Business Model != Content Ownership
on
Calling Out TiVo
·
· Score: 1
Why is it that IP owners think that profits are automatic, justified and deserved?
When you own content of some kind (be it text, audio or video), then you own it. That's all.
If you want to make money from it, you have to come up with a business model for that. You have to figure out a way to attract money for your content without losing control of that content. There is no guarentee that such a model exists. There is no guarentee that you will think of one or implement it well if there is a way.
But mostly, there is no guarentee that once you come up with a business model that works, that some future technicological shift won't change that business model. This does not equal theft. This just means the business landscape is changing and you have to change with it.
It is the responsibility of the IP owner to come up with a business model that is profitibal and controlable. If you just throw your content out there and expect money to just flow back in, you're an idiot. If the business landscape changes and a model that was once profitable is no longer profitable, then you either change your business model or you're an idiot.
Advertising timesharing paid content has worked for a long time because there wasn't much choice for the consumer for dealing with the time slots. With Remote controls, VCRs, and now TIVO, timeslicing is not as usefull because the consumer now has more control over timespans. This has nothing to do with the content. It has only to do with the business model.
As long as companies want to pay to place commercials on broadcast TV, then the TV station is getting their money whether anyone watches that commercial or not. Nothing is being stolen. Hell, no money is even being lost. Tivo might make the advertiser want to pay less money to place the add, but that is up to the contract negotiation between advertiser and broadcaster. That is a negotiaotion problem, not a theft problem. Once the contract is signed and the add run, nobody is losing any money.
This discussion is not about whether the kernel has bugs or holes. It is about portable/configurable security models. A Model is not the same as an implementation.
A security model is about defining how users will be given permission to perform specified actions. The message gives an example of the POSIX model. Others are possible. You can choose an ACL based model, or a highly restricted class/access or simple user/group/world RWX like unix of old.
Installable security modules allows the user to select what TYPE of security they want to use. Whether any of the implementations of these has holes is up to the implementers. We would prefer that the implementation be well audited as well as well defined.
This has nothing to do with BSD being better audited or better tested. Each of the BSDs has its own model, but just the ONE.
This installable security model is a very good thing for Linux. It allows choice for using linux in areas that require widely different types of security methodology.
The DMCA forbids the distribution of devices that are designed to circumvent protections on copywrited materials. Some other clauses indicate directly circumventing protections on copyrighted materials.
Presumably this is means the owner of the copyright is the one who decided on the protection. If someone who does not own the copyright puts protection on something, does that qualify?
So you don't know if it is copyrighted until after you break in. Then, if it is copyrighted to someone other than the person serving the file, the DMCA doesn't cover it. You find the real copyright owner, (RIAA, MPAA) and ask them if they consider this to be their protection (which they don't) and the DMCA no longer matters.
Too many people are arguing about destruction of technology and survival problems to get to the core question.
How about we re-phrse the core question to get rid of all the other arguments and just get to the point.
If you could take yourself and some smart people and a stack of textbooks on computer science and engineering and travel back in time to 1945 and re-invent the computer revolution from the ground up, how would you go about designing hardware, software, communication, interaction, whatever else?
Now all we have to do is get rid of all the trolls who want to spend all their time arguing about time travel and paradoxes and what-not.
I've used Java on and off for a few years.
And I've played with the Visual Studio.NET beta recently.
The structure of the.NET is very much centered around a Java like architecture. MS has added some useful features, and altered VB and VC a lot to bring them into line with the new runtime environment. It also required W2K (big surprise).
VC++ now has two modes: Native mode where it generates native machine binaries and uses standard API, and Managed mode, where it generates code and API designed to run in the.NET runtime environment along with VB and C#.
C# is Java. What else is there to say. It has a few more bells but that's it.
VB has been really ripped apart. Most of the data types are changed, restricted or gone. No more variants. Arrays are always zero based, always dynamic. Declaration, scope and instantiation all behave exactly like a Java environment now.
There's threading now and better Try/Catch exception handeling.
