A more efficient method would be to ship the store a big stack of blanks, and let them download and burn on demand for customers who want a physical copy and/or are unable to download it themselves.
How about worldwide release for a fair price... In cinemas that aren't overpriced and filthy... On optical discs that aren't encumbered with DRM schemes and can be played anywhere... For download in an open format which is also not encumbered by DRM...
Sure, some people will still pirate but many more won't... The pirates will no longer be offering a superior service, they will be considerably less convenient and only marginally cheaper.
Currently the movie industry treats its customers with utter contempt, subjecting them to drm schemes, region restrictions... Many people are strongly against supporting organisations who treat them this way.
You could also start paying actors a more realistic wage relative to the amount of work they do, quite often behind the scenes staff work for far longer and far harder to produce a movie and yet they get paid a pittance compared to the big name actors.
The world moves on, and things have to change in order to improve... Sure, the initial design could have been better and thus more flexible and easier to adapt to change, for instance the basic design of unix hasn't changed much and the basic unix design now powers huge numbers of different devices. But still, there are limits and always unforeseen new requirements.
MS have subjected their customers to this many times too, there are many situations where compatibility has been broken, or even worse situations where they have implemented very questionable hacks in order to try and maintain some level of compatibility...
Put simply, as the world changes you have to change with it, you can't just sit on your ass and hope that everyone else waits for you.
Amusing analogy you use, mice are very adaptable creatures so if you put the cheese in hard to reach places they will soon work out how to reach it.
Looks like they are still at the embrace stage since hyper-v is still a new and relatively small player in the market. The question is, do you think they would be doing anything at all to facilitate running anything other than windows if they dominated the market? More than likely they would actually go out of their way to make it difficult...
If MS succeed in dominating the virtualization market and eliminating vmware/xen/kvm, you can bet that's what will happen...
Well, if hyper-v is considerably harder to support than any of its many competitors then that's good reason not to use it... Why expend all that extra effort for something that brings so little extra to the table?
Also hyper-v is take 2 from ms, they previously had a product called "virtual server" which they pushed for a couple of years, and then dropped totally and then later told people to wait for hyper-v... I would be extremely wary about investing in a product from a company that has a history of dropping products completely, and after a period of having no virtualization offering coming out with an incompatible replacement.
If it was a ship, then its now within the 12 miles of sea claimed by the uk... The uk could therefore demand that it leaves uk waters, which it would clearly be unable to do. Refusing to leave the sovereign waters of a foreign nation when requested could be seen as a hostile act, and provoke a military response by the UK.
On the other hand, sealand was built and "founded" at the time territory extended only 3 miles out... Now most countries claim 12 miles of sea around their land... Sealand is about 7 miles out afaik, and the owners of sealand claimed 3 miles of surrounding sea at the time, which means there was 1 mile of international water between the uk and sealand. When the uk extended their claim to 12 miles, so did sealand... But i don't believe that extension can cover any territory that's already claimed by someone else.
Copyright terms should actually be shorter than they were originally... In those days, it could take years to get your work published and distributed, these days that's simply not the case.
Copyright should last a maximum of 5 years from the date of first publication. This is more than fair, gives you as much time as you need to develop the work (as its unpublished, its protected by law as a trade secret) and then 5 years in which to sell the work, again more than enough in the modern interconnected world.
I would also add some other stipulations... You must continue to make the work available for an equivalent price (adjusted for inflation) or less, if you don't want to sell something anymore then it goes to the public domain. You must not discriminate against who can buy your media. While i wouldn't advocate forcing someone to line up local distributors worldwide and provided translated versions for every country, you should not go out of your way to prevent sales to anyone. People in other countries should be free to purchase your original work and have it shipped internationally, or they can choose to wait for a local distributor. If the media is distributed digitally online then anyone should be equally able to access it regardless of where they are located or what device they use to access it. Similarly the price should be the same for everyone, with shipping (if applicable) charged at cost.
