What I would like instead is to have every voter to get a receipt when they vote, that uniquely identifies their precinct and vote, and shows a unique number for that vote/voter combo. Something like:
Any verifiable paper receipt would allow your employer, landlord, or union steward to collect receipts, and then punish workers or tenants accordingly. You can't escape by encrypting the content, either, because the landlord will compel you to reveal the key.
You could require the voter to memorize her receipt number before leaving the polling booth, but if the number can be traced back to an individual voter by any means (including, e.g., by bribing a polling official), then the secrecy of your ballot can and will be compromised. It wouldn't have taken much for Katherine Harris to have learned who was naughty and nice, for example, and then to decide who to purge from the voter rolls.
This is a case where the only system that works is also the one that happens to be simplest: That the polling machine produces an anonymous, unambiguous paper ballot, which can be easily read by the voter, the vote-counting machine (which, ideally, should come from a different supplier than the polling machine), and by the election official doing a hand count. Anything else is vulnerable to abuse, as we've seen.
Keep in mind that the original Toy Story came out at about the same time as James and the Giant Peach, and not long after Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Disney was expecting a modest profit from its partnership with Pixar, and thought they'd be splitting maybe $20-30 million in profits per film -- adequate compensation for allowing Pixar to borrow the Mouse's distribution and marketing chain, but small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.
The idea that Pixar would crank out five consecutive blockbusters was simply not on the table in 1995. Pixar's output up to that date consisted of a couple of award-winning animated shorts; suggesting that Pixar would outshine Disney Animation by 2000 (with Disney releasing The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Lion King in the five years prior) would have gotten you laughed out of the studio.
But then Jeff Katzenberg decided he'd had enough of Michael Eisner, and went off to Dreamworks to make Antz (and Shrek). Lion King turned out to be the high-water mark for Disney's 2D animation unit; their best effort since was Tarzan, which grossed $435 million worldwide -- a little more than half of Finding Nemo's leviathan take, which is currently at $844 million.
So, Pixar has ended up paying Disney about 10-20 times what Disney's contribution to the process is worth. Eisner was probably using these lucrative terms as the starting point in his negotiations, while Steve Jobs (who already has Sony and Warner on speed-dial) was starting from the idea that Pixar could snap its fingers and have five studios vying for the honor.
Eisner is unquestionably an idiot for failing to recognize this, because he desperately needs Pixar to feed quality product into the gaping maw of his marketing, distribution and merchandising empire -- he's not going to make as healthy of a living selling Brother Bear plush toys and video sequels, that's for sure. Pixar just needs a distributor, though, and they're big enough now that they can get one for the asking.
Second, Apple gets 35% off the top of each sale. The rest goes to the RIAA, which it diffuses through its normal chain of profit sucking. This has the net effect of the artists themselves getting 35% less (and possibly worse than that, if portions of the standard breakdown include a flat fee per sale rather than a percentage of the gross).
That assumption only holds water if iTMS sales are cannibalizing music store sales -- and since the fossilized bones of the music store are already on display in museums, we can safely assume that's not the case. Apple's share of $0.99 is only squeezing the artist in dimensions where the artist receives more than 100% of $0 from Kazaa.
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
The problem is that GPL enforcement is in the hands of several thousand shallow-pocketed Linux developers, each of whom now has an airtight case against SCO -- but even going through the motions of a lawsuit would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is why only deep-pocketed leviathans like IBM and Red Hat are actually picking up the phone and calling their lawyers.
The other problem is that SCO is a hollow shell, animated only by the lawsuit and an infusion of money from GPL-hostile interests. As soon as SCO's claims have their nanosecond in court (and are laughed out of the courtroom), SCO will declare bankruptcy and disappear in a puff of smoke. Litigants can't collect damages from a bankrupt company, and SCO has no other revenue.
The real question is whether any of the major SCO players (McBride et al.) will face criminal charges for perpetrating a massive stock fraud upon their investors -- and the answer, unfortunately, is "probably not." To put them in jail, a prosecutor would have to prove they knew they were lying -- and, unless they're complete idiots, they aren't going to leave any such proof for the SEC to find. SCO will follow Enron and Worldcom into the valley of frauds, but the company's board and executives, the ones who are cashing out their shares in "pre-planned transactions" (ahem), will laugh their way to the bank. It's the perfect crime.
The most recent branch to be sold off was to Accenture, a Bahamas based (i.e. tax shelter) spin off of Enron.
Unless there's more than one company named Accenture, I think you're merging reports here: Accenture (nee Andersen Consulting) was a spin-off of Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that cooked Enron's books. They had no connection to the scandal that downed their former parent, except to breathe a sigh of relief that they had changed their name a few months before.
