even the Dialectizer).
The Google cache is about the only bypass system that can be used reliably, and that's on a page-by-page basis. Sure, I suppose you could write up your own proxy and stick it on some inconspicuous website, but WebSENSE has filtered out most of the well-known ones.
Full disclosure: I am a lawyer. I have also clerked for a federal judge (on the East Coast, not in Chicago).
The first half of the article was interesting, and, although I have not looked into the details of copyright law or the specifics of the case, it appears at first blush that Mr. Whatzizname might have a valid claim against Coke.
However, the second half of the article is little more than ill-informed, paranoid conjecture about the judge buying her seat on the federal bench, selective case assignments, the use of court security to intimidate people, a conspiracy by the 7th Circuit to squelch the "crusading lawyer," etc. Speaking as a lawyer, much, if not all, of these provacative events described in the second half of the article are all consistent with the normal and appropriate functioning of the federal court system.
I will be the first to admit that, unfortunately, legal proceedings often seem inscrutable to the layperson. However, laypeople should not be in such a hurry to ascribe sinister motives to every legal ruling or procedure that they do not understand. It's a pity that the "journalist" writing this article decided to rely primarily on the guidance of a "court reformer" and "electronic journalist" who obviously has an ax to grind against the judiciary, and is prone to making wild assertions of extravagant criminal conspiracies involving judges, the CIA, etc. etc., and then citing the absence of evidence supporting his assertions as proof of the effectiveness of the same conspiracies. I've got news for the author of the story: while my court might not have tossed the plaintiff's lawsuit against Coke as abruptly (maybe-- it's hard to say without seeing the papers), from the decsriptions in the article, it would have responded exactly as the trial judge did on all the subsequent proceedings. Does that mean that my court is in line with the CIA and Coke and the rest of the black helicopter brigade, too?
But to keep this on-topic, an online news story worth giving an award would try much harder to present a well-researched and balanced story, without resorting to the one-sided sensationalism that this one does. A real reporter would not only not adopt Mr. Skolnick's assertions that Judge Manning paid a million dollars for her seat on the bench, but would not even mention such an extraordinary claim without first attempting to verify through sources other than Mr. Skolnick. Any news story could be turned into an attention-grabber like this one by making vague innuendoes, failing to provide evidence to support the most outrageous claims, and mischaracterizing the consequences of particular acts, all of which this reporter repeatedly does. Keep in mind the addage that "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof" while you re-read parts 6-10 of that article.
These awards are for excellence in online journalism, not yellow journalism.
For the "online commentary" category, consider James Lileks at lileks.com. He's a newspaper columnist from Minneapolis, but his web content seems to be unaffiliated with his day job.
He's got a terrific sense of humor, a fine way with words, a genuine fondness for 20th Century Americana, and is pretty handy with the clipart to boot.
Slashdot Mirror
The UB study just goes to underline why the RIAA is fighting so hard to prevent P2P sharing. It is well-acknowledged that the current business models of RIAA members is superstar-driven.
It's an oft-repeated fact that record labels lose money on 90% of their roster of artists, and make it all up and then some on the 10% of artists and records that become blockbusters. Thus, if P2P sharing is primarily undercutting the superstars (as the UB study states), that's the logical attack point for the RIAA.
There's no question that a new business model is needed, not just because of P2P, but because the idea of an industry where 10% of a company's products underwrite the losses on the other 90% is inherently unsound. The music industry managed to make it work for a while, but the inefficiencies and alternatives have caught up, and the RIAA is going to have to adapt or die.
You make a good point-- for all the nostalgia being thrown around on the topic of old computer games, it might be nice once in a while for someone to summarize for those of us who weren't there.
MULE, however, was a game I recall from my childhood. Both the idea and the execution were quite simple-- the premise was that you were part of a 4-person colony on a distant planet called "Irata." (Get it?) The game proceeded in 12 rounds-- each round began with a land grab, in which each player would select a parcel of land on the planet's surface, although some parcels were more desirable (and thus, more contentiously sought after) because of the natural resources they contained. Once the land grab was completed, each player would have the opportunity to exploit the resources on his or her plots of land by purchasing, equipping, and deploying MULEs ("multiple use labor elements"-- i.e. robots). Each parcel could be used to either grow food, generate energy, or mine Smithore.