There is also no reason why, assuming demand still exists, you couldn't continue making a reasonable profit selling non copyrighted work. The cost of producing media is extremely cheap, you just won't be able to rip people off with excessive margins because you will have competitors able to offer lower prices. Some people will pay for the convenience, some out of laziness because they know you as the original supplier.
The idea of copyright lasting longer is insulting, the idea that people can sit on their backsides and receive money from work their parents did 70 years ago is ridiculous. If you want to be paid, do some work! The revenue should dry up when you stop working, and if you want a retirement plan take out a pension like everyone else.
BSD is closer to how things would be without copyright... GPL actually depends on copyright to prevent the abuse you describe in relation to BSD...
As for decompilation and deobfuscation, you would end up in a war between manufacturers making their systems harder to reverse engineer, and reverse engineers trying to open them up... This would result in systems becoming more complex and more unreliable, to the detriment of users.
You would end up with unscrupulous companies taking the non copyrighted code, modifying it to be incompatible, obfuscating it as much as possible, compiling it and then releasing the precompiled, obfuscated and incompatible binaries... They would then proceed to market heavily so that their version became the defacto standard (very few people would realise the trap they're falling into) and anyone using the freely available version is now at a significant disadvantage.
Why should a content publisher have the right to make content available in one country, but then take steps to block third parties from exporting that content to another country (eg region restrictions etc)?
You don't see that happen with physical goods, there's nothing to stop me purchasing a laptop in china and either bringing it with me or having it shipped, and for digital data that can and should be even easier.
I can fully understand a manufacturer who feels that there is insufficient demand for their product in another country that its not worth expending the time and effort to export and market the product there for a tiny number of extra sales. They are saving themselves wasted effort, and it is still possible for anyone who is still interested to import the goods themselves on a small scale.
On the other hand, when a manufacturer actually goes out of they way to prevent third party export of their product to another country that is just ridiculous and highly insulting. They are actually expending significant resources to DECREASE SALES and to SCREW THOSE IN COUNTRIES THEY DONT LIKE... This all strikes me as extremely discriminatory.
It's one thing to not bother, it's quite another to go out of your way to inconvenience someone else.
They always have the option to move to a country where the works are published lawfully.
Migration is actually very difficult, it can be extremely difficult to acquire the necessary permits to live in another country. That's why there are so many illegal immigrants, would you advocate illegally entering another country so you can purchase movies instead of pirating them in your own country?
They always have the option to buy the appropriate brand of computer or game console and watch it on that. And since when has a PC been able to tell whether its VGA, DVI, or HDMI output is headed to a "TV" as opposed to a "computer monitor"?
And why should they? I'm not forced to buy a particular brand of TV to watch broadcast shows, i'm not forced to buy a particular brand of car to drive on public roads.
They always have the option to buy tickets to watch the game in person.
Not at all, it is often extremely difficult to get tickets for major sporting events... A large number of the tickets are reserved for corporate sponsors etc... You have to buy tickets well in advance to get a good seat or to even get a seat at all, and its often exceptionally expensive. Also the event may not be held locally to you, if its held in another country you have to content with flights, hotels, immigration papers etc.. The cost and inconvenience becomes astronomical enough to put a lot of people off.
Also consider events like the olympics, ordering tickets is being done on a lottery system so even people who want to see a specific event and are willing/able to pay for it may not be able to get tickets. When tickets for major events initially go on sale its often impossible to access their website or phone lines due to heavy demand too.
The option to see the game in person is only ever available to a limited number, equal to the capacity of the stadium... If more than that many people want to see the event live then some of them simply don't have that option at all.
What is reasonable to you is not always reasonable to the work's author.
Prices are usually set by publishers rather than the actual author, who will see a tiny pittance of the price... This industry is corrupted by extreme greed and arrogance... Why should someone who spends 6 months being filmed in a movie receive millions on an ongoing basis, while other people (including people like camera operators who were there during the same filming) only receive an average hourly wage for the time they actually spent working?
What ever happened to an honest day's work for an honest day's pay?
Local distributors (or lack thereof) should not matter... Similarly, lack of translation doesn't matter to everyone...