No, the ultimate slashdotting would be several hundred lawsuits filed against SCO, by the copyright holders of Linux (which is to say, everyone who has ever contributed code), each seeking an injunction against SCO and punitive monetary damages.
Maybe this is just my gut reaction, but maybe colleges should be spending their time working on EDUCATION and not SELLING MUSIC. Leave that to the music companies, stores, etc.
Any university with a decent computer network is being forced to think about these issues -- forced by an avalanche of RIAA subpoenas, and by bandwidth-hogging traffic volumes, that are interfering with the university's primary mission.
The universities are looking at music distribution because it may be the path of least resistance, not because they're looking to start a lucrative side business to distract them from education.
God forbid we should worry about the important things, like who is going to pay for our parent's medical care, our environment, our rights as individual citizens, our massively corrupt politicians, overpopulation, corporate greed...
I think we already know who is paying for our corrupt politicians.
Although such an extravagant system is hardly required if ISPs will just...not keep logs of who has which IPs at what times. That right there is really all that's necessary in order to put a stop to the threat of the RIAA.
It would also make it difficult for the ISP to find out which user(s) are spamming, defacing other websites, or launching denial-of-service attacks. Anonymity may be a desirable goal for the user, but it's probably not so good from an ISP's point of view.
WiFi, unless it spreads everywhere really quick will be isolated to the big cities and forgotten by the rest of the country. Cellular is the way to go because of the availibility. Sure 802.11x has fast ass speeds, but I don't live anywhere close to a major city. So it's my tiny bit of bandwidth and go everywhere around here. Works for me, man.
[Suddenly the screen goes wavy and we flash back to a high-level meeting in 1993, where an MBA-type is presenting the business case for Iridium to Motorola's Board of Directors.]
Presenter: Cellular, unless it spreads everywhere really quick, will be isolated to the big cities and forgotten by the rest of the country. Satellite is the way to go because of the availibility. Sure, cellular has coverage in the major cities, but our business-case models predict it will never be profitable elsewhere.
Board: Um, okay. Pick up your sack of money on the way out.
This is no different from what he's claiming everyone else is. He IS a commercial site (He isn't someone doing their family web site). He is a "commercial" entity (in a broad sense). He's using it to promote his "business" (politics).
I'm cynical about politics, but I'm not that cynical. Senator Hatch's web site is not commercial in any meaningful sense; he is not engaging in commerce via his site. If he had an online store with Orrin Hatch baseball caps and bumper stickers, it'd be another story -- but he doesn't. As a Senator, Hatch has a legitimate duty to be accessible to his constituents, and his web site serves that non-commercial purpose.
I would simply notify the creator of the JS stuff and have them get charges brought up on violating their IP
You can't "bring someone up on charges" merely for violating copyright: Copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a crime. The DMCA blurs this distinction, by making it a crime to circumvent copyright protection, but nonetheless you can't arrest the gentleman from Utah [sic] for infringing someone's copyright.
A big part of the RIAA's tactics in this debate is to make you think file sharing is a crime. They want to embed in your consciousness that "listening to music that someone else purchased" is morally equivalent to "boarding a ship and stealing the cargo." Playing fast and loose with language is part of that effort: If you subconsciously accept that intangible ideas are "property" which can be "stolen," and that "pirates" are "stealing intellectual property" when they download copyrighted materials, then the battle is already half lost.
I'm more than happy to see a hypocrite get his comeuppance -- if Sen. Hatch thinks copyright infringement should be punished with vigilante justice, then I'll warm up the tar and feathers -- but the original poster is right to point out that "pirate" is unjustified hyperbole, and that using pirate analogies to discuss these issues only makes it harder to defend our rights.
However, any proposal to force companies to adopt standards etc., is simple fascism.
<VOICE="Inigo Montoya">
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
</VOICE>
By your logic, mandating that Air New Zealand will follow a maintenance schedule (or that it can't be purchased outright by, say, Singapore) puts the government in league with Mussolini. The gubmint has no business addressing public concerns with fascist building codes, safety regulations, pollution limits, or product standards -- it should just stop interfering and let the private sector sort those issues out.
Or, perhaps, there are other points on the scale between anarchy and fascism? Perhaps the government has a compelling interest in preventing monopolies from forming, and in mandating open standards (NOT "open source," which is a different animal) to promote a fair and healthy capitalist marketplace?
The beginning of the decline probably was some time in the 1980's when the US started going into debt more and more [...]
If you're asserting that the 1980s marked the beginning of a decline in American dominance of world affairs, then I'm afraid I have to ask what you're smoking. You may have some rational concerns about fiscal policy lurking in here (and we'd probably agree that Bush's tax cuts are less than useful in that regard), but your opening premise boggles the mind: What exactly would you consider an increase in American dominance of world affairs, if you view the era from 1980 to the present as a decline?
