If you use my house or car, there will be general wear and tear to that property. That's because there is only one of it and we are both using that same instance. Contrast this to copying a CD. Once you have your own copy, mine is totally unaffected when you play yours and has nothing to do with me. Also, why should you get my house while I'm on vacation. There are many others who would want it instead. My house is what we might call "scarce". Data on the other hand is easily copyable and therefore abundant.
I am astonished that people still fail to make this distinction. Intellectual property law attempts to take something that it easily copyable at almost no cost and crowbar it into an alternate model. It isn't working and no broken analogy is going to change that. Property and intellectual property are different mainly because, in the absence of any laws, scarcity of physical property would be governed by nature and scarcity of intellectual property would not exist.
Why the hell are such using simple password based authentication anyway?
We should be using personal pass-phrase protected keys and certificates to encrypt and sign our communications (in addition to the current certificate based authentication we use to verify their identity on secure web sites), and everything required to do this should be provided to us by the banks by snail mail.
In my (completely non-expert) opinion, I can't see how watermarking can ever work as a way of tracing duplication of content because it can be very easily worked around
Watermarking is designed to embed something into the audio that does not get noticed by the listener, but contains various information.
At the same time, most audio codecs are designed to save space and one way they do this is to drop things from the stream that would not be heard by the listener anyway.
So one would imagine that re-encoding, whilst perhaps sometimes unadvisable for various unrelated reasons, would do a fairly good job at removing or at least severely damaging a watermark.
Oh, hold on yes there is! The difference is I can't play it if I get it from the BBC, so I'm forced to "pirate" it myself even though I have already paid for it.
Artificially crippling the iPlayer service that paying customers receive, solely to prevent those that don't pay from getting as large a benefit from the service is rather like breaking your own leg so that you get better value from the NHS.
I find those kinds of notifications just as distracting as the phone ringing. Yes, I can ignore either, but I'd rather finish what I'm doing and check my emails at a convenient point.
Personally, I find email the best form of communication by far for work related issues. I can point people back to what I said earlier when they can't remember it, I don't get interrupted as readily, and I can refer back to what others have said and remind them of it later.
I remember having literally hundreds of tapes around that time, and back then I had to save up for a pack of 10 blanks so they weren't cheap by my standards. My music collection now fits compressed onto 3 DVDs.
Fast forward a few years and more music than you could listen to in a life time will fit on some cheap blank media.
So perhaps I shouldn't have said "all the music anyone would want" since that is subjective.
If I don't buy a lottery ticket, I haven't lost anything. This is fine; I want no part in the system because I think it stinks.
With copyright, I am involved in the system whether I like it or not. My right to use and change data is restricted by government intervention in order to protect the profits of a small minority who rely on an otherwise broken business model.
It's all a pointless discussion anyway. Extrapolating from current trends, in 15 years time you'll be able to buy a disc for next to nothing containing all the music anyone would want for next to nothing. Kids will be trading them in the playground for a pack of crisps. It's just a shame it will probably take until then for the industry to adapt itself, because it will cause itself so much pain in the mean time. If only it would aggressively adapt now, things would be better for everyone.
Haven't you worked out yet that Bush invaded because he knew the weapons *weren't* there?
He had wanted a reason to invade for a long time and scaring the public with talk of weapons and vague connections with terrorism made it acceptable to them. Once he knew there were no weapons it was the perfect time to strike because the retaliation would be weak and a victory apparently easy.
Compared to me, his wealth has gone down in the last few years. Mine has pretty much trebled in that time and while still utterly insignificant compared to that of Bill Gates, he is nonetheless relatively less rich compared to me than he previously was.
Whether he remains relatively more or less rich compared to the average regular joe (whatever that is) remains unknown to me.
If everyone on earth had the value of their bank accounts doubled, would be all be twice as wealthy? No we wouldn't. The amount we have is only meaningful relative to the amount others have.