I think it was a BIG MISTAKE to rip VB apart to make it more java like. Sure, you get threading and some other nice things, but at the expense of a lot of things that VB 6 and earlier could do before but can't anymore. Porting old code wil be a nightmare at best, impossible at worst. Most existing VB applications will need to be majorly overhauled to just compile in VB.NET.
They should have left VB mostly the way it was. It was designed for entry to mid level RAD and it worked best that way. They could make C# the Java killer, web development language and maybe keep what they did with VC++.
Instead they tried to drag the large base of VB programmers into their.NET world (most VB apps I've seen could care less about the internet/web/online world). All this does is abuse their installed base of VB products and generate more rewrite/headaches for existing apps.
Yes,.NET is definitely modeled heavily after Java. I think it was a mistake to go so heavily in that direction. Net based applications are still heavily outnumbered by local and client/server applications in most businesses and that isn't going to change soon. They are abusing/abandoning their enterprise customer base to chase the internet application development market. Bad Move. Java is a good design for somethings, but not for everything.
MS could at least have redesigned it a bit to clean up some java mistakes. It looks like they copied the Java design so completely, they took it mistakes and all. So much for "Innovation".
Watch out for censorware
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 2
Let's just hope censorware doesn't accidently prevent people from voting at public schools and libraries.
For one thing, checking for bombs/guns is something that ultimately protects my life. That is something that I am concerned with and am willing to grant them my rights to protect.
Searching bags/licenses/etc is an action that ultimately protects the other companies profits and doesn't concern me in the least. So I'm not so willing to have my rights violated in their interest.
No children were hurt or lives lost in the pirating of this software.
I had that problem too, using my VCR as primary tuner and video passthrough to the TV.
When the VCR was in SP mode, the Macrovision darkened the picture, but when I set the VCR to EP, the problem cleared up. I leave the VCR on EP now except when recording (something other than DVD of course.)
good luck.
I want a jacket with logo's of many open source projects.
GNU on the back, Tux and Daemon on the front (left and right), Apache feather and Samba-Bamba on the sleeves.
Lots of other smaller (nice looking) logos spread around: XFree86, Gimp, Gnome, KDE (I'm not partisan), PostgreSQL,
... ummm...
GNAT,
... ummm...
more anyone?
I looked, You can't get this stuff anywhere, even as just patches to do it yourself. Somebody's gotta fix that.
I'd have the ShareZilla client examin other gnutella clients and pass along the IP address of some other valid client rather than just make one up. Then you get a proper gnutella response.
If it is really good, it would have the address and file reference of someone who actually has the selected file.
For every vision there is an equal and opposite revision
OK, So I've not fully investigated their client program, but...
1) It is likely that they used the GNUTella client as a basis for their program.
2) They are selling their programs, so they are probably not just releasing it source and all under GPL.
3) They violate the GPL.
At the very least, you can demand that they prove that they are not using GNUTella code (by examination of the source by someone familiar with gnutella), or that they release all of their code as GPL. This would kill the profit motive for Flatworld.net
This O'Reilly that we see in the interview - the one that is so focused on Open Standards - is not the true O'Reilly. Far beneath the surface, there is another O'Reilly & Associates, one that sells closed source software. You heard me right - O'Reilly and Associates makes and sells Closed Source Software for Windows, O'Reilly Website. It's time to expose the hypocritical, two-faced O'Reilly!
So what you are saying is that if someone does many things that are good and helpful and then does one thing that you don't approve of, then he is EVIL.
There must not be many acceptable people in your reality.
In the previous article on whether open source is trusted, many people missed the whole point. Trusted means that the system is designed as a whole, with spicific security requirements involved at all points. When you have an established roadmap and specified set of requirements that all modules must follow, you can get a trusted system. It doesn't mean "more eyes" or "noone has broken into my machine yet. Just try me!"
This was the issue at hand. Linux does not have a road map. It's parts are kept by individuals, and internal interfaces are not published let alone planned. If you want to change the kernel, you submit a patch, not a proposal.