That's impossible: there simply isn't enough foreign investment (or oil, for that matter) to run other large nations like the US.
That logic is circular: If the rest of the world were producing at U.S. levels of efficiency, there would be enough foreign capital floating through the system to terraform Mars, much less build four or five competing GPS networks. Foreign investment is not resource-limited in the manner you imply, which suggests the world outside America has reached its peak efficiency and can generate no more wealth to invest with. There is an absolute abundance of untapped human potential in the world's economy, and the not-so-dark secret of America's rise to power is that it's been tapping that potential better than any other nation on earth.
Don't believe me? Take the poorest, hungriest citizen of any other nation, teleport them to America, and see if they're richer or poorer after five years. Nine times out of ten the hapless person you pluck from poverty will be vastly better off, and the person hasn't changed one iota. It's the American package of personal freedoms and political rights which enables that person to earn a standard of living far higher than what they could achieve in China or Peru or Somalia, and conversely the ability of other nations to turn their resources into wealth is a function of how close they are to the American package.
As for your parenthetical comment about oil, the problem is less the lack of oil resources and more that the supply expands and contracts unexpectedly, often in response to political events (e.g., a revolution in Saudi Arabia would whipsaw the price of oil right quick). If the world were full of stable democracies, you'd worry about oil about as often as you worry about tungsten or tuna; it wouldn't be The One Limited Resource whose lack prevents world prosperity. (If anything, the tuna is a higher candidate on that score -- overfishing will become a problem long before we drain the planet of oil.)
In a sense you're right about one thing: China and India and Europe should be more productive than America. They have more resources and higher populations -- and if, say, China ever got its act together and bedded down basic concepts like the rule of law, property rights, and freedom of speech, it could become a real challenger to American dominance. And, personally, I think America would be tickled pink if that happened. I think we'd study their example and push ourselves harder, as we did with Japan in the 1980s -- but I don't think the U.S. will send the Navy to deal with economic threats, in the absence of a military threat that would affect our better judgement. (You can cite America's history of intervention in Central America as a counter-example, if you like, but I think that age has long since passed.)
At most I think the EU might give America an economic run for its money for a decade or two, after which the Americans will study how the Europeans did it, adapt, and beat them at their own game. Militarily the U.S. has moved beyond dominance and is heading into "why bother trying?" territory: Even if China or the EU started building an army to rival America's, American tanks will have photon torpedoes by the time they're ready to ro
Given that the US no longer has a "no first use" policy,
Um, the U.S. never had a "no first use" policy. It had an explicit "you invade West Germany and we'll make Moscow glow in the dark" policy, which had the desired effect vis-a-vis Soviet tanks and western Europe. Gorbachev tried to score propaganda points in the early 80s by pledging the Soviets would not be the first to use nuclear weapons, to which the Reagan administration more or less nodded and said "we agree, we don't think you'll be first either."
Bush is crass enough to remind everyone that America contemplates first-use of nuclear weapons, and apparently dippy enough to propose trotting out the nukes to crack open underground bunkers -- but the policy didn't originate with him.
But, objectively, the US is a mid-size nation with an economy that is in deep trouble ($3 trillion in foreign debt and growing rapidly), that depends on skilled immigration for its competitiveness, and that faces enormous inequalities and social problems.
Um, what? The United States alone had a GDP of $10 trillion in 2001, compared to $7.8 trillion for the entire EU -- and an apples-to-apples comparison would measure the EU against NAFTA. The EU is approaching self-imposed limits on its geographic expansion, has a birth rate significantly below the replacement rate, and has economic, cultural, and legal fracture lines that the U.S. eliminated centuries ago.
China and India may have pockets of technological expertise, but they are not "caught up" in any meaningful sense -- they are not inventing radical new technologies or approaching first-world levels of infrastructure, health care or political stability. It will be a long, long time, measured in centuries, before either country equals the U.S. in an economic, scientific or military sense, even if the U.S. stops advancing.
What is the US going to do when (and it's "when", not "if") foreign investments slow down, the dollar crumbles, skilled workers stay away, and the economy falters?
You're describing the 1970s. America's dominance is not a passing phase that started with WWII and ended on 9/11 -- it's a phenomenon that will last as long as America lasts, or until other nations become so much like America that one can't tell them apart. European and Asian space programs may leapfrog the moribund NASA in the short term, especially in light of the Columbia disaster -- but in America private citizens are building their own launch vehicles, and may well put people into orbit before China does.
As much as I admire Eldred and Lessig, I have to say I don't like their proposal, which is a form of surrender.
On the contrary, it's a proposal that acknowledges the reality of the situation. At the national level, our corporate boardrooms have had a series of conversations like this:
CEO: "Let's goose the stock price, cash out our stock options, and retire as millionaires!"
