But all of this only holds true if the editing script itself is a derivative work - and the editing script is just a series of time codes. If you stretch the definition of derivative work that far then things like movie reviews are derivative works, and web sites like imdb.com are just big copyright infringements.
You need to understand two important things about modern - and i stress modern - copyright legislation: a) it is all about money and b) when copyright legislation talks about derivative works and fair use and the like, it doesn't give any hard and fast rules as to what constitutes fair use or a derivative work, it only gives guidelines. These guidelines are interpreted by a judge - which basically means that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, that the side with the most lawyers wins.
Copyright is the vega-a-matic legal tool of the content industry: it slices, it dices, it makes julienne carrots. By bringing this suit against RCA/Clearplay, what the content industry is saying is that it is illegal to make money off their content without their permission - but this is not what copyright is about! This is what licenses are about: which is why when you buy a 15$ DVD, you aren't allowed to rent or lend it, whereas Blockbuster pays way more for the same DVD, under a different license, so that they may do these things. Up until now, I've never seen a license statement that says "you may not publish instructions which can be used by a third party to automatically skip parts of this work" (buy I'm guessing I will soon) and that's what pisses the studios off: they left a loophole in the license, somebody figured out how to make money with that loophole, and they want that money. It has *nothing* to do with art.
And it's not just the United States: Canada, Western Europe, Australia and Japan are also in the same situation. Think of it this way: these places are home to between one and one and a half billion people out of a world population of six billion. If you come from one of these places (and, since we're on Slashdot, you most probably do), even if you consider your income/lifestyle nothing special, it represents unattainable luxury to more than fifty percent of the world's population. These people just want the same things as we have (and as they see us have via tv, movies, magazines, etc) but the sad truth is that there isn't enough to go around: not only do we have an artificially high standard of living, we can only maintain that standard because other people have an artificially low standard of living.
I'll enjoy seeing them squirm even more, harping to the newpapers that their sales are declining due to evil pirates.
You laugh, but that's exactly what they'll do - some soulless marketroid will be quoted "Even with the advent of legal downloading, we're still seeing MILLIONS of copies of our property being traded illegaly. These people claim to be motivated by the convenience factor, but this just proves that they're a bunch of freeloaders."
Basically, i can see how this decision was made: "What do you mean they're only buying *some* of the songs? They can't just buy some of the songs, they have to buy all the songs, dammit." What is it about these guys, were they dipped in clue-be-gone when they were young? When somebody goes this far out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot, you just gotta wonder.
It'll be interesting to see how this stuff plays in Europe - legal dowloading is just starting up (nowhere near US levels despite a common currency and market) and the EU usually takes a dim view of these kinds of practices. Meanwhile, i suggest the RIAA just get to the point: use all that lobbying firepower to have congress declare an RIAA tax so they can take their pound of flesh right out of people's paychecks without having to worry about the whole "music" thing. Maybe then they'd shut up for a while?
England has existed as a unified entity since the 10th century; the union between England and Wales, begun in 1284 with the Statute of Rhuddlan, was not formalized until 1536 with an Act of Union; in another Act of Union in 1707, England and Scotland agreed to permanently join as Great Britain; the legislative union of Great Britain and Ireland was implemented in 1801, with the adoption of the name the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 formalized a partition of Ireland; six northern Irish counties remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland and the current name of the country, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, was adopted in 1927
wow, that looks so close to XP for a second i even thought "spoof". I honestly don't think basic users could tell the difference, although it's hard to get an idea about how it behaves from screenshots. Thanks for the mirror, the main site is still unreachable.
Will they be able to upgrade those laptops to play next year's "latest games". At @$3,000, buying a completely new machine every two years hurts, whereas spending $400 - 700 a year on your tower will keep you in the running for a while.
Why not spend the money on a tricked out mini-itx and find a decent LCD monitor with a small footprint?
Cross-licensing patents is a common occurrence between technology companies. There really isn't anything unusual there, I think.
It's about which specific two companies we're talking about.
If IBM and HP announced a deal like this, the spin would be "industry giants unite behind linux and open source". Sun and Microsoft have at least one thing in common: they are both threatened by the rise in visibility of linux/open source solutions of late.
Going back years now, Microsoft has had its eyes on the server side of the market - pushing NT against a fragmented Unix marketplace (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc etc). The threat from Linux wasn't people switching NT -> Linux, but rather people switching proprietary unix to Linux in stead of unix to NT. Whether Linux (or any other open source operating system) will become a threat to Microsoft on the desktop remains to be seen, but i guess they're giving the matter some thought.