After each player had his or her turn to deploy MULEs, the game yielded a harvest on each parcel, depending on the suitability of each parcel for the use it was put to, various economies of scale, and random events that increased or decreased the production of certain goods planetwide or on a local level. Phase 2 of the round-- the auction-- then began.
Each commodity was placed up for auction, and a player could either elect to buy or sell that commodity in that round. Thus, if you produced only food, you'd need to buy energy during the auction, since you need energy to run your MULEs. While the colony maintained a store which bought or sold excess quantities of each commodity at fairly reasonable prices, because of supply and demand, predatory buying or selling, or a disaster at the store, players would often find that the store was out of stock and their fellow competitors were the only source of necessary commodities. Consequently, you would wind up paying exorbitant prices demanded by the monopolist with the goods. In this regard, the game rewarded, at least on the surface, highly cutthroat play. I say "on the surface," because the game also required the players to achieve a colony-wide level of success by the end of the game, and a player who extorted his fellows might become the richest player in the game, but the colony might be declared a failure overall, making the victory phyrric.
That's the general outline of the game, although there were lots of little touches that made it more complicated. The reason most people recall t fondly was because it was because it was a game that required some critical (and fast) thinking, but was designed to support lots of different strategic approaches-- you could be a land baron, keeping other players from obtaining important parcels, even though you never developed them yourself; you could focus your strategy on one commodity and hope to control the market; you could play a balanced approach; you could screw people surreptitiously, etc. The game was simple to learn, and primitive in its execution, but was conceptually rich and rewarded those who planned ahead. It also introduced a lot of interesting competitive economic concepts like economies of scale, supply and demand, monopolies, etc., that had not been incorporated into computer games before. And although the graphics were primitive, the characters involved had a whimsical feel to them and it had a funky little theme song that was catchy.
Emusic.com is one of the first companies to Get it Right(tm).
They've struck deals with artists and/or labels to provide subscirbers with unlimited downloads of good-quality, non-crippled mp3's. Subscribers pay in the ballpark of $15 a month, and royalties get paid to labels out of those funds based on the number of downloads a track has.
The doenside is that their catalog is sketchy, since only those labels willing to offer their wares up on such an expirmental basis participate. They Might Be Giants are one of the biggest names, making almost their entire catalog available. There are also some offerings from Elvis Costello, Matador Records, and a few other prominent names, along with lots of people you've never heard of, but who are cross-referenced to similar, well-known bands, allowing easy sampling of content suitable to your tastes.
Even if their offerings are only mildly interesting to you, I encourage you to subscribe for a few months. Success by emusic.com might help open the eyes of the bigger labels to an online business model that actually works.
Use KaAzalite and you'll miss out on all that free herbal viagara, low-rate home mortgages, and personalized merchant accounts you'll rack up just for spending a few hours downloading tunes.
Slashdot: Filler for Nerds. Stuff that doesn't really matter.
Incorrect. Cite me a statute if you can.
Social Security cards used to say "Not to be used for identification" on the front, but what the Government meant was that the cards themselves were not supposed to be used as proof of someone's identity. Back then, SSNs weren't really used for anything other than Social Security, so the dissemination of cards wasn't controlled very well.
These days, the Government requires people to use their SSN as an i.d. number in the military, and the IRS uses it as your taxpayer i.d. number, two clearly non-SS purposes. Private buisnesses are perfectly entitled to ask for it, and if you want to refuse to give it, fine. But if they don't want to do business with you as a result of your refusal, there's nothing you can do about it. You'll also notice that your SS card no longer says anything about it not being used for identification purposes.
The bottom line is, use of the SSN as an identifier is so common in the U.S. that it is, for all intents and purposes, a national i.d. number. Encoding it on a card isn't going to change-- for the better or worse-- that fact.