Board: "What happens to the company afterwards?"
CEO: "Who cares? We'll be stinking rich, and everyone else can take it in the pants!"
Board: "Sounds like bold leadership to us!"
Meanwhile, other goals that might interest John Q. Public or even Jane T. Investor (such as long-term solvency, fiscal transparency, sound public policy, allowing creative works to enter the public domain, etc.) have been trampled. The problem manifests in any number of ways, from the collapses of Enron and WorldCom, to Disney's manipulation of copyright law, to the increasing number of would-be investors who are "sitting on the sidelines" and depressing the economy.
These are problems that need to be solved, but they're not the problem Eldred is trying to solve: He just wants to republish books that have fallen out of print, but are still bottled up by our existing copyright system. I'd love to see Lessig and Eldred solve the larger problem, but frankly this is not Eldred's problem to solve. This is your problem to solve.
Yes, you, random Slashdot person. I hold you personally responsible for this mess. Since you've opened the door by saying you don't think Lessig and Eldred are doing enough to solve this problem, I'll go one step further: I don't think you are doing enough to solve this problem. Your contributions to the EFF have been woefully lacking. Your letters to Congress are remarkable for their absence. While you've done a stellar job of carping to your fellow Slashdot readers, your progress on the road to actually solving this problem has been dreadfully inadequate.
Only noncommercial or ephemeral works, or maybe the occasional small press publication, would ever enter the public domain, again enlarging the disparity between the authors who actually create literary works and the media conglomerates which merchandise them.
The PD Enhancement Act addresses the disparity between rights granted to authors and the rights retained by the people, not the disparity between authors and media conglomerates. It imposes a trivial burden upon the authors, as you note, but it frees many works now trapped in a legal and economic limbo. It's a start. It's a proposal that can fly in the current political climate, without requiring that we first solve the Disney Problem and reduce corporate influence (or dramatically increase our own influence) over the creation of copyright law.
In the example you cite, it took 50 years for supporters of the First Amendment to organize effectively (the ACLU was founded in 1920) and rally public opinion to their cause. To announce that you're unhappy with Eldred and Lessig for proposing half-measures is to ignore the difficulty of the task, and to dodge your obligation to defend your own rights. Get cracking.
Despite your protestations to the contrary, unlawfully copying somebody else's intellectual property is depriving them of deserved reward.
Define "deserved."
Hint: "Whatever the fine folks at the RIAA think they deserve" is not a good working definition. At what point do you ask yourself if, say, the Andrews Sisters have been well and fully compensated for contributing "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" to society? After 50 years? Seventy? Setting aside the issue of whether the last surviving Andrews sister actually gets even pennies on the dollar at this stage, at what point do you ask whether society is paying too much? When do you ask whether our society is, in fact, being ripped off, fleeced, and cheated of its rightful heritage by greedy, self-interested, amoral business interests, rather than the reverse?
How do you measure the creative works lost to us because our copyright laws prevent their publication? How many more Shakespeare in Love stories are unheard and unwritten because the lock on Jay Gatsby has yet to expire? What brilliant works of fiction about the making of Citizen Kane die with their would-be authors in copyright limbo? For what good purpose would you deny the people the same right to Steinbeck as they have to Shakespeare?
Copying the RIAA's IP is most certainly illegal, under our existing copyright laws... but if that's the extent of your thoughts on the issue, I suggest thinking about it a bit more.
So you sit at your Apple (tm) Computer, load up your Apple (tm) OS, load the Apple (tm) iTunes(tm) software, click on the button which goes to the Apple (tm) iTunes (tm) Music Stores, buy some DRM-ed music and then save it on your MP3 player, which can only be an Apple (tm) iPod (tm).
...and then burn it to a Compact Disc(tm), which can only be played in, um, everything.
At this stage I'm still not an iMusic customer, but my objection is a practical one: The machine I use to play music doesn't understand the new AAC format, and probably never will. Even I can see, though, that Apple's new store is the best e-music distribution scheme since Napster.
The market has already shown it will accept weak DRM, especially if the rights being "managed" (i.e., taken away) are ones not in common use. DRM restricts your ability to take DVDs from one region to another, or to read unscrambled bits and bytes directly from the disc -- but 95% of the audience doesn't do these things, and the remaining 5% can beat the DRM anyway.
I'd predict 95% of the market for online music doesn't care if they can play the music on only three computers (95% of the market doesn't have three computers), and the remaining 5% are busy cracking the AAC format. The iPod's exclusive status as an AAC-capable player will be gone in 90 days, if not sooner; the market incentive to support this format jumped by a factor of twenty in the past week.