Meanwhile, Sun is having a hard time selling costly upmarket solutions to customers who keep hearing that "free" software and inexpensive hardware can deliver just as well (i'm not saying this is true, i'm saying this is what the Sun sales guy keeps hearing from his customers).
Sun and Microsoft look at the world in much the same way: it's about selling units (as opposed to IBM which sees it as selling service). This is classic "enemy-of-my-enemy" business strategy... we'll have to wait and see how it works out.
"Some time after six the gates opened and we began to file in one at a time. In the yard was an office where an official entered in a ledger our names and trades and ages, also the places we were coming from and going to --this last is intended to keep a check on the movements of tramps. I gave my trade as 'painter'; I had painted water-colours--who has not? The official also asked us whether we had any money, and every man said no. It is against the law to enter the spike with more than eightpence, and any sum less than this one is supposed to hand over at the gate."
From "Down and Out in Paris and London" by George Orwell - a non fiction book read it online for free here.
I'm considering naming my first-born child either Br4d or J4n37, depending on gender. My wife isn't too keen on the idea but there's plenty of time left to persuade her... considering you haven't even met her yet. Now move out of your parent's basement and stop posting April Fool's jokes.
What I remember as the Gopher killer was that the team started off on a strange tangent with a 3D interface(?!).
as i recall, the real gopher killer was when the University of Minnesota asserted that their patent on Gopher meant that people had to pay them in order to run a server. In the early 90's that was just shocking. My how the internet has changed.
See dear AC, there's this little thing called sarcasm.. I'd look into getting your sarcasm detector fixed
The great-grandparent post is not (only?) an example of sarcasm, it's (mainly?) an example of irony. Irony means saying the opposite of what you mean, whereas sarcasm just means using a cutting tone designed to taunt or hurt. They very often go hand in hand: you'll utter an ironic statement in a sarcastic tone, but knowing and understanding the difference *absoluetely* guarantees you the distinction of most anal pedant in the room (prepending statements with "It's interesting to note that..." also helps).
Van Leuwin: Thank you, Officer Ripley, that will be all. Ripley: God damn it, that's not all! 'Cause if one of those things get down here then that will be all! And all this bullshit that you think is so important, you can kiss all that goodbye!
let me get this straight: you're advocating that a big company track your movements using what amounts to spyware in the product that they sold you? They told me this part of Slashdot was different, but i didn't think it was this different;)
It;s probably worth pointing out that P. and Britney are making the recording industry a hellova lot more than you are.
"Of thirty thousand CDs that the industry released last year in the United States, only four hundred and four sold more than a hundred thousand copies, while twenty-five thousand releases sold fewer than a thousand copies apiece. No one seems to be able to predict which those four hundred and four big sellers will be." - source: The Money Note, by John Seabrook
RIAA execs don't lie awake in bed worrying that in 10 years times, sales will have been cut in half by P2P.
Unless their cluelessness approaches nearly mystical levels[1], recording industry executives know that digital distribution is inevitable. Sure, they're probably a bunch of old white guys who never heard of the internet before 2001, but that was three years ago, and you'd better bet they have *some* smart people working for them. Fact: digital distribution of music is more efficient than physical distribution - i can download a much wider selection of songs, at any time of the day or night, than i can get at the record store, and i live in a capital city. Imagine if you live in Armpit, Ar.
But gearing up for digital distribution is going to take a) time and b) money. Time because not everybody has broadband yet - especially when you figure that, to these guys, the market is worldwide. Money because somebody has to invest in the infrastructure to make all this possible. Ask Apple how much they spent on their music store. On the other hand, the infrastructure for doing business in the bricks and mortar world is pretty much paid off and the profit margins are fat.
The recording industry is squeezing every last cent of profit out of their current way of doing business before they switch to digital delivery and start all over. What keeps them awake at night is the idea that by the time they get there, sharing on p2p will have changed people's value perception of music: that they will think of it as something you get for free on the net.
They instead lie awake in bed worrying that in 10 years time, artists will deliver their music straight from the recording studio in their attic, through the server in the basement, to their Internet based community of fans.
In any market with many producers and many consumers, middlemen will always emerge. Over time, seeking to maximize profits by reducing inefficiency, these middlemen will be reduced to a few big players. Once this happens, these big players will start to exhibit monopolistic/oligopolistic behaviour - they will think of the market as "their market", not in terms of the market they compete in, but in terms of the market they own, like a private club. Eventually, this behaviour will distort the market and decrease the gains to the producers and consumers - thus providing incentive for somebody to offer an alternative. If that alternative proves profitable, copycats emerge and the power of the old middlemen diminishes until they are driven out of business (in their current form: they usually become just another copycat, vis. Barnes & Noble) and the market is governed by the new middlemen. Over time, seeking to maximize profits by reducing inefficiency, these new middlemen will be reduced to a few big players....
