Well, according to the media industry, copyright infringement is the exact same as theft. They see it as you walking into their house and taking the Thanksgiving turkey right off of their tables. As driving off in one of their cars. As taking their daily newspapers right off of their porch.
All I'm asking them is to do the minimum: Nail MediaDefender for their copyright violations. If they let some people do it but not others, could this be a good step to getting the whole copyright violations = theft thrown out? After all, even if they grant MD permission to use those titles, surely they are writing off the 'grants of usage' as business expenses and taking it off of their taxes..
If you distribute baking soda (sell/give away/etc) and tell people that its crack, you can be arrested and held to the same liabilities as if you had actually sold crack..in fact..some states have laws to where you'd get charged for selling it, but not possession. Some will tack on an extra charge on top of possession/sale.
So tell me why MediaDefender gets away with inserting fake data labeled as copyright-violating material into someone else's server and then going all vigilante on them. If you own the copyright you might be able to get away with it as its no longer in violation of copyrights since its yours, but since MediaDefender doesn't own them directly..
That on top of the damages they have caused this company, in either time, money, or business damages.
The cell phone manufacturers forbid companies to sell their new hardware for less than a certain amount. A phone might cost them $50 to make, but you know that they're going to sell it to you for $400. Or actually, $50 + two-year contract..which means the cell company can pay it off in like two months. You don't believe that phone actually costs $400, do you?
Its collusion, plain and simple. I could have a contest to win a $100,000 car..and if Uncle Scam's Car Lot was selling Pinto's for $100,000, but sold it to me at 99.9% off, then you could win a Pinto!
Think of genes as a blueprint..the blueprint everyone is familiar with. And you have a five story building on that blueprint.
You don't build the building from the ground up. First you have to build the structure and foundation, and make sure its all stable. Then you can start working your way from the outside, in. Or from the inside, out in some cases. But the important part is the scaffolding. The scaffold being the egg or the womb or the seed or whatever. A lot of the time what happens is that the part (fingers on hands, for example) are grown as one big outcropping with a few pointy bones inside, and cells die off around the portions that will later be known as fingers.
I would imagine for something this drastic to be changed, your hands might need to be lopped off and the wound left open and exposed while you're floating in a vat of liquid similar to a womb..maybe even hooked up to a blood oxygenator and nutrient delivery system as well..while your hand healed to its new shape.
Then you get into the whole business of genes turning on and off..thats where it really gets messy.
Basically, the support classes will sit there on autoattack until something dies five minutes later, as opposed to the mage/berserker class who will kill in three hits and move on. Brilliant!
I suspect that when all the major ISPs start setting bandwidth limits and thus putting a cash value on the byte, that spammers will start to dwindle. You can prosecute text message, SMS, and spam calls over cell phone..because they all have cash values.
Bytes on an unlimited service have no obvious cash value.
Hopefully he doesn't do that to any law-savvy and sue-happy people if he's in the USA. He could be sued over it unless the ToS clearly defines what they did wrong. 'Excessive Utilization' won't cut it in court.
Cell phone companies used to have a habit of cutting people's service off if they complained too much or used up too many minutes with their support staff. The kicker is that they would then charge them the early termination fee and try to reclaim the phone they 'leased' to the customer. This only stopped once they got sued a few times.
A better way for him to approach the situation would be to warn them first. Hey, your torrents are a Problem on the network. Fix it or we'll have to cut your service. If he can document that he warned them of a ToS violation and they didn't stop, they'd have much less to worry about.
None of this would be a problem if most areas had access to multiple broadband ISPs, though.
Lets say Employee A decides that he'd make a good off-site backup person. Lets go on to say that he's an honest hardworking man who has no intention of making a million overnight by copy/pasting the data and shipping it to some benefactor.
The tapes come up missing. Employee A is fired, jailed, and probably sued for everything he's worth as he only has $20 an hour or so for the past 5 years to hire a lawyer with. Supervisor A is fired, Manager A might be fired too..because they both knew about it. People ridicule the hell out of the company for giving a random employee the backups for all the important data, and business slows dramatically.
Second scenario.