Apple is also dangerously close to hitting the sweet spot on pricing, which is the one thing that could truly drive a stake through the heart of Kazaa: When it takes three days to find the one unreliable server with the other half of that song you started downloading, and you have to disinfect your computer afterwards to remove the spyware/adware crap... $0.99 starts to look like a reasonable bargain, especially for music that isn't currently in the top 40. The independent labels are begging Steve Jobs to get their music on board for a reason.
I think online music is at the stage where book sales would be if the Book Publishing Association of America had sued Amazon out of existence, BarnesAndNoble.com only sold books by Penguin and Rand McNally (and it cost $10/month to even browse their online shelves), and the public library system had been outlawed and driven underground -- and then Steve Jobs stepped forward and offered a service that met the pent-up demand for book sales. Yes, it still sucks that libraries have been outlawed, and the evil media cartel is still an evil media cartel, but at least now I can get (relatively) unfettered access to books; under the circumstances, this is probably the best news I could expect.
I'll mention one of the oldest kids sites on the web: Coloring.com, a.k.a. Carlos's Coloring Book. It's exactly what it sounds like -- an online coloring book -- and it dates back to November 1994, before Shockwave and Java and all that other high-bandwidth stuff. Turn your computer into a $20 box of crayons.
One of your classmates will be in a terrible car accident about five years from now, and spend the rest of his life in an "assisted care" facility for the severely mentally handicapped. Another will die a stupid death about 14 years from now: He'll take a shortcut walking home from a party one night, fall through the ice and drown.
Stop them.
Don't worry about yourself: You turn out fine, and your mistakes are ones you can learn from; if I tell you how to avoid them, you'll be less prepared for what comes next.
...Well, actually, if you could move your entire 401(k) out of Lucent in February 2000, the "diversifying your portfolio" lesson will be a lot less expensive. Come to think of it, forget about investing: Here's a list of all the winning Illinois State Lottery numbers for 1986. Go nuts.
Slashdot Mirror
Any verifiable paper receipt would allow your employer, landlord, or union steward to collect receipts, and then punish workers or tenants accordingly. You can't escape by encrypting the content, either, because the landlord will compel you to reveal the key.
You could require the voter to memorize her receipt number before leaving the polling booth, but if the number can be traced back to an individual voter by any means (including, e.g., by bribing a polling official), then the secrecy of your ballot can and will be compromised. It wouldn't have taken much for Katherine Harris to have learned who was naughty and nice, for example, and then to decide who to purge from the voter rolls.
This is a case where the only system that works is also the one that happens to be simplest: That the polling machine produces an anonymous, unambiguous paper ballot, which can be easily read by the voter, the vote-counting machine (which, ideally, should come from a different supplier than the polling machine), and by the election official doing a hand count. Anything else is vulnerable to abuse, as we've seen.
The idea that Pixar would crank out five consecutive blockbusters was simply not on the table in 1995. Pixar's output up to that date consisted of a couple of award-winning animated shorts; suggesting that Pixar would outshine Disney Animation by 2000 (with Disney releasing The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Lion King in the five years prior) would have gotten you laughed out of the studio.
But then Jeff Katzenberg decided he'd had enough of Michael Eisner, and went off to Dreamworks to make Antz (and Shrek). Lion King turned out to be the high-water mark for Disney's 2D animation unit; their best effort since was Tarzan, which grossed $435 million worldwide -- a little more than half of Finding Nemo's leviathan take, which is currently at $844 million.
So, Pixar has ended up paying Disney about 10-20 times what Disney's contribution to the process is worth. Eisner was probably using these lucrative terms as the starting point in his negotiations, while Steve Jobs (who already has Sony and Warner on speed-dial) was starting from the idea that Pixar could snap its fingers and have five studios vying for the honor.
Eisner is unquestionably an idiot for failing to recognize this, because he desperately needs Pixar to feed quality product into the gaping maw of his marketing, distribution and merchandising empire -- he's not going to make as healthy of a living selling Brother Bear plush toys and video sequels, that's for sure. Pixar just needs a distributor, though, and they're big enough now that they can get one for the asking.
I invented a light-emitting resistor in a UIUC circuit design course over ten years ago. It only worked once, though, and it burned my fingers.
I find your lack of faith... disturbing.
That assumption only holds water if iTMS sales are cannibalizing music store sales -- and since the fossilized bones of the music store are already on display in museums, we can safely assume that's not the case. Apple's share of $0.99 is only squeezing the artist in dimensions where the artist receives more than 100% of $0 from Kazaa.
Wait a minute, this is a Slashdot survey. The choices are:
The problem is that GPL enforcement is in the hands of several thousand shallow-pocketed Linux developers, each of whom now has an airtight case against SCO -- but even going through the motions of a lawsuit would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is why only deep-pocketed leviathans like IBM and Red Hat are actually picking up the phone and calling their lawyers.