This question is about politics because that is some of what it takes to alter the kernel. You can't just go RTFM, there is no FM. Either your idea gets in or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, its because a PERSON turned it down (whether its bad code, bad ideas or bad attitude). You can't go to the specification and see if your patch is part of the plan or if it satisfies all the requirements. This is where politics comes in. When people make subjective decisions that affect other people, politics is inevitable.
This is not about ReiserFS. That is just an example, and arguing that it is right or wrong or not really a "political" situation isn't the point.
Kernel development can go a long way to solve BOTH of these issues (Trusted and politics) by adopting a more organized design methodology. I grant that Linus has done well organizing things. But he has also made decisions that are not forward thinking. Examples: 1. refusal to move forward in later version GCC compatibility. He once specifically said he would refuse patches that were purely GCC compatbility patches. He claims that he likes 2.7.2 because he knows it well. That is a very personal reason that doesn't have much purpose beyond his own convenience. That's the stuff politics is made of. 2. refusal to accept scalability modifications, such as some of those from IBM. This is more subjective. Maybe linux needs it or maybe not. But so far it is still a subjective decision. Noone but Linus can say what will be done.
Linux needs a plan. Linux needs requirements. Linux needs organization. (brace yourself, here comes the hard one...) Linux needs a design committee. (AAAAAHHHHHRRRGGG!!! OK, thats out of the way). If you lay down the roadmap, requirements and specs ahead of time, then more people can do more work more quickly, with less confusion about what is expected and acceptable. There is less politics (in the development part anyway) because you just point to the spec and say "read that". Unless what you really want is to maintain a few people in power, which is a very political motive. In the discussion of trusted systems, this is what they were talking about. As long as everyone was up to spec and all modules conformed to interface, then you know the system was trustable. When modules change interface and break each other by surprise, when there is no requrement for security beyond "close the holes and look for bugs", then you are not trustable no matter how secure you eventually make it. It's just another type of security through obscurity, obscurity of design rather than obscurity of implementation.
Good God Man! You really intend to do this to your children? You are going to ruin their lives as an snub to the people who are making your life misurable?
If any one of them (or you, or your mother, or some other unlucky stranger) gets bad credit or a felony record, ALL OF THEM WILL SUFFER THE SAME WAY YOU ARE! This won't fix things, it will only make it worse.
Deal with your own problems and get your children as far away from it as possible. (That is unless you really hate them and want them to suffer all the same anguish that you are suffering, and possibly more)
Spite is one thing. Collateral dammage is another.
This is just a threat. Every negotiation starts with an outrageous demand. This allows the DOJ to back off slightly to a more reasonable solution, while allowing MS to feel that they have dodged a bullet. Watch for a MS counter that is a little bit more resonable than their usual "slap on the wrist" offers.
NO! They cannot use whatever protection scheme they want!
If they have the right to take whatever technical action they want despite the law, then we as users must have the same right.
If we the users are to be restircted by the law despite what technical access we may have, then they (The MPAA) must also be restricted by the law.
We should never say that they have a right that is different than our rights. Let them pick a battle ground, then KEEP THEM ON IT! They picked the law, so use the law to ruin them. If they had picked technology, then we'd have beat them already and they know it. Don't let them change the scenery in the middle of the fight just because it might benefit them later.
The law says that we have the right to fair use. They are using technology to circumvent the law, and they know it. Don't tell them they can cheet when we can't!
True, last 11/19/1999 was the last odd day, but it was also made of two digits, four of each. (four 1's and four 9's)
This month we will get the first EVEN with the same. 02/22/2000 The next is 02/02/2002 and then 02/20/2002. When were the last ODD and EVEN like this? 08/08/0808? 11/17/1777? others?
If you move, does the E-mail address go with you, or does it stay with the physical location? Then someone else would get your E-mail and v-v. Of course, you could send in that Change-of-address card, and they'll have to figure out which E-mail to forward and which not.