You're the supervisor who advises that this backup agency is a good idea. You give your data to the backup agency who stores them. It gets stolen or copied, etc. You sue the pants off of them for damages, and you don't lose business. No one gets fires, as it was the backup agency's fault entirely.
"Well, we've determined that information doesn't want to be free. Therefore, all BitTorrent or P2P traffic not sponsored by one of our esteemed peers will be allowed 100MB a month. Over that and your bill will go up."
Your example isn't a good one, but I'll provide a similar one.
Wal-Mart, trying to save on costs, gets rid of all their shopping carts. However, you can rent one outside from one of several different vendors. Suddenly, Wal-Mart decides to ban unsafe carts from the store.
Five of the six vendors are put on the unsafe list because they didn't pay the highest bribe.
This is going to become, "Pay us or we'll ban your browser."
I think it would start a very ungood trend among websites.
If I knew the location of my laptop I would inform the police. If the police refused to do anything to help, I'd ask the person for it back myself. If they refused, depending on circumstances, I'd be kicking ass and not taking names. Once the thief had been subdued via boot to the kidney and torso times six or so, I'd take the laptop back.
After all, its your right to recover your stolen goods, and if the police won't help, its your right to get them back yourself.
I posted a similar idea to a proposed improvement in a homeland security project last week and people modded me up for it. Sure glad we are free to say such things and that we'd never be suddenly interr
Hate to break it to you, but its that way pretty much everywhere. I've never ever known one woman that didn't have men after her. Even 400 pound welfare recipients with 3 kids and autism will have several men interested in her.
I think that's one of the big social problems that our society must face in order to improve. To women, its a game of choice most of the time. To men, its a game of probabilities and chance. Get your name and self out there as much as you can and hope you get some bites.
Lawyers are very good at intimidation. The system pretty much rewards it. After all, if you can threaten/berate/harass someone out of standing up to you and your client, you've just saved yourself a buttload of time and earned quite a bit of money. So I don't blame them for trying. Imagine if everything about your job was to fuck someone else out of something, or defend someone against being fucked out of something. Also, just the title of lawyer is enough to make people sweat a little bit.
Case-in-Point: Years and years ago I was driving in my '98 Cavalier. A large dumptruck cuts me off and slows down. I was already pissed off, and then a chunk of broken concrete somehow rattled out of the back, onto the interstate, and was kicked up by their tire. It busted my windshield, leaving a nice apocolyptic-butterfly (for lack of better description) shatter mark covering most of my windshield. I got a picture of the truck, the concrete still in the window, and everything I could think of.
When I called the company to ask them to repair it, they said they weren't going to under any circumstances because I shouldn't have been driving behind said truck. They said it wasn't their problem at all. I called the next day with the same response.
On the third day, I called a law office who had been advertised in the phone book. They asked if I had evidence, and were pretty shocked that I did. They agreed to contact the place and ask nicely for a resolution. Merely hours later, the vice president of the company calls and asks me to fax him a copy of the bill and says I'll get a check in the mail in a few days.
I called the lawyer back and he did it because he didn't think they'd cave so fast, but that if they took it to court I had a pretty damn good chance of winning. All he did was bark out some rules on how the judge would see their neglect for not having the required flaps behind their tires, and for having most identifying information/phone numbers scratched off. When he told them I had pictures of the truck right after, with chunk-o-concrete still lodged in my windshield, they caved.
While this is true, they DO own the infrastructure, this doesn't give them the right to snoop on your communications. Consider using the phone..should they be allowed to record and listen all your phone calls? What about those dirty pictures you have in your sent folder on yahoo mail..should they be allowed to access those too?
The way it works in the USA is this. If the company owns the infrastructure, and the email is business related, they can snoop at will. If your email is external (gmail, yahoo mail, etc) and NOT provided by the company, then they cannot. Doing so is grounds for a lawsuit on the grounds of privacy invasion.
I can personally attest to this fact. I was visiting a friend in a suburb-area on the outskirts of Nashville, but had to drive through part of metro Nashville to get to my destination (it was faster due to the interstate construction and congestion).