"translation" is often cited as a reason why american movies take so long to be shown in europe, and yet the UK requires no translation whatsoever and many people in the rest of europe are perfectly capable of understanding english, and when given the choice between "watch it now in english, watch it in 6 months time in your local language" will choose the english version.
Local distributors should only be a convenience, It's not exactly hard to purchase something online these days, shipping for something as small as a dvd is not going to break the bank and delivery of a file digitally online make physical location irrelevant... The problem is that the content industry explicitly tries to prevent this kind of thing through the use of region restrictions.
The best service is currently available from pirates...
You have media available at the same time worldwide. No artificial restrictions (regions, drm etc), you can do what you like with the media. You have the choice to view the untranslated version now, or wait for a translated one. There are fan made subtitles available, often better than the official translations.
The difference is that the blackberry model requires you to run your own BES server, which in turn must be linked to one of a small number of supported proprietary groupware setups... This requires a lot of expensive software, an expensive server plus power and hosting etc, and then you need sufficient knowledge to configure and maintain it, or to pay someone else to do so (usually quite poorly)... All in all a rather expensive proposition, and therefore not even in consideration for the average end user.
iCloud on the other hand is available to all iPhone users at an affordable cost.
Some providers don't provide equivalent service under any other terms...
Prepaid plans don't require a contract, but are likely to be more expensive... Contracts are often the same price and length wether you take them with a subsidised phone or not (ie if you don't take a phone you are being ripped off badly).
Generally the shorter the contract term, the worse deal you get, its quite common that a 24 month contract including a handset will cost less per month than a 1 month contract without a handset while providing equivalent voice/sms/data service. It seems mobile operators want to make you pay for the ability to change whenever you like.
Exactly, stupider... You mitigate one problem (that of repeated password changes) and create some new ones instead of fixing the problem properly by implementing an algorithm which remembers passwords by age rather than a fixed number of them.
You have lots of vendors selling firewalls, who will insist that is all thats needed... Lots of non technical (and even more pseudo-technical types) believe this, and its become a corporate standard to build networks like this.
After a while, you have so much cruft that it's not viable (in terms of time and cost) to secure the network properly... There are simply too many machines to reconfigure, and too many services you depend on which are fundamentally insecure and would need to be replaced.
Keeping records of the last 12 passwords is flawed, you should keep record of infinite passwords for a predetermined period of time otherwise the user can simply change their password repeatedly to expire the old ones from the cache.
Also passwords need to be sufficiently different from previous passwords, or you will get ridiculous situations where Password1 becomes Password2, and then Password3 etc...
Of course, if a password was strong in the first place, stored using a strong hashing algorithm and isn't suspected to have been leaked (eg by a keylogger) then it's often beneficial NOT to change it... People are not good at remembering passwords, especially complex ones, so if you make them change regularly this always results in... Easily remembered passwords. Passwords being written down. Passwords being forgotten, generating helpdesk calls or requiring a (probably very insecure) reset procedure. Passwords reused in other places (therefore only as secure as the weakest of those places).
Depends wether MS are willing to go all in on phones and tablets, or intentionally try to hold them back to prevent them eating into PC market share, which is what they generally seem to do.
And even worse is that they provide a locked handset, if they were to provide an unlocked handset you could take it anyway, then sell it or give it to someone else. It's stupid to not take a phone given that the contract is the same price regardless.
There are two reasons for the lack of exploits in windows phone 7...
First there was such an exploit, and MS decided to work with the jailbreakers and they now offer an official, albeit crippled, jailbreak option. Second their marketshare is so tiny that very few people are even interested in writing a jailbreak.
Incidentally, neither WebOS nor Meego (or whatever its called this week) have jailbreak exploits available, because both platforms provide simple official ways of getting root. That doesn't mean there aren't vulnerabilities to be found, it just means there is very little incentive for people to find them.
Slashdot Mirror
Only DRM is not encryption, it is really just obfuscation because in order to view the content at all you must also have the decryption key...
Cracking the encryption is irrelevant, all you need to do is work out the algorithm in use and where the key is hidden.