Slashdot Mirror
When you own content of some kind (be it text, audio or video), then you own it. That's all.
If you want to make money from it, you have to come up with a business model for that. You have to figure out a way to attract money for your content without losing control of that content. There is no guarentee that such a model exists. There is no guarentee that you will think of one or implement it well if there is a way.
But mostly, there is no guarentee that once you come up with a business model that works, that some future technicological shift won't change that business model. This does not equal theft. This just means the business landscape is changing and you have to change with it.
It is the responsibility of the IP owner to come up with a business model that is profitibal and controlable. If you just throw your content out there and expect money to just flow back in, you're an idiot. If the business landscape changes and a model that was once profitable is no longer profitable, then you either change your business model or you're an idiot.
Advertising timesharing paid content has worked for a long time because there wasn't much choice for the consumer for dealing with the time slots. With Remote controls, VCRs, and now TIVO, timeslicing is not as usefull because the consumer now has more control over timespans. This has nothing to do with the content. It has only to do with the business model.
As long as companies want to pay to place commercials on broadcast TV, then the TV station is getting their money whether anyone watches that commercial or not. Nothing is being stolen. Hell, no money is even being lost. Tivo might make the advertiser want to pay less money to place the add, but that is up to the contract negotiation between advertiser and broadcaster. That is a negotiaotion problem, not a theft problem. Once the contract is signed and the add run, nobody is losing any money.
A security model is about defining how users will be given permission to perform specified actions. The message gives an example of the POSIX model. Others are possible. You can choose an ACL based model, or a highly restricted class/access or simple user/group/world RWX like unix of old.
Installable security modules allows the user to select what TYPE of security they want to use. Whether any of the implementations of these has holes is up to the implementers. We would prefer that the implementation be well audited as well as well defined.
This has nothing to do with BSD being better audited or better tested. Each of the BSDs has its own model, but just the ONE.
This installable security model is a very good thing for Linux. It allows choice for using linux in areas that require widely different types of security methodology.
By SUE CANT
I want 5 Megawatts by mid May!
The DMCA forbids the distribution of devices that are designed to circumvent protections on copywrited materials. Some other clauses indicate directly circumventing protections on copyrighted materials.
Presumably this is means the owner of the copyright is the one who decided on the protection. If someone who does not own the copyright puts protection on something, does that qualify?
So you don't know if it is copyrighted until after you break in. Then, if it is copyrighted to someone other than the person serving the file, the DMCA doesn't cover it. You find the real copyright owner, (RIAA, MPAA) and ask them if they consider this to be their protection (which they don't) and the DMCA no longer matters.
too bad.
How about we re-phrse the core question to get rid of all the other arguments and just get to the point.
If you could take yourself and some smart people and a stack of textbooks on computer science and engineering and travel back in time to 1945 and re-invent the computer revolution from the ground up, how would you go about designing hardware, software, communication, interaction, whatever else?
Now all we have to do is get rid of all the trolls who want to spend all their time arguing about time travel and paradoxes and what-not.
What it needs is to be retrograded back to what it was 100 years ago before Mr. Walt Disney got into the business of buying laws.
I bet Tivo's next version has DVD support of some kind. It's too easy.
Now that's what I call convergence. TV, DVD, Replay, Internet access, Browsing, and Linux server all in one.
If Tivo doesn't, someone else will.
It was all the old people who were stuped.
funny how the intellegence curve is following me ...
Thank God. That's just what we don't need, a gun totin' NRA spoutin' activist trying to explain to the world how OSS works ...
Sorry Eric.
I've used Java on and off for a few years. And I've played with the Visual Studio .NET beta recently.
.NET is very much centered around a Java like architecture. MS has added some useful features, and altered VB and VC a lot to bring them into line with the new runtime environment. It also required W2K (big surprise).
.NET runtime environment along with VB and C#.
.NET world (most VB apps I've seen could care less about the internet/web/online world). All this does is abuse their installed base of VB products and generate more rewrite/headaches for existing apps.
