Why would we pay for the biggest cheap advertising windfall that these large corporations have ever had?
How much does it cost Nike to run a 30 second ad on TV to a few million people? And how much does it cost them to maintain a permanent website available to the wired public of the entire world?
How much more information can interested customers get from their exposure to the products on the Net than from a short flashy TV commercial?
How many more impulsive sales are generated by customers who can purchase the cool thing they just saw with a few mouse clicks instead of jumping off the couch in the middle of the Super Bowl to go purchase that pair of shoes they can't live without?
There is one solution for advertisers that think they are not making enough money on the net: Get Off! We did not start surfing the Net so we could purchase things.
We started because we could communicate. The convenience of the Net makes profits easier to come by, and still businesspeople whine.
The Net is an environment that businesses have to adapt to. If businesspeople want to make a profit, that is their problem. It is certainly not the users' (or they would say consumers') problem.
Hear! Hear! At least somebody recognises this question as settled. Batman did Superman. He did it by stopping his heart and tricking Superman into thinking he was dead. Batman is wearing the title belt.
Do these reporters just pick subjects out of a hat?
That's great that the average price is not $18, but there are still CDs that sell for that price. The average price of the examples you gave is still $13.375. Considering that the market value of these things without a monopoly should be somewhere under $5, the RIAA is still abusing the laws.
DVDs should cost between $5 and $7. CDs should be less. They are stealing your money at the record store.
And now they want to add a further measure of defence or their monopoly by legislating alternate avenues for music distribution out of existence. As the posting said:
...the RIAA is less concerned about piracy and more about the
low barrier of entry into the online music business.
High barriers for entry mean they can steal from you with impunity.
Redhat said they were standardizing the Gnome and KDE desktops. I didn't know that meant changing Gnome into KDE. The Bluecurve icons are way too cartoony.
Are they honestly trying to compete with OSX's Bluepill (or whatever it's called) and Win2K (obviously, XP's interface is nearly as stupidly cartoony as Bluecurve)?
Copyright is the right to copies, not derivatives. However, rightly or wrongly, Congress gave the content industries rights over derivative works which means just about anything with any relationship to a copyrighted work is supposedly under their control.
This is strange because any altered version is certainly not a copy.
Copy
2. An imitation, transcript, or reproduction of an original
work; as, a copy of a letter, an engraving, a painting, or
a statue.
So, one would surmise that copyright would not apply to altered versions as they are not "imitations." However, Congress did not see it this way, so the MPAA will probably win.
First off, I totally agree with what you were trying to say. But I have a few of questions:
My first question is:
Was Thomas Jefferson not in France as ambassador during the writting of the Constitution? While I agree that those were his opinions and that his opinions were expressed in some way in the Constitution, I was under the impression that he did not actually participate in the writing of the Constitution.
My second question is:
You said:
Jefferson believed that if there was no protection to intellectual property, people would not be encouraged to share knowledge with others.
Would Thomas Jefferson ever have used the term "intellectual property"? I really doubt this as he seemed to think ideas had a different nature than physical property. I thought "intellectual propery" was a concoction of one of those muddle-headed RIAA lawyers or one of their vile kin. You probably should not repeat such foul terms. They play into the hands of the vermin.
My third question is:
Is copyright really a balance? I have heard this argument many times, but when I read the Constitution, I just do not get that impression. Maybe I am crazy, but the impression that the Constitution gives me is that these are incentives to increase the distribution of these ideas. In other words, the intention of the Constitution is to make sure more people receive more information. By that reasoning, the intended recipeints of the information take precident over the creators of the information. In that light, are we not all, as citizens of the US, the owners of all information created in the US, or for that matter, the world? If we are the owners of the information, then is the RIAA not stealing from us by keeping the information from us?
Are you asking how this has affected us in our daily lives besides:
the fact that governments around the world have now gotten the right to spy on anybody?
the fact that speech can no longer be free? (meaning that I and everybody has to watch what they say all the time... When I was a child, I was taught that this was a feature of oppressive socialist/communist regimes. Now it seems to be a feature Dubuya's global regime. You do the math.)
the fact that there is little or no regulation for these broad spying powers?
the fact that many countries are suggesting or enacting national biometric ID programs? (When I was a child, biometrics were for criminals (fingerprints). Does that make anybody who gives up biometric data to the government a criminal? I think so.)
the fact that by 2005 all foreign nationals (some of which are my friends) are going to have to submit biometric data to the US government to enter the country? (Is this like human region coding? It is certainly prejudicial, and you can count on the fact that they WILL ask US citizens in the future once it has been deemed "convenient" for foreigners. I suppose they could say it is not prejudical, then, could they not?)
the fact that by being a geek or different in any way I am now subject to the accusation of being a "terrorist"? (Looks like all those ex-football-player cops / thugs have an excuse to persecute geeks again.)
the fact that I cannot take a pair of tweezers on an airplane?