They've got plenty of purpose when you're young and virtually all of your friends use the sites along with you
I half agree, but what's the relevence of the age bit? I'm not as young as most facebook users (33) but many of my friends use it which is what makes it useful to me.
do you really think gangs would kill as many people if they had to replace their drive-bys with, I don't know, pitching throwing knives out the window at their targets, and gun battles were replaced with swordfights?
Gangs are not a good example because they use guns whether they are legal or not.
Of course most killings in the UK don't involve guns. They are too hard to get hold of and so people use other weapons. Surely you haven't jumped from those stats to somehow then believe that all those killings didn't happen with other weapons?
Reducing homicide by banning guns is like trying to cut traffic congestion by banning Volvos.
Where is your evidence that the encumbered parts are the parts that interface with the hardware? Have you seen the source?
Why do you think those parts cost the most to produce? Given the specs, I would imagine the parts very close to the hardware cost the least. Why do you think otherwise?
Also, why assume the negative? Why not release the unencumbered parts and see what happens? What is there to lose? If you are right then nothing is lost. If you are wrong we end up with some good open drivers.
Me for one. I've been needing a new laptop for a few months, but I've been specifically waiting to see what happens with the Dell & Linux situation before buying. As long as they actually get them on sale reasonably soon they have my business.
Incidentally, I am considered (rightly or wrongly) by many of my friends and family as the "expert" when asking advice on what computer hardware to buy. It would be stretching it to suggest all my friends and family would use linux because they won't, but I would be more likely to recommend Dell to them now just because I now like them more as a company since they are Linux friendlyy. So Dell will benefit from this decision in more ways than just getting direct business from Linux users.
Yeah! I'm pissed off too, because I can't watch these shows on my kettle in my kitchen! If you choose to run a minority OS, you can't honestly expect to have the level of support as the vast majority. That's clearly unreasonable.
I don't expect the same level of support, I just expect as least one way of getting it working without being forced to use a particular vendor. Forcing me to use a vendor is against the BBC charter.
The BBC sometimes can't justify spending shitloads of license payers' money on technology a tiny minority uses. The DRM is essential due to the protection required to stop people not paying their license fee and just downloading shows. They have to protect their revenue, and they have to protect those who do pay their licenses.
What? I don't think you understand how the system works. What you way there makes no sense. Besides, nobody is talking about spending shit loads of money. Not using DRM costs LESS money. They protect their revenue by ensuring their funding is renewed. They do that by ensuring they do what the charter says. For example, this is a small excerpt:
(1) The BBC exists to serve the public interest. (2) The BBC's main object is the promotion of its Public Purposes. (3) In addition, the BBC may maintain, establish or acquire subsidiaries through which commercial activities may be undertaken to any extent permitted by a Framework Agreement.
I don't see anything there that says is has to piss off its customers whilst pretending to prevent piracy.
BitTorrent isn't superior to offerings from TV networks, regardless of how you see it. Well, it is for you as your OS of choice isn't supported, so it's either BitTorrent or nothing, but the majority of PC users (Windows) find these services work juuust fine. Like Channel4's 4oD service. It's great.
High quality media that plays on anything and can be moved from one device to another easily by the user is clearly superior to media that only plays on one platform and cannot be copied. Please explain how more versatile media is not superior.
2) I have, on occasion decided to download instead of buying because it's the ONLY WAY to get content without DRM. You say "stealing" causes DRM, but I think it's the other way around. I would be perfectly prepared to pay for non-DRM'd content and I accuse anyone who disagrees with my of judging me by their own standards.
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If you use my house or car, there will be general wear and tear to that property. That's because there is only one of it and we are both using that same instance. Contrast this to copying a CD. Once you have your own copy, mine is totally unaffected when you play yours and has nothing to do with me. Also, why should you get my house while I'm on vacation. There are many others who would want it instead. My house is what we might call "scarce". Data on the other hand is easily copyable and therefore abundant.
I am astonished that people still fail to make this distinction. Intellectual property law attempts to take something that it easily copyable at almost no cost and crowbar it into an alternate model. It isn't working and no broken analogy is going to change that. Property and intellectual property are different mainly because, in the absence of any laws, scarcity of physical property would be governed by nature and scarcity of intellectual property would not exist.