I have NEVER seen shorter yellow lights. Some lasted less than three seconds. The green hadn't even all the way faded out before the light turned red. In two separate cases within five minutes I had seen cars skidding to a stop, complete with sounds and skid marks on the road behind them. And the intersection was red about mid-skid, so had they had a little longer reaction times they would have t-boned someone. People on the other end of the intersection often don't look at what could be coming, they just assume its safe.
After all, its better to ruin someone else's life than to pay attention to whats around you.
The power system, at 'man level' is very safe relatively speaking. There are codes, systems, devices, etc, etc..all designed to keep people safe and then deliver power. However, once you get up into the thousands of volts and amps range things are different. Its now a matter of 'if this isn't wired properly this metal screwdriver will vaporize instantly and blow back into my face' and 'if the ground in this area is getting too much power, standing near it could be fatal' or 'if this line is opened hot and arcs to other lines, can they tolerate the extra power without melting everything down to the breaker'
The industry has even regulated (mostly with OSHA's help) those things to be as safe as possible.
When I say safety, I mean in stability of the grid.
Imagine, for example, that some fool goes and fires a thick chain into a substation. Chances are that it will contact multiple metallic surfaces that are energized, and will conduct power between the two. This has the potential of destroying expensive pieces of equipment at the site. If the power grid rolls a 1 on its save-vs-explode chcek, it could very well destroy equipment in both directions up and down the line, or even equipment at the power station itself. The system is VERY complex and it would take very powerful computers to be able to simulate things like this.
I would say that regulations need to be made to any switching station over a certain size or power rating that makes power companies harden the site against physical, network, and electrical attack/damage/etc. In return for that investment, the government could have a plan to help out those power companies in case of such an attack or natural disaster, etc.
An attack on a control point of the power grid could cause millions in damage if properly executed, and possibly lives from extended loss of power. I'd like to think the power grid has built-in protections to keep a 'bad node' from ruining several others, but it just might not..seeing as how companies build for economy before they build for safety.
Even something as simple as opening a few junctions could cause fireworks..take a look at some online videos about 'opening hot' for example..now imagine if that arc caught other pieces of equipment because the line was still energized.
Simply put, the power industry needs to step up to the plate and harden both their network infrastructure and their meatspace infrastructure against malicious attack.
"Sure, they won't know exactly what you read, but if you visit Erowid, I'd call it a good bet you don't want recommendations on a cheese to go with dinner."
99.99% of the time, any advertisement or unsolicited recommendation I see is ignored. So how about we cut to the chase and say that no matter WHICH website I visit, I don't want recommendations of products or commercial services.
And if you haven't checked lately, alcohol is considered a drug..I believe its listed on Erowid as well. Many people find that cheese goes well with wine.
I'm never buying Creative again because of their Audigy line. I purchased an Audigy one day and everything was fine. Then a few weeks later, the sound started to distort. I reinstalled drivers, reinstalled Windows, etc. Thought it was a broken card so I RMAed it. The second card did the same thing after several reinstalls, so I tried to RMA it.
At that point I was told by Creative that it was a problem with my system and was denied the RMA. Heading to their forums in rage, there was a 80+ page long post in their technical forum about this. The distortion was very harsh/random, could damage speakers and hearing if you had your volume up, and Creative said they could never reproduce it at all for the first few months.
Then they universally blamed all motherboard manufacturers, locked the topics (so they would get buried under newer topics), and moved on. Similar new topics about the issue were deleted without warning. I ended up using on-board sound and not looking back. If you can't support hardware better than this or work with any manufacturer to make sure your card doesn't take up 90% of the PCI bus at all times, maybe you shouldn't be in the PC hardware market.
But Creative is just riding the Gravy Train now. Release a decent sound chip, hack together some drivers from your minimum wage programmers, and find ways to keep people from hacking them to enable better features on lower cards, because a lot of times its the same sound chip in all versions.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, according to the media industry, copyright infringement is the exact same as theft. They see it as you walking into their house and taking the Thanksgiving turkey right off of their tables. As driving off in one of their cars. As taking their daily newspapers right off of their porch.