Fair use is a defense to a charge of copyright infringement. You do not have an entitlement to access copyrighted information in any manner you want to.
Maybe it's the "fair" that throws everybody off. "Fair use" just means that there are some situations in which it is acceptable for you to reproduce copyrighted information, even though such reproduction would otherwise be infringing.
Syndicators, that's who. The real money in producing t.v. shows is getting enough episodes of a show ordered that you can then turn around and sell them as a syndication package.
Think about it-- the major networks really only supply prime-time programming-- 8p.m. to about midnight. Everything else that shows on network affiliates (and non-affiliate stations) is either locally generated programming or syndicated stuff. That's why you get The Simpsons or ST:TNG showing every day on a given channel-- because the channel bought the syndication rights for that package of shows. Syndications of popular shows can reap a bloody fortune in revenues for the production company-- in the hundreds of millions of dollars for a reasonably successful comedy. (Typically because an affiliate in every market will buy a syndication package for a successful show, rather than having the network pay for it once for first-run.)
Anyway, the reason shows aren't released to video shortly after they finish their first-run is because the money to be made in syndication is so staggering. If Paramount sold ST:TNG videos of the most recent season's episodes 6 months after the end of each season, they'd have a much harder time pitching the entire series in syndication to the local stations-- after all, the fans of the show (who translate to eyeballs watching the local station's advertising) already have permanent copies of the episodes that are being offered as a syndication package.
That's why you're only seeing Seasons 1 & 2 of The Simpsons on DVD now: because the syndication package that features those episodes doesn't command much of a price from local stations any more. Fox (or, more accurately, Gracie Films, the producer of the show) waits to release videos until it has gotten maximum value from syndication of those episodes because syndication offers a bigger revenue stream than video sales. For shows that don't (or won't) make it into syndication (typically, you need in the neighborhood of 100 episodes or about 5 seasons to make it attractive to an affiliate who will run 5-7 shows a week), a video release can occur much faster. (Witness South Park, which Comedy Central knows damn well won't run on a broadcast station because of its content. You can buy videos of SP now, because those sales aren't cannibalizing potential syndication revenue.) Of course, if a show wasn't popular enough to survive for 100 episodes, it's unlikely to have a big enough market to make a video release financially viable. There may be 10,000 people who loved the live-action Tick series, but even if all 10,000 people buy the DVD set, will that cover the cost of pressing and marketing the discs?
You've pretty much stumbled onto where the entertainment industry is being driven to. If you can't stop people from sharing t.v. shows (and like the Hydra, cutting off ReplayTV's head doesn't stop P2P services and other options from growing), the industry is going to have to find a way to get people to want to buy the same thing they can get on t.v. for free. How?
Value added is one way-- how do you get people to buy the same Beatles CD they already own a copy of? Remaster it "for cleaner sound"; add new liner notes, bonus tracks, etc. Give people a reason to buy it (again), and many will. The Simpsons DVDs are a must-have for Simpsons fans because they have Matt Groening doing commentary tracks. Many people will buy those DVDs even if they can get the same epsiodes off Channel 2 or Tivo or Morpheus for free.
Time shifting is the other-- not in the "tape on Thursday, watch on Friday" sense, but in the "see new episodes first" sense. Right now, with advertiser supported t.v., the shows go on network t.v. for free first, then show up on video. Movies go the other way. Expect to see t.v. shows following the movie route in the future-- the new Sopranos season might come out first on DVD for those willing to pay for it, and those who aren't will just have to wait until HBO gets around to showing it. Voila! Customers paying for television content that they can get for free.
The argument that "Linux has a smaller installed base, so its security holes are less important" sounds like a paraphrasing of the old "security through obscurity" canard.
After all, aren't you really saying that those security flaws are less critical because script kiddies and crackers are less likely to come across a Linux box than a Windows one?
Well, if you can afford a few months of fighting to get the computers back, you stand to make a great deal of profit by suing the police (or the Federal Marshals, or whoever did the confiscating), since an "anonymous tip" from a website is in no way sufficient to go get a warrant to seize property.