The other problem is that SCO is a hollow shell, animated only by the lawsuit and an infusion of money from GPL-hostile interests. As soon as SCO's claims have their nanosecond in court (and are laughed out of the courtroom), SCO will declare bankruptcy and disappear in a puff of smoke. Litigants can't collect damages from a bankrupt company, and SCO has no other revenue.
The real question is whether any of the major SCO players (McBride et al.) will face criminal charges for perpetrating a massive stock fraud upon their investors -- and the answer, unfortunately, is "probably not." To put them in jail, a prosecutor would have to prove they knew they were lying -- and, unless they're complete idiots, they aren't going to leave any such proof for the SEC to find. SCO will follow Enron and Worldcom into the valley of frauds, but the company's board and executives, the ones who are cashing out their shares in "pre-planned transactions" (ahem), will laugh their way to the bank. It's the perfect crime.
Unless there's more than one company named Accenture, I think you're merging reports here: Accenture (nee Andersen Consulting) was a spin-off of Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that cooked Enron's books. They had no connection to the scandal that downed their former parent, except to breathe a sigh of relief that they had changed their name a few months before.
Anybody want to write a simple HOWTO?
Any university with a decent computer network is being forced to think about these issues -- forced by an avalanche of RIAA subpoenas, and by bandwidth-hogging traffic volumes, that are interfering with the university's primary mission.
The universities are looking at music distribution because it may be the path of least resistance, not because they're looking to start a lucrative side business to distract them from education.
I think we already know who is paying for our corrupt politicians.
It would also make it difficult for the ISP to find out which user(s) are spamming, defacing other websites, or launching denial-of-service attacks. Anonymity may be a desirable goal for the user, but it's probably not so good from an ISP's point of view.
I thought "Were-Nanotechnologists" were people who turned into researchers by the light of a full moon.
[Suddenly the screen goes wavy and we flash back to a high-level meeting in 1993, where an MBA-type is presenting the business case for Iridium to Motorola's Board of Directors.]
Presenter: Cellular, unless it spreads everywhere really quick, will be isolated to the big cities and forgotten by the rest of the country. Satellite is the way to go because of the availibility. Sure, cellular has coverage in the major cities, but our business-case models predict it will never be profitable elsewhere.
Board: Um, okay. Pick up your sack of money on the way out.
I'm cynical about politics, but I'm not that cynical. Senator Hatch's web site is not commercial in any meaningful sense; he is not engaging in commerce via his site. If he had an online store with Orrin Hatch baseball caps and bumper stickers, it'd be another story -- but he doesn't. As a Senator, Hatch has a legitimate duty to be accessible to his constituents, and his web site serves that non-commercial purpose.
You can't "bring someone up on charges" merely for violating copyright: Copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a crime. The DMCA blurs this distinction, by making it a crime to circumvent copyright protection, but nonetheless you can't arrest the gentleman from Utah [sic] for infringing someone's copyright.
A big part of the RIAA's tactics in this debate is to make you think file sharing is a crime. They want to embed in your consciousness that "listening to music that someone else purchased" is morally equivalent to "boarding a ship and stealing the cargo." Playing fast and loose with language is part of that effort: If you subconsciously accept that intangible ideas are "property" which can be "stolen," and that "pirates" are "stealing intellectual property" when they download copyrighted materials, then the battle is already half lost.
I'm more than happy to see a hypocrite get his comeuppance -- if Sen. Hatch thinks copyright infringement should be punished with vigilante justice, then I'll warm up the tar and feathers -- but the original poster is right to point out that "pirate" is unjustified hyperbole, and that using pirate analogies to discuss these issues only makes it harder to defend our rights.
<VOICE="Inigo Montoya">
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
</VOICE>
By your logic, mandating that Air New Zealand will follow a maintenance schedule (or that it can't be purchased outright by, say, Singapore) puts the government in league with Mussolini. The gubmint has no business addressing public concerns with fascist building codes, safety regulations, pollution limits, or product standards -- it should just stop interfering and let the private sector sort those issues out.
Or, perhaps, there are other points on the scale between anarchy and fascism? Perhaps the government has a compelling interest in preventing monopolies from forming, and in mandating open standards (NOT "open source," which is a different animal) to promote a fair and healthy capitalist marketplace?
If you're asserting that the 1980s marked the beginning of a decline in American dominance of world affairs, then I'm afraid I have to ask what you're smoking. You may have some rational concerns about fiscal policy lurking in here (and we'd probably agree that Bush's tax cuts are less than useful in that regard), but your opening premise boggles the mind: What exactly would you consider an increase in American dominance of world affairs, if you view the era from 1980 to the present as a decline?