Of course: i could be full of shit. "Professional" musicians have existed for thousands of years, whereas the recording industry hasn't. Then again, how many troubadours in the middle ages lived in castles? Only the ones who worked for the king.
[1]"No one in this world...has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."
-- H.L. Mencken
That is to say, letting a box push information to them at it's own speed is a waste of time and doesn't give them exactly what they want. Unless what they want is a box that pushes information at them at it's own speed... don't overlook the appeal of vegetative behaviour.
Other than on-demand TV (hosted TiVo?), another option for television is to tie together on-screen and on-line with things like extra info, viewer opinions, etc. The bbc (all hail the great auntie) does a lot of this today, and you can tell it's well thought out: more than just the "lookit, we have urls" factor. In the US, pbs (*the* answer to people who tell you that US television is crap) has some killer secions on it's site - especially older episodes of frontline which you can watch in streaming formats (usually windows media and real player... i know, i know). It's interesting to notice that neither of these are commercial television organizations (which seem to exist to stuff as much advertising down your throat as possible).
The days of people flipping through channels are ending, and the days of people flipping through menus of available media better be coming soon
<devil's_advocate>
Sheep are sheep - whether using a remote control or a keyboard. When there are only five big suppliers of web content left because they own all the IP and can use their armies of lawyer zombies to keep everyone else off the net or safely restricted to the sidelines, there won't be much difference between the web and television.
</devil's_advocate>
No, i don't think that will happen... at least not all the way. Having said that, the world used to be made up of domains ending in.edu and people would attack you like a pack of rabid dogs if you even mentioned the possibility of selling things on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
But all of this only holds true if the editing script itself is a derivative work - and the editing script is just a series of time codes. If you stretch the definition of derivative work that far then things like movie reviews are derivative works, and web sites like imdb.com are just big copyright infringements.
You need to understand two important things about modern - and i stress modern - copyright legislation: a) it is all about money and b) when copyright legislation talks about derivative works and fair use and the like, it doesn't give any hard and fast rules as to what constitutes fair use or a derivative work, it only gives guidelines. These guidelines are interpreted by a judge - which basically means that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, that the side with the most lawyers wins.
Copyright is the vega-a-matic legal tool of the content industry: it slices, it dices, it makes julienne carrots. By bringing this suit against RCA/Clearplay, what the content industry is saying is that it is illegal to make money off their content without their permission - but this is not what copyright is about! This is what licenses are about: which is why when you buy a 15$ DVD, you aren't allowed to rent or lend it, whereas Blockbuster pays way more for the same DVD, under a different license, so that they may do these things. Up until now, I've never seen a license statement that says "you may not publish instructions which can be used by a third party to automatically skip parts of this work" (buy I'm guessing I will soon) and that's what pisses the studios off: they left a loophole in the license, somebody figured out how to make money with that loophole, and they want that money. It has *nothing* to do with art.
And it's not just the United States: Canada, Western Europe, Australia and Japan are also in the same situation. Think of it this way: these places are home to between one and one and a half billion people out of a world population of six billion. If you come from one of these places (and, since we're on Slashdot, you most probably do), even if you consider your income/lifestyle nothing special, it represents unattainable luxury to more than fifty percent of the world's population. These people just want the same things as we have (and as they see us have via tv, movies, magazines, etc) but the sad truth is that there isn't enough to go around: not only do we have an artificially high standard of living, we can only maintain that standard because other people have an artificially low standard of living.
I'll enjoy seeing them squirm even more, harping to the newpapers that their sales are declining due to evil pirates.
You laugh, but that's exactly what they'll do - some soulless marketroid will be quoted "Even with the advent of legal downloading, we're still seeing MILLIONS of copies of our property being traded illegaly. These people claim to be motivated by the convenience factor, but this just proves that they're a bunch of freeloaders."
Basically, i can see how this decision was made: "What do you mean they're only buying *some* of the songs? They can't just buy some of the songs, they have to buy all the songs, dammit." What is it about these guys, were they dipped in clue-be-gone when they were young? When somebody goes this far out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot, you just gotta wonder.