Think about it-- if it was, I could phone in an anonymous tip to the BSA that Microsoft was pirating my very first program, the one that prints "Hello World" over and over again, and that they'd be likely to delete it if the police came knocking. Bingo, the cops have a nice warehouse full of neato computers, and no more monopoly for a while.
A warrant can only issue if the police have "probable cause" to believe a violation is being committed. If cops go to a judge with a warrant application based on an anonymous tip, they have to have additional evidence to show why they believe this particular tipster is reliable. The "someone--we don't know who-- submitted a report on our website" argument isn't going to get them very far.
One has practically nothing to do with the other. The notion of "disability" is used in many places in the law, and it is defined differently in each one of those places.
For example, to be "disabled" under the ADA, you need to be impaired in your ability to work. (An oversimplification, but suitable for purposes of this example.) On the other hand, to be eligible for Social Security Disability payments, you have to be completely unable to perform any meaningful work. Same notion of "disability"; two very different meanings.
The way "disabled" is used in your policy is yet a third meaning-- that is, how your insurance company defines you as being eligible for a payout. Their definition of "disability" should be spelled out in your policy-- most often in Long Term Disability policies, it means an inability to perform your current occupation. Your policy being an agreement between your insurance company and you ("I will pay you premiums if you promise to pay me benefits if I become unable to perform my current occupation") will not be affected at all by this decision. Although your insurance policy uses the same word "disability" as the ADA, it never incorporated the ADA's (or SSI's, or anyone else's) definition of the word, and is thus unaffacted by this decision.
I have a recollection of some touch-screen ATMs in Ithaca, N.Y. using something like that. Instead of keying in your PIN on a keypad, you had to touch the simulated keypad on the screen, but that made it easy for shoulder surfers to see what your PIN was.
In an effort to increase the security of these machines, the ATM put up a keypad on the screen that jumbled the numbers around-- instead of 1,2,3 in the top row, it might have 5,2,7. You had to hunt and peck out the numbers of your PIN, but because the machine scrambled the arrangement with each user (or maybe even each login attempt), someone couldn't stand behind you and just push the same buttons that you did to recreate your PIN. It was certainly slower than using plain old muscle memory, but at least one step more secure.
I haven't seen an ATM anywhere else that did this. (Of course, I haven't seen too many purely touch-screen ATMs, either.)
Isn't that the exact argument 2600 has been making about DeCSS? The one that the Courts don't seem to be buying?
What's so scary about that? I mean, besides the fact that it's legally accurate?
Section 107 of the copyright at, which describes the doctrine of "fair use," sets for particular instances where reproduction of a copyrighted work is "not an infringement of copyright." Specifically, reproducing some portion of a copyrighted work is not considered a violation of Section 106 of the Act (which vests exclusive rights in copyright holders to control the reproduction and distribution of their work) where, among other things, the purpose of the reproduction is for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research."
In other words, when I publish a review (i.e. criticism or commentary) of the new Britney Spears album, I can quote lyrics from the songs without infringing on the copyright in those lyrics held by the author, but can't republish those lyrics in part of my novel about a young teen pop star. I can use clips of the "Lord of the Rings" movie in a news story (i.e. news reporting) about the advances in movie technology, but I can't videotape the whole movie and give copies of it to my friends.
Granted, the concept of a "right to fair use" and fair use being a "defense against infringement" is subtle, and probably just semantics. But the doctrine of "fair use" isn't the idea that you have a right to do whatever you want with a copyrighted work, as long as you consider what you're doing to be karmically "fair."
Web pages are not so etherial and fleeting. With a quick trip through the Google cache or one of the handful of projects that involve caching "backups" of the entire Web from time to time, a tech-savvy employer could find many previous iterations of your web site. A gross disparity between the current version and a historical one would probably only prompt a more searching review of the original one.
Face it, this is the Information Age, which means that storage and retrieval of information, including such trivial stuff as what some nerd at thinks of Star Trek, is fast, easy, and publicly available. Even your visits to the convenience store are typically recorded and, in some cases, retained indefinitely. It is impossible these days to know with any degree of assurance that things you say will not be recorded and archived, possibly to be used against you in the future.