That logic is circular: If the rest of the world were producing at U.S. levels of efficiency, there would be enough foreign capital floating through the system to terraform Mars, much less build four or five competing GPS networks. Foreign investment is not resource-limited in the manner you imply, which suggests the world outside America has reached its peak efficiency and can generate no more wealth to invest with. There is an absolute abundance of untapped human potential in the world's economy, and the not-so-dark secret of America's rise to power is that it's been tapping that potential better than any other nation on earth.
Don't believe me? Take the poorest, hungriest citizen of any other nation, teleport them to America, and see if they're richer or poorer after five years. Nine times out of ten the hapless person you pluck from poverty will be vastly better off, and the person hasn't changed one iota. It's the American package of personal freedoms and political rights which enables that person to earn a standard of living far higher than what they could achieve in China or Peru or Somalia, and conversely the ability of other nations to turn their resources into wealth is a function of how close they are to the American package.
As for your parenthetical comment about oil, the problem is less the lack of oil resources and more that the supply expands and contracts unexpectedly, often in response to political events (e.g., a revolution in Saudi Arabia would whipsaw the price of oil right quick). If the world were full of stable democracies, you'd worry about oil about as often as you worry about tungsten or tuna; it wouldn't be The One Limited Resource whose lack prevents world prosperity. (If anything, the tuna is a higher candidate on that score -- overfishing will become a problem long before we drain the planet of oil.)
In a sense you're right about one thing: China and India and Europe should be more productive than America. They have more resources and higher populations -- and if, say, China ever got its act together and bedded down basic concepts like the rule of law, property rights, and freedom of speech, it could become a real challenger to American dominance. And, personally, I think America would be tickled pink if that happened. I think we'd study their example and push ourselves harder, as we did with Japan in the 1980s -- but I don't think the U.S. will send the Navy to deal with economic threats, in the absence of a military threat that would affect our better judgement. (You can cite America's history of intervention in Central America as a counter-example, if you like, but I think that age has long since passed.)
At most I think the EU might give America an economic run for its money for a decade or two, after which the Americans will study how the Europeans did it, adapt, and beat them at their own game. Militarily the U.S. has moved beyond dominance and is heading into "why bother trying?" territory: Even if China or the EU started building an army to rival America's, American tanks will have photon torpedoes by the time they're ready to ro
Um, the U.S. never had a "no first use" policy. It had an explicit "you invade West Germany and we'll make Moscow glow in the dark" policy, which had the desired effect vis-a-vis Soviet tanks and western Europe. Gorbachev tried to score propaganda points in the early 80s by pledging the Soviets would not be the first to use nuclear weapons, to which the Reagan administration more or less nodded and said "we agree, we don't think you'll be first either."
Bush is crass enough to remind everyone that America contemplates first-use of nuclear weapons, and apparently dippy enough to propose trotting out the nukes to crack open underground bunkers -- but the policy didn't originate with him.
Um, what? The United States alone had a GDP of $10 trillion in 2001, compared to $7.8 trillion for the entire EU -- and an apples-to-apples comparison would measure the EU against NAFTA. The EU is approaching self-imposed limits on its geographic expansion, has a birth rate significantly below the replacement rate, and has economic, cultural, and legal fracture lines that the U.S. eliminated centuries ago.
China and India may have pockets of technological expertise, but they are not "caught up" in any meaningful sense -- they are not inventing radical new technologies or approaching first-world levels of infrastructure, health care or political stability. It will be a long, long time, measured in centuries, before either country equals the U.S. in an economic, scientific or military sense, even if the U.S. stops advancing.
You're describing the 1970s. America's dominance is not a passing phase that started with WWII and ended on 9/11 -- it's a phenomenon that will last as long as America lasts, or until other nations become so much like America that one can't tell them apart. European and Asian space programs may leapfrog the moribund NASA in the short term, especially in light of the Columbia disaster -- but in America private citizens are building their own launch vehicles, and may well put people into orbit before China does.
Just make sure that Han shoots first.
On the contrary, it's a proposal that acknowledges the reality of the situation. At the national level, our corporate boardrooms have had a series of conversations like this:
CEO: "Let's goose the stock price, cash out our stock options, and retire as millionaires!"
Board: "What happens to the company afterwards?"
CEO: "Who cares? We'll be stinking rich, and everyone else can take it in the pants!"
Board: "Sounds like bold leadership to us!"
Meanwhile, other goals that might interest John Q. Public or even Jane T. Investor (such as long-term solvency, fiscal transparency, sound public policy, allowing creative works to enter the public domain, etc.) have been trampled. The problem manifests in any number of ways, from the collapses of Enron and WorldCom, to Disney's manipulation of copyright law, to the increasing number of would-be investors who are "sitting on the sidelines" and depressing the economy.