The truth is, I am not really afraid of terrorists. I would certainly have a better chance of getting struck by lightning or winning the lottery and probably a better chance of experiencing both in the same day. I am afraid of government, though.
The US government has been keeping records since the Social Security system was put in place. Everybody in the US has a primary key. IBM designed a similar system for the Nazis, and look what they did with it. What has IBM been designing for the US government since the 1930's? I am sure I do not want to know.
When I was a child, I was taught that only people under oppressive socialist/communist regimes had to worry about their government spying on them. Now it seems, everybody has to worry. The entire industrialized world is now spying on its citizens, and these governments are looking to broaden their surveillance and information sharing.
The government and the news media (the real terrorists) have drastically over estimated the threats posed by terrorists. As a result, the economy is in a slump. Jobs everywhere are scarce, and Linux has been directly affected by that;)(ie. software projects canned by corporations, etc.)
So, are you asking besides all that how this has affected me? Hmmm... Well, I have felt threatened since that day. A close relative of mine was fingerprinted at work (which means that she is now a criminal so far as the government is concerned, see above). I have postponed (indefinitely?) travelling to the US. I suppose I could also say that I have experienced a true witch hunt, just like the ones they told me about in school.
While I can see O'Reilly and his Anonymous Coward friend's point of view, I think they are missing the big picture. This is not about mandating some kind of software. This is about mandating transparency in government.
We have lived long under the shadow of the cold war. It has been over for more than a decade, and still government secrets are the rule and not the exception. How can we, the citizens, make decisions about government when we do not even know what they are really doing?
Closed standards allow for spyware and weaknesses like viruses. Open standards deal with these things quickly. MS does not fix bugs until they are forced to through embarrassment. Dangerous security flaws in Open Source Software get fixed in as little as 24 hours from a public discovery. Do they want an insecure government? All significant virus attacks in the last 5 years were because MS's software.
Villanueva had another point that is applicable here: This is not a mandate for Linux or FreeBSD. This is a mandate for Open Source Software. If companies like MS want to sell to the government, they can go right ahead. The just have to include their source code with the software they supply. Is this impossible for MS to do? No. It comes down to a decision of whether they want to or not.
Even if they did allow open distribution of their source code, they would not have lost it. They still own the copyright on it and could still claim that anybody using it must pay them royalties. This is not even considered by MS to be an option. MS forgets that the government makes the rules... MS does not. Maybe the monopoly has gone to their heads.
The real reason they do not want to open their code is because they will not be able to embrace and extend and extinguish anything that way. This would mean that MS would have to compete with quality of software (something they know they cannot possibly do).
Finally, no software developed with public money should go to private hands. Why should your tax money go into developing something you have to pay for again? If public money is used, you already paid for it. Requiring Open Source Software just guarantees that the taxpayers get what they pay for.
Therefore, a mandate of this nature would not exclude proprietary software. It would exclude software from manufacturers that did not wish to play by the rules. It would be detrimental to interests wanted to sidestep government rules by keeping secrets or get the government to fund their R&D. It would also be a step toward restoring transparency in government and allow the taxpayers to get a return on their investment. Based on these few arguments (and there are many more), Open Source Software seems to be the only choice for a society that calls itself a democracy.
Can we put Bill Gates and other MS employees (including the customer service department) for creating two circumvention devices and discussing them?
The Personal License Migration Service (PLMS) and the Personal License Update Utility mentioned in this article both circumvent the copy protection written into WMP. Is MS violating the DMCA for customer service? Or to make up for their bugware?
So, I guess my question is: Can we sue MS for violating the DMCA with respect to their own products?
It would be nice to have MSs big budget against the DMCA:)
You should say "old medium." VCDs have been around for quite some time. The only reason they are new to you is because the MPAA prevented them from being used much in the US. At the same time, VCDs were very popular in Asia (where the piracy of organizations like the MPAA is less palatable) for most of the last decade.
However, I agree that this old medium has become cheaper and more advantageous for teaching than probably any other.