All I'm asking them is to do the minimum: Nail MediaDefender for their copyright violations. If they let some people do it but not others, could this be a good step to getting the whole copyright violations = theft thrown out? After all, even if they grant MD permission to use those titles, surely they are writing off the 'grants of usage' as business expenses and taking it off of their taxes..
Maybe its time the IRS get a few anonymous tips?
If you distribute baking soda (sell/give away/etc) and tell people that its crack, you can be arrested and held to the same liabilities as if you had actually sold crack..in fact..some states have laws to where you'd get charged for selling it, but not possession. Some will tack on an extra charge on top of possession/sale.
So tell me why MediaDefender gets away with inserting fake data labeled as copyright-violating material into someone else's server and then going all vigilante on them. If you own the copyright you might be able to get away with it as its no longer in violation of copyrights since its yours, but since MediaDefender doesn't own them directly..
That on top of the damages they have caused this company, in either time, money, or business damages.
The problem with subsidizing phones is this.
The cell phone manufacturers forbid companies to sell their new hardware for less than a certain amount. A phone might cost them $50 to make, but you know that they're going to sell it to you for $400. Or actually, $50 + two-year contract..which means the cell company can pay it off in like two months. You don't believe that phone actually costs $400, do you?
Its collusion, plain and simple. I could have a contest to win a $100,000 car..and if Uncle Scam's Car Lot was selling Pinto's for $100,000, but sold it to me at 99.9% off, then you could win a Pinto!
Genes just don't work that way.
Think of genes as a blueprint..the blueprint everyone is familiar with. And you have a five story building on that blueprint.
You don't build the building from the ground up. First you have to build the structure and foundation, and make sure its all stable. Then you can start working your way from the outside, in. Or from the inside, out in some cases. But the important part is the scaffolding. The scaffold being the egg or the womb or the seed or whatever. A lot of the time what happens is that the part (fingers on hands, for example) are grown as one big outcropping with a few pointy bones inside, and cells die off around the portions that will later be known as fingers.
I would imagine for something this drastic to be changed, your hands might need to be lopped off and the wound left open and exposed while you're floating in a vat of liquid similar to a womb..maybe even hooked up to a blood oxygenator and nutrient delivery system as well..while your hand healed to its new shape.
Then you get into the whole business of genes turning on and off..thats where it really gets messy.
Basically, the support classes will sit there on autoattack until something dies five minutes later, as opposed to the mage/berserker class who will kill in three hits and move on. Brilliant!
*whine* But we have to remember a passsworddddd. We just want to hit login and have everything magically work!
I suspect that when all the major ISPs start setting bandwidth limits and thus putting a cash value on the byte, that spammers will start to dwindle. You can prosecute text message, SMS, and spam calls over cell phone..because they all have cash values.
Bytes on an unlimited service have no obvious cash value.
You mean beatmania?
Fun game, but get the Japanese ones. The American one has shitty songs.
Hopefully he doesn't do that to any law-savvy and sue-happy people if he's in the USA. He could be sued over it unless the ToS clearly defines what they did wrong. 'Excessive Utilization' won't cut it in court.
Cell phone companies used to have a habit of cutting people's service off if they complained too much or used up too many minutes with their support staff. The kicker is that they would then charge them the early termination fee and try to reclaim the phone they 'leased' to the customer. This only stopped once they got sued a few times.
A better way for him to approach the situation would be to warn them first. Hey, your torrents are a Problem on the network. Fix it or we'll have to cut your service. If he can document that he warned them of a ToS violation and they didn't stop, they'd have much less to worry about.
None of this would be a problem if most areas had access to multiple broadband ISPs, though.
Personal EMP. Step into a booth or build one from plans on the internet. Blam! Goodbye hidden electronic devices.
Unidentified broadcaster..
This frequency is reserved for House Liao military use only
Do not attempt to transmit on it again.
Lets say Employee A decides that he'd make a good off-site backup person. Lets go on to say that he's an honest hardworking man who has no intention of making a million overnight by copy/pasting the data and shipping it to some benefactor.
The tapes come up missing. Employee A is fired, jailed, and probably sued for everything he's worth as he only has $20 an hour or so for the past 5 years to hire a lawyer with. Supervisor A is fired, Manager A might be fired too..because they both knew about it. People ridicule the hell out of the company for giving a random employee the backups for all the important data, and business slows dramatically.