Why the hell are such using simple password based authentication anyway?
We should be using personal pass-phrase protected keys and certificates to encrypt and sign our communications (in addition to the current certificate based authentication we use to verify their identity on secure web sites), and everything required to do this should be provided to us by the banks by snail mail.
--
Martin.
In my (completely non-expert) opinion, I can't see how watermarking can ever work as a way of tracing duplication of content because it can be very easily worked around
Watermarking is designed to embed something into the audio that does not get noticed by the listener, but contains various information.
At the same time, most audio codecs are designed to save space and one way they do this is to drop things from the stream that would not be heard by the listener anyway.
So one would imagine that re-encoding, whilst perhaps sometimes unadvisable for various unrelated reasons, would do a fairly good job at removing or at least severely damaging a watermark.
Any codec exports got a view on this?
There is no difference.
Oh, hold on yes there is! The difference is I can't play it if I get it from the BBC, so I'm forced to "pirate" it myself even though I have already paid for it.
Artificially crippling the iPlayer service that paying customers receive, solely to prevent those that don't pay from getting as large a benefit from the service is rather like breaking your own leg so that you get better value from the NHS.
People can already get the programs off the internet. Have you been asleep for the last 10 years?
DRM DOES NOT WORK.
FreeBSD and Windows are very different.
What are some examples of what they offer that Linux does not for your usage pattern?
I find those kinds of notifications just as distracting as the phone ringing. Yes, I can ignore either, but I'd rather finish what I'm doing and check my emails at a convenient point.
Personally, I find email the best form of communication by far for work related issues. I can point people back to what I said earlier when they can't remember it, I don't get interrupted as readily, and I can refer back to what others have said and remind them of it later.
If DRM is doing its job, then how come I see far more copied DVDs around than copied CDs even though DVD has DRM and CD does not?
Really?
I remember having literally hundreds of tapes around that time, and back then I had to save up for a pack of 10 blanks so they weren't cheap by my standards. My music collection now fits compressed onto 3 DVDs.
Fast forward a few years and more music than you could listen to in a life time will fit on some cheap blank media.
So perhaps I shouldn't have said "all the music anyone would want" since that is subjective.
If I don't buy a lottery ticket, I haven't lost anything. This is fine; I want no part in the system because I think it stinks.
With copyright, I am involved in the system whether I like it or not. My right to use and change data is restricted by government intervention in order to protect the profits of a small minority who rely on an otherwise broken business model.
It's all a pointless discussion anyway. Extrapolating from current trends, in 15 years time you'll be able to buy a disc for next to nothing containing all the music anyone would want for next to nothing. Kids will be trading them in the playground for a pack of crisps. It's just a shame it will probably take until then for the industry to adapt itself, because it will cause itself so much pain in the mean time. If only it would aggressively adapt now, things would be better for everyone.
What makes you think keeping order is Bush's goal? If the country is in order, it might turn against him. A chaotic country is an unthreatening one.
Haven't you worked out yet that Bush invaded because he knew the weapons *weren't* there?
He had wanted a reason to invade for a long time and scaring the public with talk of weapons and vague connections with terrorism made it acceptable to them. Once he knew there were no weapons it was the perfect time to strike because the retaliation would be weak and a victory apparently easy.
What might be more interesting is to dock 10,000k from the salaries of the security team everytime someone finds a serious exploit
Who the hell is going to work there with such an utterly idiotic policy?
Surely one aspect of this is that they should be looking to attract good people to the team. Threats of "fines" is hardly the way to do it.
Compared to me, his wealth has gone down in the last few years. Mine has pretty much trebled in that time and while still utterly insignificant compared to that of Bill Gates, he is nonetheless relatively less rich compared to me than he previously was.
Whether he remains relatively more or less rich compared to the average regular joe (whatever that is) remains unknown to me.
Huh?
Please define wealth.