.NET is definitely modeled heavily after Java. I think it was a mistake to go so heavily in that direction. Net based applications are still heavily outnumbered by local and client/server applications in most businesses and that isn't going to change soon. They are abusing/abandoning their enterprise customer base to chase the internet application development market. Bad Move. Java is a good design for somethings, but not for everything.
The structure of the
VC++ now has two modes: Native mode where it generates native machine binaries and uses standard API, and Managed mode, where it generates code and API designed to run in the
C# is Java. What else is there to say. It has a few more bells but that's it.
VB has been really ripped apart. Most of the data types are changed, restricted or gone. No more variants. Arrays are always zero based, always dynamic. Declaration, scope and instantiation all behave exactly like a Java environment now. There's threading now and better Try/Catch exception handeling.
I think it was a BIG MISTAKE to rip VB apart to make it more java like. Sure, you get threading and some other nice things, but at the expense of a lot of things that VB 6 and earlier could do before but can't anymore. Porting old code wil be a nightmare at best, impossible at worst. Most existing VB applications will need to be majorly overhauled to just compile in VB.NET.
They should have left VB mostly the way it was. It was designed for entry to mid level RAD and it worked best that way. They could make C# the Java killer, web development language and maybe keep what they did with VC++. Instead they tried to drag the large base of VB programmers into their
Yes,
MS could at least have redesigned it a bit to clean up some java mistakes. It looks like they copied the Java design so completely, they took it mistakes and all. So much for "Innovation".
Let's just hope censorware doesn't accidently prevent people from voting at public schools and libraries.
Searching bags/licenses/etc is an action that ultimately protects the other companies profits and doesn't concern me in the least. So I'm not so willing to have my rights violated in their interest.
No children were hurt or lives lost in the pirating of this software.
I had that problem too, using my VCR as primary tuner and video passthrough to the TV. When the VCR was in SP mode, the Macrovision darkened the picture, but when I set the VCR to EP, the problem cleared up. I leave the VCR on EP now except when recording (something other than DVD of course.) good luck.
I want a jacket with logo's of many open source projects.
...
...
GNU on the back, Tux and Daemon on the front (left and right), Apache feather and Samba-Bamba on the sleeves.
Lots of other smaller (nice looking) logos spread around: XFree86, Gimp, Gnome, KDE (I'm not partisan), PostgreSQL,
... ummm
GNAT,
... ummm
more anyone?
I looked, You can't get this stuff anywhere, even as just patches to do it yourself. Somebody's gotta fix that.
If it is really good, it would have the address and file reference of someone who actually has the selected file.
For every vision there is an equal and opposite revision
1) It is likely that they used the GNUTella client as a basis for their program.
2) They are selling their programs, so they are probably not just releasing it source and all under GPL.
3) They violate the GPL.
At the very least, you can demand that they prove that they are not using GNUTella code (by examination of the source by someone familiar with gnutella), or that they release all of their code as GPL. This would kill the profit motive for Flatworld.net
This O'Reilly that we see in the interview - the one that is so focused on Open Standards - is not the true O'Reilly. Far beneath the surface, there is another O'Reilly & Associates, one that sells closed source software. You heard me right - O'Reilly and Associates makes and sells Closed Source Software for Windows, O'Reilly Website. It's time to expose the hypocritical, two-faced O'Reilly!
So what you are saying is that if someone does many things that are good and helpful and then does one thing that you don't approve of, then he is EVIL.
There must not be many acceptable people in your reality.
MySQL vs PostgreSQL. That was the question.
speed vs. reliability....
...hmmmm...
speed vs. reliability....
Now which side of that arguement was I on again. I keep forgetting.
It doesn't mean "more eyes" or "noone has broken into my machine yet. Just try me!"
This was the issue at hand. Linux does not have a road map. It's parts are kept by individuals, and internal interfaces are not published let alone planned. If you want to change the kernel, you submit a patch, not a proposal.