Second scenario.
You're the supervisor who advises that this backup agency is a good idea. You give your data to the backup agency who stores them. It gets stolen or copied, etc. You sue the pants off of them for damages, and you don't lose business. No one gets fires, as it was the backup agency's fault entirely.
"Well, we've determined that information doesn't want to be free. Therefore, all BitTorrent or P2P traffic not sponsored by one of our esteemed peers will be allowed 100MB a month. Over that and your bill will go up."
Your example isn't a good one, but I'll provide a similar one.
Wal-Mart, trying to save on costs, gets rid of all their shopping carts. However, you can rent one outside from one of several different vendors. Suddenly, Wal-Mart decides to ban unsafe carts from the store.
Five of the six vendors are put on the unsafe list because they didn't pay the highest bribe.
This is going to become, "Pay us or we'll ban your browser."
I think it would start a very ungood trend among websites.
If I knew the location of my laptop I would inform the police. If the police refused to do anything to help, I'd ask the person for it back myself. If they refused, depending on circumstances, I'd be kicking ass and not taking names. Once the thief had been subdued via boot to the kidney and torso times six or so, I'd take the laptop back.
After all, its your right to recover your stolen goods, and if the police won't help, its your right to get them back yourself.
Not sure what to make of it at this point, but the gut feeling says this will be an excuse to be anticompetitive.
I posted a similar idea to a proposed improvement in a homeland security project last week and people modded me up for it. Sure glad we are free to say such things and that we'd never be suddenly interr
Hate to break it to you, but its that way pretty much everywhere. I've never ever known one woman that didn't have men after her. Even 400 pound welfare recipients with 3 kids and autism will have several men interested in her.
I think that's one of the big social problems that our society must face in order to improve. To women, its a game of choice most of the time. To men, its a game of probabilities and chance. Get your name and self out there as much as you can and hope you get some bites.
Lawyers are very good at intimidation. The system pretty much rewards it. After all, if you can threaten/berate/harass someone out of standing up to you and your client, you've just saved yourself a buttload of time and earned quite a bit of money. So I don't blame them for trying. Imagine if everything about your job was to fuck someone else out of something, or defend someone against being fucked out of something. Also, just the title of lawyer is enough to make people sweat a little bit.
Case-in-Point: Years and years ago I was driving in my '98 Cavalier. A large dumptruck cuts me off and slows down. I was already pissed off, and then a chunk of broken concrete somehow rattled out of the back, onto the interstate, and was kicked up by their tire. It busted my windshield, leaving a nice apocolyptic-butterfly (for lack of better description) shatter mark covering most of my windshield. I got a picture of the truck, the concrete still in the window, and everything I could think of.
When I called the company to ask them to repair it, they said they weren't going to under any circumstances because I shouldn't have been driving behind said truck. They said it wasn't their problem at all. I called the next day with the same response.
On the third day, I called a law office who had been advertised in the phone book. They asked if I had evidence, and were pretty shocked that I did. They agreed to contact the place and ask nicely for a resolution. Merely hours later, the vice president of the company calls and asks me to fax him a copy of the bill and says I'll get a check in the mail in a few days.
I called the lawyer back and he did it because he didn't think they'd cave so fast, but that if they took it to court I had a pretty damn good chance of winning. All he did was bark out some rules on how the judge would see their neglect for not having the required flaps behind their tires, and for having most identifying information/phone numbers scratched off. When he told them I had pictures of the truck right after, with chunk-o-concrete still lodged in my windshield, they caved.
The Hell They Can! (tm)
While this is true, they DO own the infrastructure, this doesn't give them the right to snoop on your communications. Consider using the phone..should they be allowed to record and listen all your phone calls? What about those dirty pictures you have in your sent folder on yahoo mail..should they be allowed to access those too?
The way it works in the USA is this. If the company owns the infrastructure, and the email is business related, they can snoop at will. If your email is external (gmail, yahoo mail, etc) and NOT provided by the company, then they cannot. Doing so is grounds for a lawsuit on the grounds of privacy invasion.