These are problems that need to be solved, but they're not the problem Eldred is trying to solve: He just wants to republish books that have fallen out of print, but are still bottled up by our existing copyright system. I'd love to see Lessig and Eldred solve the larger problem, but frankly this is not Eldred's problem to solve. This is your problem to solve.
Yes, you, random Slashdot person. I hold you personally responsible for this mess. Since you've opened the door by saying you don't think Lessig and Eldred are doing enough to solve this problem, I'll go one step further: I don't think you are doing enough to solve this problem. Your contributions to the EFF have been woefully lacking. Your letters to Congress are remarkable for their absence. While you've done a stellar job of carping to your fellow Slashdot readers, your progress on the road to actually solving this problem has been dreadfully inadequate.
The PD Enhancement Act addresses the disparity between rights granted to authors and the rights retained by the people, not the disparity between authors and media conglomerates. It imposes a trivial burden upon the authors, as you note, but it frees many works now trapped in a legal and economic limbo. It's a start. It's a proposal that can fly in the current political climate, without requiring that we first solve the Disney Problem and reduce corporate influence (or dramatically increase our own influence) over the creation of copyright law.
In the example you cite, it took 50 years for supporters of the First Amendment to organize effectively (the ACLU was founded in 1920) and rally public opinion to their cause. To announce that you're unhappy with Eldred and Lessig for proposing half-measures is to ignore the difficulty of the task, and to dodge your obligation to defend your own rights. Get cracking.
Define "deserved."
Hint: "Whatever the fine folks at the RIAA think they deserve" is not a good working definition. At what point do you ask yourself if, say, the Andrews Sisters have been well and fully compensated for contributing "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" to society? After 50 years? Seventy? Setting aside the issue of whether the last surviving Andrews sister actually gets even pennies on the dollar at this stage, at what point do you ask whether society is paying too much? When do you ask whether our society is, in fact, being ripped off, fleeced, and cheated of its rightful heritage by greedy, self-interested, amoral business interests, rather than the reverse?
How do you measure the creative works lost to us because our copyright laws prevent their publication? How many more Shakespeare in Love stories are unheard and unwritten because the lock on Jay Gatsby has yet to expire? What brilliant works of fiction about the making of Citizen Kane die with their would-be authors in copyright limbo? For what good purpose would you deny the people the same right to Steinbeck as they have to Shakespeare?
Copying the RIAA's IP is most certainly illegal, under our existing copyright laws... but if that's the extent of your thoughts on the issue, I suggest thinking about it a bit more.
At this stage I'm still not an iMusic customer, but my objection is a practical one: The machine I use to play music doesn't understand the new AAC format, and probably never will. Even I can see, though, that Apple's new store is the best e-music distribution scheme since Napster.
The market has already shown it will accept weak DRM, especially if the rights being "managed" (i.e., taken away) are ones not in common use. DRM restricts your ability to take DVDs from one region to another, or to read unscrambled bits and bytes directly from the disc -- but 95% of the audience doesn't do these things, and the remaining 5% can beat the DRM anyway.
I'd predict 95% of the market for online music doesn't care if they can play the music on only three computers (95% of the market doesn't have three computers), and the remaining 5% are busy cracking the AAC format. The iPod's exclusive status as an AAC-capable player will be gone in 90 days, if not sooner; the market incentive to support this format jumped by a factor of twenty in the past week.
Apple is also dangerously close to hitting the sweet spot on pricing, which is the one thing that could truly drive a stake through the heart of Kazaa: When it takes three days to find the one unreliable server with the other half of that song you started downloading, and you have to disinfect your computer afterwards to remove the spyware/adware crap... $0.99 starts to look like a reasonable bargain, especially for music that isn't currently in the top 40. The independent labels are begging Steve Jobs to get their music on board for a reason.
I think online music is at the stage where book sales would be if the Book Publishing Association of America had sued Amazon out of existence, BarnesAndNoble.com only sold books by Penguin and Rand McNally (and it cost $10/month to even browse their online shelves), and the public library system had been outlawed and driven underground -- and then Steve Jobs stepped forward and offered a service that met the pent-up demand for book sales. Yes, it still sucks that libraries have been outlawed, and the evil media cartel is still an evil media cartel, but at least now I can get (relatively) unfettered access to books; under the circumstances, this is probably the best news I could expect.
I'll mention one of the oldest kids sites on the web: Coloring.com, a.k.a. Carlos's Coloring Book. It's exactly what it sounds like -- an online coloring book -- and it dates back to November 1994, before Shockwave and Java and all that other high-bandwidth stuff. Turn your computer into a $20 box of crayons.
How old are you, mate?
Stop them.
Don't worry about yourself: You turn out fine, and your mistakes are ones you can learn from; if I tell you how to avoid them, you'll be less prepared for what comes next.