A more efficient method would be to ship the store a big stack of blanks, and let them download and burn on demand for customers who want a physical copy and/or are unable to download it themselves.
How about worldwide release for a fair price...
In cinemas that aren't overpriced and filthy...
On optical discs that aren't encumbered with DRM schemes and can be played anywhere...
For download in an open format which is also not encumbered by DRM...
Sure, some people will still pirate but many more won't... The pirates will no longer be offering a superior service, they will be considerably less convenient and only marginally cheaper.
Currently the movie industry treats its customers with utter contempt, subjecting them to drm schemes, region restrictions... Many people are strongly against supporting organisations who treat them this way.
You could also start paying actors a more realistic wage relative to the amount of work they do, quite often behind the scenes staff work for far longer and far harder to produce a movie and yet they get paid a pittance compared to the big name actors.
The world moves on, and things have to change in order to improve...
Sure, the initial design could have been better and thus more flexible and easier to adapt to change, for instance the basic design of unix hasn't changed much and the basic unix design now powers huge numbers of different devices. But still, there are limits and always unforeseen new requirements.
MS have subjected their customers to this many times too, there are many situations where compatibility has been broken, or even worse situations where they have implemented very questionable hacks in order to try and maintain some level of compatibility...
Put simply, as the world changes you have to change with it, you can't just sit on your ass and hope that everyone else waits for you.
Amusing analogy you use, mice are very adaptable creatures so if you put the cheese in hard to reach places they will soon work out how to reach it.
Looks like they are still at the embrace stage since hyper-v is still a new and relatively small player in the market.
The question is, do you think they would be doing anything at all to facilitate running anything other than windows if they dominated the market? More than likely they would actually go out of their way to make it difficult...
If MS succeed in dominating the virtualization market and eliminating vmware/xen/kvm, you can bet that's what will happen...
Well, if hyper-v is considerably harder to support than any of its many competitors then that's good reason not to use it... Why expend all that extra effort for something that brings so little extra to the table?
Also hyper-v is take 2 from ms, they previously had a product called "virtual server" which they pushed for a couple of years, and then dropped totally and then later told people to wait for hyper-v... I would be extremely wary about investing in a product from a company that has a history of dropping products completely, and after a period of having no virtualization offering coming out with an incompatible replacement.
If it was a ship, then its now within the 12 miles of sea claimed by the uk...
The uk could therefore demand that it leaves uk waters, which it would clearly be unable to do. Refusing to leave the sovereign waters of a foreign nation when requested could be seen as a hostile act, and provoke a military response by the UK.
On the other hand, sealand was built and "founded" at the time territory extended only 3 miles out...
Now most countries claim 12 miles of sea around their land...
Sealand is about 7 miles out afaik, and the owners of sealand claimed 3 miles of surrounding sea at the time, which means there was 1 mile of international water between the uk and sealand. When the uk extended their claim to 12 miles, so did sealand... But i don't believe that extension can cover any territory that's already claimed by someone else.
And if they do have any internet connectivity, it will be connected to the UK and thus subject to being shut off at the whim of the UK authorities.
Copyright terms should actually be shorter than they were originally...
In those days, it could take years to get your work published and distributed, these days that's simply not the case.
Copyright should last a maximum of 5 years from the date of first publication. This is more than fair, gives you as much time as you need to develop the work (as its unpublished, its protected by law as a trade secret) and then 5 years in which to sell the work, again more than enough in the modern interconnected world.
I would also add some other stipulations...
You must continue to make the work available for an equivalent price (adjusted for inflation) or less, if you don't want to sell something anymore then it goes to the public domain.
You must not discriminate against who can buy your media. While i wouldn't advocate forcing someone to line up local distributors worldwide and provided translated versions for every country, you should not go out of your way to prevent sales to anyone. People in other countries should be free to purchase your original work and have it shipped internationally, or they can choose to wait for a local distributor. If the media is distributed digitally online then anyone should be equally able to access it regardless of where they are located or what device they use to access it.
Similarly the price should be the same for everyone, with shipping (if applicable) charged at cost.