I'll grant you, only the most forward-thinking (or paranoid, or both) people would have thought this way 20 years ago, but, hey, Orwell was thinking along those lines back in the 1940s.
Deciding a case from the bench isn't the norm, but it's definitely not ususual. Long before the oral argument, the parties file extensive written briefs setting forth arguments and case citations, and the Judge (or, more likely, his clerk) has already reviewed those submissions in detail. Many judges believe that oral arguments by the parties don't typically clarify the case beyond what's in the briefs, and thus, decide the case before oral argument even begins. (Some judges even have a full written decision ready before oral argument-- sounds like this judge did.)
The very factors that made Felten a "good" subject for a civil liberties case allowed the judge to rule that there wasn't a case at all.
There's an old lawyer's addage that "easy cases make bad law." (Typical of the profession, there's also an addage that "hard cases make bad law," but let's ignore that one for the moment.) In other words, a judge faced with a situation where one party is clearly right, it's tempting to decide the case favorably to that party, even though the legal reasoning to get there is not the most sound. Here, there is no question that Felten was not subject to any continuing threat from the RIAA, and thus, there was no existing controversy. (The "chilling effect" argument was more interesting, but that goes to show you why easy cases make bad law.)
There's no question that Felten's case would have been far more effective a vehicle to challenge the DMCA if he had gone ahead and published the paper under the RIAA's threat, and then litigated the consequences (if any). But to put one's self in that position requires a martyrdom complex that Felten (and even Sklyrov) doesn't have.
The Audio Home Recording Act, 17 USC 1001-1010, provides for the manufacture and importation of "digital audio recording devices" under certain conditions. Any such device-- that is, one that permits digital-to-digital copies (but excluding computers and some other messy technical points)-- must contain the Serial Copy Management System. 17 USC 1002(a), and the manufacturer or importer must report quarterly on sales and pay a royalty of 2% of the price of the devices. 17 USC 1004. The royalties are then distributed to certain parties under a tedious statutory scheme. 17 USC 1006-1007.
Don't fall asleep yet, because here's the interesting part: "No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings." Whoo! That's a mouthful. What does it really mean?
Let's let the 9th Circuit explain that:
Wait a minute! Who stuck "private" in there? There's nothing "private" about distributing (even non-commercially) copyrighted recordings to the public. The quoted case, upholding the distribution of the Diamond Rio mp3 player, goes on to state that the primary use of the device is to "space-shift" music-- that is, move music from your computer to a Rio player to go for a walk. It then explains that "Such copying is paradigmatic noncommercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act." Id. (emphasis added).
There is a huge difference between the concept of permitting unlimited copying for "personal" or "private" use, and permitting copying for noncommercial-but-public distribution. The language of the 9th Circuit in interpreting section 1008-- the only court to do so (the Napster court didn't really address the issue we're discussing here)-- clearly proceeds under an expectation that copying under the AHRA be for "private" use.
The law directs that individual statutory sections be interpreted as part of a unified whole. The fact that Section 1008 is part of a larger statute involving digital copying in compliance with the Serial Copy Management System suggests that Section 1008's freewheeling permission to make digital copies extends only to those digital recordings that preserve the SCMS limitations.
Maybe I'm overstating the clarity of the law in asserting that copying for friends-- noncommercial, public copying-- is absolutely prohibited under the AHRA, since there isn't a case that definitively establishes that proposition. But at the same time, it is misleading to suggest that the AHRA explicitly permits scuh copying. There is a significant indication from the Court in the Diamond Rio case to suggest that noncommercial distribution of copyrighted recordings is not within the scope of Congress' intent in passing the AHRA.
Sounds fascinating. You wouldn't, by any chance, happen to have a citation for this "law," would you?
Didn't think so.
It is not "legal" to make a copy of a copyrighted work-- be it analog music, digital music, a book, whatever-- "for a friend." I don't know where this myth got started (Audio Home Recording Act, maybe?), but it's wrong.
Hey, if Wil can geek it up, I can too.