Man, I never realize that Jack Valenti was such a scary looking guy. His words always scared me, but I never realized such a devilish face could be attached to all that filth that comes out of his mouth. Amazing...
I suppose it just proves that corruption and greed really rot people from the inside, but eventually, it shows on the outside, as well...
... but like any nation, we don't like our citizens providing weapons to enemies of the state. No contradiction there.
Interesting... In a country that is supposed to value privacy and individualism above all else, tools to protect privacy are considered to be "weapons."
I suppose by that reasoning trial by jury could be considered a "conspiracy."
If you do not think that is a contradiction, you should really consider returning to university for a logic course.
It is interesting that Congress has approved a penalty usually reserved for murder for a crime that essentially amounts to expensive vandalism. If you deface a wall, you get a few hours of community service. If you deface a website, you get life. I would say that it is difficult to consider a society that can put people in prison for life for a crime that is more or less a misdemeanor a free society.
What about those Enron and Worldcom executives? When do they get life in prison or an even stiffer sentence? The crime they committed was premeditated stealing. That at least would be considered a felony in most cultures.
Moral: If you are greedy and like to steal, Uncle Sam wants you to run a major corporation and write a book. If you are a teenager and have nothing better to do than deface a little property, better do it with spray paint, because if you use your computer, you can grow old in prison.
Nice message we are sending to young people these days. I suppose Gecko was right: "Greed... is good!"
While a system that would depend on "the fundamental constants of the universe" is a great idea, I do not think most people on the street care to do physics problems in their head.
Rather, they will be concerned with something that regulates their behavior as greatly as the rotation of the Earth. Not fixing the time to the cycle of a day would confuse most people. Imagine having to go to work at a different time every day of the year.
This second time system also has a problem. While it looks very interesting, it is base 16. The entire argument was proposed over finding a base 10 system of time. Adding a base 16 time system to the metric system would be a step toward returning the metric system to something like the English Imperial System. Such a system would only be good for computers since it works no nicely with binary numbers. But if that is to be done with time, why not recreate the entire metric system for computers and base it on 16 and not 10?
However, when arbitrarily choosing a time system to replace the current one, the choice should probably be something made for people. Base 10 works well for those of use without physics degrees or wetware interfaces, and it fits into the original scheme of the metric system.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would we pay for the biggest cheap advertising windfall that these large corporations have ever had?
How much does it cost Nike to run a 30 second ad on TV to a few million people? And how much does it cost them to maintain a permanent website available to the wired public of the entire world?
How much more information can interested customers get from their exposure to the products on the Net than from a short flashy TV commercial?
How many more impulsive sales are generated by customers who can purchase the cool thing they just saw with a few mouse clicks instead of jumping off the couch in the middle of the Super Bowl to go purchase that pair of shoes they can't live without?
There is one solution for advertisers that think they are not making enough money on the net: Get Off! We did not start surfing the Net so we could purchase things.
We started because we could communicate. The convenience of the Net makes profits easier to come by, and still businesspeople whine.
The Net is an environment that businesses have to adapt to. If businesspeople want to make a profit, that is their problem. It is certainly not the users' (or they would say consumers') problem.
Obviously, you have forgotten that the FBI was recently repremanded for lying to a federal court?
Didn't you see A Fish Called Wanda? It's "unbe-fucking-lieveable."
Hear! Hear! At least somebody recognises this question as settled. Batman did Superman. He did it by stopping his heart and tricking Superman into thinking he was dead. Batman is wearing the title belt.
Do these reporters just pick subjects out of a hat?
GDict says:
Shouldn't the headline read:
as the incumbents are the people already in power?Sweet, they have a wall/floor mounted server like mine :)
I am disappointed. I thought he was going to sue. They obviously deserve it.
Answer: DRM
If your processor prevents it, it wont happen. Unless you happen to have a chip fabrication facility in your back yard...
That's great that the average price is not $18, but there are still CDs that sell for that price. The average price of the examples you gave is still $13.375. Considering that the market value of these things without a monopoly should be somewhere under $5, the RIAA is still abusing the laws.
DVDs should cost between $5 and $7. CDs should be less. They are stealing your money at the record store.
And now they want to add a further measure of defence or their monopoly by legislating alternate avenues for music distribution out of existence. As the posting said:
High barriers for entry mean they can steal from you with impunity.That is quite possibly the ugliest website I have ever seen.
Redhat said they were standardizing the Gnome and KDE desktops. I didn't know that meant changing Gnome into KDE. The Bluecurve icons are way too cartoony.