It'll be interesting to see how this stuff plays in Europe - legal dowloading is just starting up (nowhere near US levels despite a common currency and market) and the EU usually takes a dim view of these kinds of practices. Meanwhile, i suggest the RIAA just get to the point: use all that lobbying firepower to have congress declare an RIAA tax so they can take their pound of flesh right out of people's paychecks without having to worry about the whole "music" thing. Maybe then they'd shut up for a while?
Source: = CIA world factbook
e x c e l l e n t!
thank you. no, really, thank you.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"
Well, kind of like you, lifting most of your points from Lawrence Lessig's Keynote from OSCON 2002, all of which also made their way into his book The Future of Ideas.
I'm not trolling here, i just figure you might want to attribute some of these ideas.
wow, that looks so close to XP for a second i even thought "spoof". I honestly don't think basic users could tell the difference, although it's hard to get an idea about how it behaves from screenshots. Thanks for the mirror, the main site is still unreachable.
In communist China, everything we say sounds like foreign-sounding nonsense.
well, if they can make them for laptops, i'm sure they can make them standalone as well. Call Aienware and ask them who their supplier is ;)
Will they be able to upgrade those laptops to play next year's "latest games". At @$3,000, buying a completely new machine every two years hurts, whereas spending $400 - 700 a year on your tower will keep you in the running for a while.
Why not spend the money on a tricked out mini-itx and find a decent LCD monitor with a small footprint?
Cross-licensing patents is a common occurrence between technology companies. There really isn't anything unusual there, I think.
It's about which specific two companies we're talking about.
If IBM and HP announced a deal like this, the spin would be "industry giants unite behind linux and open source". Sun and Microsoft have at least one thing in common: they are both threatened by the rise in visibility of linux/open source solutions of late.
Going back years now, Microsoft has had its eyes on the server side of the market - pushing NT against a fragmented Unix marketplace (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc etc). The threat from Linux wasn't people switching NT -> Linux, but rather people switching proprietary unix to Linux in stead of unix to NT. Whether Linux (or any other open source operating system) will become a threat to Microsoft on the desktop remains to be seen, but i guess they're giving the matter some thought.
Meanwhile, Sun is having a hard time selling costly upmarket solutions to customers who keep hearing that "free" software and inexpensive hardware can deliver just as well (i'm not saying this is true, i'm saying this is what the Sun sales guy keeps hearing from his customers).
Sun and Microsoft look at the world in much the same way: it's about selling units (as opposed to IBM which sees it as selling service). This is classic "enemy-of-my-enemy" business strategy... we'll have to wait and see how it works out.
"Some time after six the gates opened and we began to file in one at a time. In the yard was an office where an official entered in a ledger our names and trades and ages, also the places we were coming from and going to --this last is intended to keep a check on the movements of tramps. I gave my trade as 'painter'; I had painted water-colours--who has not? The official also asked us whether we had any money, and every man said no. It is against the law to enter the spike with more than eightpence, and any sum less than this one is supposed to hand over at the gate."
From "Down and Out in Paris and London" by George Orwell - a non fiction book
read it online for free here.
I'm considering naming my first-born child either Br4d or J4n37, depending on gender. My wife isn't too keen on the idea but there's plenty of time left to persuade her... considering you haven't even met her yet. Now move out of your parent's basement and stop posting April Fool's jokes.
Clippy: "It looks like you're losing a battle!!!"
What I remember as the Gopher killer was that the team started off on a strange tangent with a 3D interface(?!).
as i recall, the real gopher killer was when the University of Minnesota asserted that their patent on Gopher meant that people had to pay them in order to run a server. In the early 90's that was just shocking. My how the internet has changed.
show me ;)
but let's not get carried away
i know i'm going to regret this in the morning...
See dear AC, there's this little thing called sarcasm.. I'd look into getting your sarcasm detector fixed
The great-grandparent post is not (only?) an example of sarcasm, it's (mainly?) an example of irony. Irony means saying the opposite of what you mean, whereas sarcasm just means using a cutting tone designed to taunt or hurt. They very often go hand in hand: you'll utter an ironic statement in a sarcastic tone, but knowing and understanding the difference *absoluetely* guarantees you the distinction of most anal pedant in the room (prepending statements with "It's interesting to note that..." also helps).
Damn you Sound and Sense, damn you to hell!
i'll just get my coat now...
Van Leuwin: Thank you, Officer Ripley, that will be all.