"Nashville, TN"
I can personally attest to this fact. I was visiting a friend in a suburb-area on the outskirts of Nashville, but had to drive through part of metro Nashville to get to my destination (it was faster due to the interstate construction and congestion).
I have NEVER seen shorter yellow lights. Some lasted less than three seconds. The green hadn't even all the way faded out before the light turned red. In two separate cases within five minutes I had seen cars skidding to a stop, complete with sounds and skid marks on the road behind them. And the intersection was red about mid-skid, so had they had a little longer reaction times they would have t-boned someone. People on the other end of the intersection often don't look at what could be coming, they just assume its safe.
After all, its better to ruin someone else's life than to pay attention to whats around you.
Thanks, Nashville.
The power system, at 'man level' is very safe relatively speaking. There are codes, systems, devices, etc, etc..all designed to keep people safe and then deliver power. However, once you get up into the thousands of volts and amps range things are different. Its now a matter of 'if this isn't wired properly this metal screwdriver will vaporize instantly and blow back into my face' and 'if the ground in this area is getting too much power, standing near it could be fatal' or 'if this line is opened hot and arcs to other lines, can they tolerate the extra power without melting everything down to the breaker'
The industry has even regulated (mostly with OSHA's help) those things to be as safe as possible.
When I say safety, I mean in stability of the grid.
Imagine, for example, that some fool goes and fires a thick chain into a substation. Chances are that it will contact multiple metallic surfaces that are energized, and will conduct power between the two. This has the potential of destroying expensive pieces of equipment at the site. If the power grid rolls a 1 on its save-vs-explode chcek, it could very well destroy equipment in both directions up and down the line, or even equipment at the power station itself. The system is VERY complex and it would take very powerful computers to be able to simulate things like this.
I would say that regulations need to be made to any switching station over a certain size or power rating that makes power companies harden the site against physical, network, and electrical attack/damage/etc. In return for that investment, the government could have a plan to help out those power companies in case of such an attack or natural disaster, etc.
An attack on a control point of the power grid could cause millions in damage if properly executed, and possibly lives from extended loss of power. I'd like to think the power grid has built-in protections to keep a 'bad node' from ruining several others, but it just might not..seeing as how companies build for economy before they build for safety.
Even something as simple as opening a few junctions could cause fireworks..take a look at some online videos about 'opening hot' for example..now imagine if that arc caught other pieces of equipment because the line was still energized.
Simply put, the power industry needs to step up to the plate and harden both their network infrastructure and their meatspace infrastructure against malicious attack.
"Sure, they won't know exactly what you read, but if you visit Erowid, I'd call it a good bet you don't want recommendations on a cheese to go with dinner."
99.99% of the time, any advertisement or unsolicited recommendation I see is ignored. So how about we cut to the chase and say that no matter WHICH website I visit, I don't want recommendations of products or commercial services.
And if you haven't checked lately, alcohol is considered a drug..I believe its listed on Erowid as well. Many people find that cheese goes well with wine.
I'm never buying Creative again because of their Audigy line. I purchased an Audigy one day and everything was fine. Then a few weeks later, the sound started to distort. I reinstalled drivers, reinstalled Windows, etc. Thought it was a broken card so I RMAed it. The second card did the same thing after several reinstalls, so I tried to RMA it.
At that point I was told by Creative that it was a problem with my system and was denied the RMA. Heading to their forums in rage, there was a 80+ page long post in their technical forum about this. The distortion was very harsh/random, could damage speakers and hearing if you had your volume up, and Creative said they could never reproduce it at all for the first few months.
Then they universally blamed all motherboard manufacturers, locked the topics (so they would get buried under newer topics), and moved on. Similar new topics about the issue were deleted without warning. I ended up using on-board sound and not looking back. If you can't support hardware better than this or work with any manufacturer to make sure your card doesn't take up 90% of the PCI bus at all times, maybe you shouldn't be in the PC hardware market.
But Creative is just riding the Gravy Train now. Release a decent sound chip, hack together some drivers from your minimum wage programmers, and find ways to keep people from hacking them to enable better features on lower cards, because a lot of times its the same sound chip in all versions.