There is also no reason why, assuming demand still exists, you couldn't continue making a reasonable profit selling non copyrighted work. The cost of producing media is extremely cheap, you just won't be able to rip people off with excessive margins because you will have competitors able to offer lower prices. Some people will pay for the convenience, some out of laziness because they know you as the original supplier.
The idea of copyright lasting longer is insulting, the idea that people can sit on their backsides and receive money from work their parents did 70 years ago is ridiculous. If you want to be paid, do some work! The revenue should dry up when you stop working, and if you want a retirement plan take out a pension like everyone else.
BSD is closer to how things would be without copyright...
GPL actually depends on copyright to prevent the abuse you describe in relation to BSD...
As for decompilation and deobfuscation, you would end up in a war between manufacturers making their systems harder to reverse engineer, and reverse engineers trying to open them up... This would result in systems becoming more complex and more unreliable, to the detriment of users.
You would end up with unscrupulous companies taking the non copyrighted code, modifying it to be incompatible, obfuscating it as much as possible, compiling it and then releasing the precompiled, obfuscated and incompatible binaries... They would then proceed to market heavily so that their version became the defacto standard (very few people would realise the trap they're falling into) and anyone using the freely available version is now at a significant disadvantage.
Why should a content publisher have the right to make content available in one country, but then take steps to block third parties from exporting that content to another country (eg region restrictions etc)?
You don't see that happen with physical goods, there's nothing to stop me purchasing a laptop in china and either bringing it with me or having it shipped, and for digital data that can and should be even easier.
I can fully understand a manufacturer who feels that there is insufficient demand for their product in another country that its not worth expending the time and effort to export and market the product there for a tiny number of extra sales. They are saving themselves wasted effort, and it is still possible for anyone who is still interested to import the goods themselves on a small scale.
On the other hand, when a manufacturer actually goes out of they way to prevent third party export of their product to another country that is just ridiculous and highly insulting. They are actually expending significant resources to DECREASE SALES and to SCREW THOSE IN COUNTRIES THEY DONT LIKE... This all strikes me as extremely discriminatory.
It's one thing to not bother, it's quite another to go out of your way to inconvenience someone else.
They always have the option to move to a country where the works are published lawfully.
Migration is actually very difficult, it can be extremely difficult to acquire the necessary permits to live in another country. That's why there are so many illegal immigrants, would you advocate illegally entering another country so you can purchase movies instead of pirating them in your own country?
They always have the option to buy the appropriate brand of computer or game console and watch it on that. And since when has a PC been able to tell whether its VGA, DVI, or HDMI output is headed to a "TV" as opposed to a "computer monitor"?
And why should they? I'm not forced to buy a particular brand of TV to watch broadcast shows, i'm not forced to buy a particular brand of car to drive on public roads.
They always have the option to buy tickets to watch the game in person.
Not at all, it is often extremely difficult to get tickets for major sporting events... A large number of the tickets are reserved for corporate sponsors etc... You have to buy tickets well in advance to get a good seat or to even get a seat at all, and its often exceptionally expensive. Also the event may not be held locally to you, if its held in another country you have to content with flights, hotels, immigration papers etc.. The cost and inconvenience becomes astronomical enough to put a lot of people off.
Also consider events like the olympics, ordering tickets is being done on a lottery system so even people who want to see a specific event and are willing/able to pay for it may not be able to get tickets.
When tickets for major events initially go on sale its often impossible to access their website or phone lines due to heavy demand too.
The option to see the game in person is only ever available to a limited number, equal to the capacity of the stadium... If more than that many people want to see the event live then some of them simply don't have that option at all.
What is reasonable to you is not always reasonable to the work's author.
Prices are usually set by publishers rather than the actual author, who will see a tiny pittance of the price...
This industry is corrupted by extreme greed and arrogance... Why should someone who spends 6 months being filmed in a movie receive millions on an ongoing basis, while other people (including people like camera operators who were there during the same filming) only receive an average hourly wage for the time they actually spent working?
What ever happened to an honest day's work for an honest day's pay?
Local distributors (or lack thereof) should not matter...