Ripley: God damn it, that's not all! 'Cause if one of those things get down here then that will be all! And all this bullshit that you think is so important, you can kiss all that goodbye!
relax, i was just foolin'
there's a system like this for gsm phones called International Mobile Equipment Identity
let me get this straight: you're advocating that a big company track your movements using what amounts to spyware in the product that they sold you? They told me this part of Slashdot was different, but i didn't think it was this different ;)
The mugger may get pissed and pop a cap in your ass when he find you only have an old walkman.
depends on what it's wrapped in
It;s probably worth pointing out that P. and Britney are making the recording industry a hellova lot more than you are.
...has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."
"Of thirty thousand CDs that the industry released last year in the United States, only four hundred and four sold more than a hundred thousand copies, while twenty-five thousand releases sold fewer than a thousand copies apiece. No one seems to be able to predict which those four hundred and four big sellers will be."
- source: The Money Note, by John Seabrook
RIAA execs don't lie awake in bed worrying that in 10 years times, sales will have been cut in half by P2P.
Unless their cluelessness approaches nearly mystical levels[1], recording industry executives know that digital distribution is inevitable. Sure, they're probably a bunch of old white guys who never heard of the internet before 2001, but that was three years ago, and you'd better bet they have *some* smart people working for them. Fact: digital distribution of music is more efficient than physical distribution - i can download a much wider selection of songs, at any time of the day or night, than i can get at the record store, and i live in a capital city. Imagine if you live in Armpit, Ar.
But gearing up for digital distribution is going to take a) time and b) money. Time because not everybody has broadband yet - especially when you figure that, to these guys, the market is worldwide. Money because somebody has to invest in the infrastructure to make all this possible. Ask Apple how much they spent on their music store. On the other hand, the infrastructure for doing business in the bricks and mortar world is pretty much paid off and the profit margins are fat.
The recording industry is squeezing every last cent of profit out of their current way of doing business before they switch to digital delivery and start all over. What keeps them awake at night is the idea that by the time they get there, sharing on p2p will have changed people's value perception of music: that they will think of it as something you get for free on the net.
They instead lie awake in bed worrying that in 10 years time, artists will deliver their music straight from the recording studio in their attic, through the server in the basement, to their Internet based community of fans.
In any market with many producers and many consumers, middlemen will always emerge. Over time, seeking to maximize profits by reducing inefficiency, these middlemen will be reduced to a few big players. Once this happens, these big players will start to exhibit monopolistic/oligopolistic behaviour - they will think of the market as "their market", not in terms of the market they compete in, but in terms of the market they own, like a private club. Eventually, this behaviour will distort the market and decrease the gains to the producers and consumers - thus providing incentive for somebody to offer an alternative. If that alternative proves profitable, copycats emerge and the power of the old middlemen diminishes until they are driven out of business (in their current form: they usually become just another copycat, vis. Barnes & Noble) and the market is governed by the new middlemen. Over time, seeking to maximize profits by reducing inefficiency, these new middlemen will be reduced to a few big players....
Of course: i could be full of shit. "Professional" musicians have existed for thousands of years, whereas the recording industry hasn't. Then again, how many troubadours in the middle ages lived in castles? Only the ones who worked for the king.
[1]"No one in this world
-- H.L. Mencken
Radio is purely a marketing medium for the music, not income generating. ... and labels lobby radio stations to get airplay for their cattle^H^Hartists
A lot of it has to do with the perceptions of the public.
"That you wre arrested is a fact, but absolutely nothing to do with whether you were actually guilty of any crime."
- the police
"I don't want you going anywhere near that criminal"
- the neighbors
Unless what they want is a box that pushes information at them at it's own speed... don't overlook the appeal of vegetative behaviour.
Other than on-demand TV (hosted TiVo?), another option for television is to tie together on-screen and on-line with things like extra info, viewer opinions, etc. The bbc (all hail the great auntie) does a lot of this today, and you can tell it's well thought out: more than just the "lookit, we have urls" factor. In the US, pbs (*the* answer to people who tell you that US television is crap) has some killer secions on it's site - especially older episodes of frontline which you can watch in streaming formats (usually windows media and real player... i know, i know). It's interesting to notice that neither of these are commercial television organizations (which seem to exist to stuff as much advertising down your throat as possible).
The days of people flipping through channels are ending, and the days of people flipping through menus of available media better be coming soon Sheep are sheep - whether using a remote control or a keyboard. When there are only five big suppliers of web content left because they own all the IP and can use their armies of lawyer zombies to keep everyone else off the net or safely restricted to the sidelines, there won't be much difference between the web and television.No, i don't think that will happen... at least not all the way. Having said that, the world used to be made up of domains ending in