This question is about politics because that is some of what it takes to alter the kernel. You can't just go RTFM, there is no FM. Either your idea gets in or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, its because a PERSON turned it down (whether its bad code, bad ideas or bad attitude). You can't go to the specification and see if your patch is part of the plan or if it satisfies all the requirements. This is where politics comes in. When people make subjective decisions that affect other people, politics is inevitable.
This is not about ReiserFS. That is just an example, and arguing that it is right or wrong or not really a "political" situation isn't the point.
Kernel development can go a long way to solve BOTH of these issues (Trusted and politics) by adopting a more organized design methodology. I grant that Linus has done well organizing things. But he has also made decisions that are not forward thinking.
Examples:
1. refusal to move forward in later version GCC compatibility. He once specifically said he would refuse patches that were purely GCC compatbility patches. He claims that he likes 2.7.2 because he knows it well. That is a very personal reason that doesn't have much purpose beyond his own convenience. That's the stuff politics is made of.
2. refusal to accept scalability modifications, such as some of those from IBM. This is more subjective. Maybe linux needs it or maybe not. But so far it is still a subjective decision. Noone but Linus can say what will be done.
Linux needs a plan. Linux needs requirements. Linux needs organization. (brace yourself, here comes the hard one...) Linux needs a design committee. (AAAAAHHHHHRRRGGG!!! OK, thats out of the way).
If you lay down the roadmap, requirements and specs ahead of time, then more people can do more work more quickly, with less confusion about what is expected and acceptable. There is less politics (in the development part anyway) because you just point to the spec and say "read that". Unless what you really want is to maintain a few people in power, which is a very political motive.
In the discussion of trusted systems, this is what they were talking about. As long as everyone was up to spec and all modules conformed to interface, then you know the system was trustable. When modules change interface and break each other by surprise, when there is no requrement for security beyond "close the holes and look for bugs", then you are not trustable no matter how secure you eventually make it. It's just another type of security through obscurity, obscurity of design rather than obscurity of implementation.
Good God Man!
You really intend to do this to your children?
You are going to ruin their lives as an snub to the people who are making your life misurable?
If any one of them (or you, or your mother, or some other unlucky stranger) gets bad credit or a felony record, ALL OF THEM WILL SUFFER THE SAME WAY YOU ARE! This won't fix things, it will only make it worse.
Deal with your own problems and get your children as far away from it as possible. (That is unless you really hate them and want them to suffer all the same anguish that you are suffering, and possibly more)
Spite is one thing.
Collateral dammage is another.
This is just a threat. Every negotiation starts with an outrageous demand. This allows the DOJ to back off slightly to a more reasonable solution, while allowing MS to feel that they have dodged a bullet.
Watch for a MS counter that is a little bit more resonable than their usual "slap on the wrist" offers.
NO! They cannot use whatever protection scheme they want!
If they have the right to take whatever technical action they want despite the law, then we as users must have the same right.
If we the users are to be restircted by the law despite what technical access we may have, then they (The MPAA) must also be restricted by the law.
We should never say that they have a right that is different than our rights. Let them pick a battle ground, then KEEP THEM ON IT! They picked the law, so use the law to ruin them.
If they had picked technology, then we'd have beat them already and they know it.
Don't let them change the scenery in the middle of the fight just because it might benefit them later.
The law says that we have the right to fair use.
They are using technology to circumvent the law, and they know it. Don't tell them they can cheet when we can't!
But wait, there's more!
True, last 11/19/1999 was the last odd day, but it was also made of two digits, four of each.
(four 1's and four 9's)
This month we will get the first EVEN with the same. 02/22/2000
The next is 02/02/2002 and then 02/20/2002.
When were the last ODD and EVEN like this?
08/08/0808? 11/17/1777? others?
If you move, does the E-mail address go with you, or does it stay with the physical location? Then someone else would get your E-mail and v-v.
Of course, you could send in that Change-of-address card, and they'll have to figure out which E-mail to forward and which not.