Similarly, lack of translation doesn't matter to everyone...
"translation" is often cited as a reason why american movies take so long to be shown in europe, and yet the UK requires no translation whatsoever and many people in the rest of europe are perfectly capable of understanding english, and when given the choice between "watch it now in english, watch it in 6 months time in your local language" will choose the english version.
Local distributors should only be a convenience, It's not exactly hard to purchase something online these days, shipping for something as small as a dvd is not going to break the bank and delivery of a file digitally online make physical location irrelevant... The problem is that the content industry explicitly tries to prevent this kind of thing through the use of region restrictions.
The best service is currently available from pirates...
You have media available at the same time worldwide.
No artificial restrictions (regions, drm etc), you can do what you like with the media.
You have the choice to view the untranslated version now, or wait for a translated one.
There are fan made subtitles available, often better than the official translations.
The difference is that the blackberry model requires you to run your own BES server, which in turn must be linked to one of a small number of supported proprietary groupware setups... This requires a lot of expensive software, an expensive server plus power and hosting etc, and then you need sufficient knowledge to configure and maintain it, or to pay someone else to do so (usually quite poorly)...
All in all a rather expensive proposition, and therefore not even in consideration for the average end user.
iCloud on the other hand is available to all iPhone users at an affordable cost.
Some providers don't provide equivalent service under any other terms...
Prepaid plans don't require a contract, but are likely to be more expensive...
Contracts are often the same price and length wether you take them with a subsidised phone or not (ie if you don't take a phone you are being ripped off badly).
Generally the shorter the contract term, the worse deal you get, its quite common that a 24 month contract including a handset will cost less per month than a 1 month contract without a handset while providing equivalent voice/sms/data service.
It seems mobile operators want to make you pay for the ability to change whenever you like.
Exactly, stupider... You mitigate one problem (that of repeated password changes) and create some new ones instead of fixing the problem properly by implementing an algorithm which remembers passwords by age rather than a fixed number of them.
You have lots of vendors selling firewalls, who will insist that is all thats needed...
Lots of non technical (and even more pseudo-technical types) believe this, and its become a corporate standard to build networks like this.
After a while, you have so much cruft that it's not viable (in terms of time and cost) to secure the network properly... There are simply too many machines to reconfigure, and too many services you depend on which are fundamentally insecure and would need to be replaced.
Keeping records of the last 12 passwords is flawed, you should keep record of infinite passwords for a predetermined period of time otherwise the user can simply change their password repeatedly to expire the old ones from the cache.
Also passwords need to be sufficiently different from previous passwords, or you will get ridiculous situations where Password1 becomes Password2, and then Password3 etc...
Of course, if a password was strong in the first place, stored using a strong hashing algorithm and isn't suspected to have been leaked (eg by a keylogger) then it's often beneficial NOT to change it...
People are not good at remembering passwords, especially complex ones, so if you make them change regularly this always results in...
Easily remembered passwords.
Passwords being written down.
Passwords being forgotten, generating helpdesk calls or requiring a (probably very insecure) reset procedure.
Passwords reused in other places (therefore only as secure as the weakest of those places).
Depends wether MS are willing to go all in on phones and tablets, or intentionally try to hold them back to prevent them eating into PC market share, which is what they generally seem to do.
I don't expect assistance, but i also don't expect them to go out of their way to hinder me either and that is the key difference.
And even worse is that they provide a locked handset, if they were to provide an unlocked handset you could take it anyway, then sell it or give it to someone else. It's stupid to not take a phone given that the contract is the same price regardless.
There are two reasons for the lack of exploits in windows phone 7...
First there was such an exploit, and MS decided to work with the jailbreakers and they now offer an official, albeit crippled, jailbreak option.
Second their marketshare is so tiny that very few people are even interested in writing a jailbreak.
Incidentally, neither WebOS nor Meego (or whatever its called this week) have jailbreak exploits available, because both platforms provide simple official ways of getting root. That doesn't mean there aren't vulnerabilities to be found, it just means there is very little incentive for people to find them.
It's possible to carry audio over DVI too... I have several devices which do this.