If everyone on earth had the value of their bank accounts doubled, would be all be twice as wealthy? No we wouldn't. The amount we have is only meaningful relative to the amount others have.
They've got plenty of purpose when you're young and virtually all of your friends use the sites along with you
I half agree, but what's the relevence of the age bit? I'm not as young as most facebook users (33) but many of my friends use it which is what makes it useful to me.
do you really think gangs would kill as many people if they had to replace their drive-bys with, I don't know, pitching throwing knives out the window at their targets, and gun battles were replaced with swordfights?
Gangs are not a good example because they use guns whether they are legal or not.
Are you being serious?
Of course most killings in the UK don't involve guns. They are too hard to get hold of and so people use other weapons. Surely you haven't jumped from those stats to somehow then believe that all those killings didn't happen with other weapons?
Reducing homicide by banning guns is like trying to cut traffic congestion by banning Volvos.
Just a quick question because I don't have time to give you a lesson myself, but have you ever heard of "History"?
You should read about it some time. There are plenty of answers to your questions.
I assume you would be perfectly happy with me taking lots of photographs of your children when they're in public?
Where is your evidence that the encumbered parts are the parts that interface with the hardware? Have you seen the source?
Why do you think those parts cost the most to produce? Given the specs, I would imagine the parts very close to the hardware cost the least. Why do you think otherwise?
Also, why assume the negative? Why not release the unencumbered parts and see what happens? What is there to lose? If you are right then nothing is lost. If you are wrong we end up with some good open drivers.
They could leave those parts out to be rewritten by the community, just like Sun have done with parts of OpenJDK.
Me for one. I've been needing a new laptop for a few months, but I've been specifically waiting to see what happens with the Dell & Linux situation before buying. As long as they actually get them on sale reasonably soon they have my business.
Incidentally, I am considered (rightly or wrongly) by many of my friends and family as the "expert" when asking advice on what computer hardware to buy. It would be stretching it to suggest all my friends and family would use linux because they won't, but I would be more likely to recommend Dell to them now just because I now like them more as a company since they are Linux friendlyy. So Dell will benefit from this decision in more ways than just getting direct business from Linux users.
Yeah! I'm pissed off too, because I can't watch these shows on my kettle in my kitchen! If you choose to run a minority OS, you can't honestly expect to have the level of support as the vast majority. That's clearly unreasonable.
I don't expect the same level of support, I just expect as least one way of getting it working without being forced to use a particular vendor. Forcing me to use a vendor is against the BBC charter.
The BBC sometimes can't justify spending shitloads of license payers' money on technology a tiny minority uses. The DRM is essential due to the protection required to stop people not paying their license fee and just downloading shows. They have to protect their revenue, and they have to protect those who do pay their licenses.
What? I don't think you understand how the system works. What you way there makes no sense. Besides, nobody is talking about spending shit loads of money. Not using DRM costs LESS money. They protect their revenue by ensuring their funding is renewed. They do that by ensuring they do what the charter says. For example, this is a small excerpt:
(1) The BBC exists to serve the public interest.
(2) The BBC's main object is the promotion of its Public Purposes.
(3) In addition, the BBC may maintain, establish or acquire subsidiaries through
which commercial activities may be undertaken to any extent permitted by a
Framework Agreement.
I don't see anything there that says is has to piss off its customers whilst pretending to prevent piracy.
BitTorrent isn't superior to offerings from TV networks, regardless of how you see it. Well, it is for you as your OS of choice isn't supported, so it's either BitTorrent or nothing, but the majority of PC users (Windows) find these services work juuust fine. Like Channel4's 4oD service. It's great.
High quality media that plays on anything and can be moved from one device to another easily by the user is clearly superior to media that only plays on one platform and cannot be copied. Please explain how more versatile media is not superior.
1) copyright infringement is not theft.
2) I have, on occasion decided to download instead of buying because it's the ONLY WAY to get content without DRM. You say "stealing" causes DRM, but I think it's the other way around. I would be perfectly prepared to pay for non-DRM'd content and I accuse anyone who disagrees with my of judging me by their own standards.