Are they honestly trying to compete with OSX's Bluepill (or whatever it's called) and Win2K (obviously, XP's interface is nearly as stupidly cartoony as Bluecurve)?
You know somebody had to ask this question...
It doesn't come with Linux?
Even with Linus' company's processory, it still has Bill's crappy anti-"piracy" message :(
Well, I guess that is the last time I buy ANYthing from Creative.
I guess "Creative" means "creative theft" of users' rights in collusion with Microtheft.
Yes, it does violate federal copyright law.
The question is: should it?
Copyright is the right to copies, not derivatives. However, rightly or wrongly, Congress gave the content industries rights over derivative works which means just about anything with any relationship to a copyrighted work is supposedly under their control.
This is strange because any altered version is certainly not a copy.
Copy
So, one would surmise that copyright would not apply to altered versions as they are not "imitations." However, Congress did not see it this way, so the MPAA will probably win.
First off, I totally agree with what you were trying to say. But I have a few of questions:
My first question is:
Was Thomas Jefferson not in France as ambassador during the writting of the Constitution? While I agree that those were his opinions and that his opinions were expressed in some way in the Constitution, I was under the impression that he did not actually participate in the writing of the Constitution.
My second question is:
You said: Jefferson believed that if there was no protection to intellectual property, people would not be encouraged to share knowledge with others.
Would Thomas Jefferson ever have used the term "intellectual property"? I really doubt this as he seemed to think ideas had a different nature than physical property. I thought "intellectual propery" was a concoction of one of those muddle-headed RIAA lawyers or one of their vile kin. You probably should not repeat such foul terms. They play into the hands of the vermin.
My third question is:
Is copyright really a balance? I have heard this argument many times, but when I read the Constitution, I just do not get that impression. Maybe I am crazy, but the impression that the Constitution gives me is that these are incentives to increase the distribution of these ideas. In other words, the intention of the Constitution is to make sure more people receive more information. By that reasoning, the intended recipeints of the information take precident over the creators of the information. In that light, are we not all, as citizens of the US, the owners of all information created in the US, or for that matter, the world? If we are the owners of the information, then is the RIAA not stealing from us by keeping the information from us?
Are you asking how this has affected us in our daily lives besides:
The truth is, I am not really afraid of terrorists. I would certainly have a better chance of getting struck by lightning or winning the lottery and probably a better chance of experiencing both in the same day. I am afraid of government, though.
The US government has been keeping records since the Social Security system was put in place. Everybody in the US has a primary key. IBM designed a similar system for the Nazis, and look what they did with it. What has IBM been designing for the US government since the 1930's? I am sure I do not want to know.
When I was a child, I was taught that only people under oppressive socialist/communist regimes had to worry about their government spying on them. Now it seems, everybody has to worry. The entire industrialized world is now spying on its citizens, and these governments are looking to broaden their surveillance and information sharing.
The government and the news media (the real terrorists) have drastically over estimated the threats posed by terrorists. As a result, the economy is in a slump. Jobs everywhere are scarce, and Linux has been directly affected by that ;)(ie. software projects canned by corporations, etc.)
So, are you asking besides all that how this has affected me? Hmmm... Well, I have felt threatened since that day. A close relative of mine was fingerprinted at work (which means that she is now a criminal so far as the government is concerned, see above). I have postponed (indefinitely?) travelling to the US. I suppose I could also say that I have experienced a true witch hunt, just like the ones they told me about in school.
While I can see O'Reilly and his Anonymous Coward friend's point of view, I think they are missing the big picture. This is not about mandating some kind of software. This is about mandating transparency in government.
We have lived long under the shadow of the cold war. It has been over for more than a decade, and still government secrets are the rule and not the exception. How can we, the citizens, make decisions about government when we do not even know what they are really doing?
Closed standards allow for spyware and weaknesses like viruses. Open standards deal with these things quickly. MS does not fix bugs until they are forced to through embarrassment. Dangerous security flaws in Open Source Software get fixed in as little as 24 hours from a public discovery. Do they want an insecure government? All significant virus attacks in the last 5 years were because MS's software.
Villanueva had another point that is applicable here: This is not a mandate for Linux or FreeBSD. This is a mandate for Open Source Software. If companies like MS want to sell to the government, they can go right ahead. The just have to include their source code with the software they supply. Is this impossible for MS to do? No. It comes down to a decision of whether they want to or not.