The "tied an onion on my belt" line wasn't from Grampa's story about Hitler stealing the number 20, it was from his strategy for dealing with striking power plant workers:
Burns: Smithers, get me some strikebreakers. The kind they had in the '30s.
[Grampa speaks for an assemblage of senior citizens]
Grampa: We can't bust heads like we used to, but we do have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I took the ferry over to Shelbyville: I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickle, which in those days had pictures of bumblebees printed on 'em. 'Gimme five bees for a quarter,' you'd say. Now where was I? Oh, the important thing was, I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
(Of course, that's quoted from memory.)
Nice ob:Simpsons ref, Wil.
And a pretty shoddy list at that. They missed common adult-contemporary FM radio fare like:
And that's just a sampling of the "fire" theme. Don't get me started on planes...
One of the categories that WebSENSE enables blocking of is "proxy avoidance systems." All of the anonymous surfing tools like Safeweb that I am aware of are blocked, as are many web page translators like Babelfish (and even the Dialectizer).
The Google cache is about the only bypass system that can be used reliably, and that's on a page-by-page basis. Sure, I suppose you could write up your own proxy and stick it on some inconspicuous website, but WebSENSE has filtered out most of the well-known ones.
If Google has millions of queries run each day, the competition must be pretty fierce to be one of the most popular.
So how come I haven't heard of so much of this stuff? "Loft Story"? "Vicky Botwright"? "Ioana"?
Maybe this is our new Dictionary of (Transitory) Cultural Literacy. God help us.
Full disclosure: I am a lawyer. I have also clerked for a federal judge (on the East Coast, not in Chicago).
The first half of the article was interesting, and, although I have not looked into the details of copyright law or the specifics of the case, it appears at first blush that Mr. Whatzizname might have a valid claim against Coke.
However, the second half of the article is little more than ill-informed, paranoid conjecture about the judge buying her seat on the federal bench, selective case assignments, the use of court security to intimidate people, a conspiracy by the 7th Circuit to squelch the "crusading lawyer," etc. Speaking as a lawyer, much, if not all, of these provacative events described in the second half of the article are all consistent with the normal and appropriate functioning of the federal court system.
I will be the first to admit that, unfortunately, legal proceedings often seem inscrutable to the layperson. However, laypeople should not be in such a hurry to ascribe sinister motives to every legal ruling or procedure that they do not understand. It's a pity that the "journalist" writing this article decided to rely primarily on the guidance of a "court reformer" and "electronic journalist" who obviously has an ax to grind against the judiciary, and is prone to making wild assertions of extravagant criminal conspiracies involving judges, the CIA, etc. etc., and then citing the absence of evidence supporting his assertions as proof of the effectiveness of the same conspiracies. I've got news for the author of the story: while my court might not have tossed the plaintiff's lawsuit against Coke as abruptly (maybe-- it's hard to say without seeing the papers), from the decsriptions in the article, it would have responded exactly as the trial judge did on all the subsequent proceedings. Does that mean that my court is in line with the CIA and Coke and the rest of the black helicopter brigade, too?
But to keep this on-topic, an online news story worth giving an award would try much harder to present a well-researched and balanced story, without resorting to the one-sided sensationalism that this one does. A real reporter would not only not adopt Mr. Skolnick's assertions that Judge Manning paid a million dollars for her seat on the bench, but would not even mention such an extraordinary claim without first attempting to verify through sources other than Mr. Skolnick. Any news story could be turned into an attention-grabber like this one by making vague innuendoes, failing to provide evidence to support the most outrageous claims, and mischaracterizing the consequences of particular acts, all of which this reporter repeatedly does. Keep in mind the addage that "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof" while you re-read parts 6-10 of that article.
These awards are for excellence in online journalism, not yellow journalism.
For the "online commentary" category, consider James Lileks at lileks.com. He's a newspaper columnist from Minneapolis, but his web content seems to be unaffiliated with his day job.
He's got a terrific sense of humor, a fine way with words, a genuine fondness for 20th Century Americana, and is pretty handy with the clipart to boot.