Even if they did allow open distribution of their source code, they would not have lost it. They still own the copyright on it and could still claim that anybody using it must pay them royalties. This is not even considered by MS to be an option. MS forgets that the government makes the rules... MS does not. Maybe the monopoly has gone to their heads.
The real reason they do not want to open their code is because they will not be able to embrace and extend and extinguish anything that way. This would mean that MS would have to compete with quality of software (something they know they cannot possibly do).
Finally, no software developed with public money should go to private hands. Why should your tax money go into developing something you have to pay for again? If public money is used, you already paid for it. Requiring Open Source Software just guarantees that the taxpayers get what they pay for.
Therefore, a mandate of this nature would not exclude proprietary software. It would exclude software from manufacturers that did not wish to play by the rules. It would be detrimental to interests wanted to sidestep government rules by keeping secrets or get the government to fund their R&D. It would also be a step toward restoring transparency in government and allow the taxpayers to get a return on their investment. Based on these few arguments (and there are many more), Open Source Software seems to be the only choice for a society that calls itself a democracy.
Can we put Bill Gates and other MS employees (including the customer service department) for creating two circumvention devices and discussing them?
The Personal License Migration Service (PLMS) and the Personal License Update Utility mentioned in this article both circumvent the copy protection written into WMP. Is MS violating the DMCA for customer service? Or to make up for their bugware?
So, I guess my question is: Can we sue MS for violating the DMCA with respect to their own products?
It would be nice to have MSs big budget against the DMCA :)
'a person must not gain access to, or enter, a computer system or part of a computer system without lawful authority to do so'.
Would not passing Berman's bill into law give one "lawful authority"? Or does "lawful authority" only apply to Australian law?
I do not know if anybody mentioned this, and I am not going to bother to check, but...
You do not need to put your cookbook under any licence. Recipes are not covered by copyright... period.
You should say "old medium." VCDs have been around for quite some time. The only reason they are new to you is because the MPAA prevented them from being used much in the US. At the same time, VCDs were very popular in Asia (where the piracy of organizations like the MPAA is less palatable) for most of the last decade.
However, I agree that this old medium has become cheaper and more advantageous for teaching than probably any other.
Man, I never realize that Jack Valenti was such a scary looking guy. His words always scared me, but I never realized such a devilish face could be attached to all that filth that comes out of his mouth. Amazing...
I suppose it just proves that corruption and greed really rot people from the inside, but eventually, it shows on the outside, as well...
Interesting... In a country that is supposed to value privacy and individualism above all else, tools to protect privacy are considered to be "weapons."
I suppose by that reasoning trial by jury could be considered a "conspiracy."
If you do not think that is a contradiction, you should really consider returning to university for a logic course.
It is interesting that Congress has approved a penalty usually reserved for murder for a crime that essentially amounts to expensive vandalism. If you deface a wall, you get a few hours of community service. If you deface a website, you get life. I would say that it is difficult to consider a society that can put people in prison for life for a crime that is more or less a misdemeanor a free society.
What about those Enron and Worldcom executives? When do they get life in prison or an even stiffer sentence? The crime they committed was premeditated stealing. That at least would be considered a felony in most cultures.
Moral:
If you are greedy and like to steal, Uncle Sam wants you to run a major corporation and write a book. If you are a teenager and have nothing better to do than deface a little property, better do it with spray paint, because if you use your computer, you can grow old in prison.
Nice message we are sending to young people these days. I suppose Gecko was right: "Greed... is good!"
While a system that would depend on "the fundamental constants of the universe" is a great idea, I do not think most people on the street care to do physics problems in their head.
Rather, they will be concerned with something that regulates their behavior as greatly as the rotation of the Earth. Not fixing the time to the cycle of a day would confuse most people. Imagine having to go to work at a different time every day of the year.
This second time system also has a problem. While it looks very interesting, it is base 16. The entire argument was proposed over finding a base 10 system of time. Adding a base 16 time system to the metric system would be a step toward returning the metric system to something like the English Imperial System. Such a system would only be good for computers since it works no nicely with binary numbers. But if that is to be done with time, why not recreate the entire metric system for computers and base it on 16 and not 10?
However, when arbitrarily choosing a time system to replace the current one, the choice should probably be something made for people. Base 10 works well for those of use without physics degrees or wetware interfaces, and it fits into the original scheme of the metric system.
As far as I know, the bai3 ke4 system is not being used at all anymore. You can thank Western arrogance and one of China's worst centuries for that...