What Viacom has asked for is not only legal, but it is common practice. Viacom is not "punishing" Dish subscribers. They have asked for a reasonable, and fair, price hike. And they have asked for a legal bundling of their products. If Dish wants to change the legality of this, go theough the proper channels to do so. If Dish doesn't want to go through the proper channels to change the law, then by all means pull the channels, but suffer the consequenses.
Putting your customers in the middle, not providing them with a service they paid for, is a violation of Customer Service 101. As a Dish subscriber, I don't CARE who is to blame. I care that I have gone to my job and worked hard all day, making less than $50,000 a year, and come home to find that my favorite channels have been replaced by rhetoric because some BILLIONAIRES have decided to have a little fight with each other.
Dish saw this coming a mile away. They could have avoided it. And if they could not avoid it, make whatever deal you need to, service your customers, and go back and sue Viacom.
Dish has put themselves in a really bad position here because they banked a lot on a marketing scheme that bagged on all other services saying they were "pigs" for raising rates, and that Dish was the cheapest. They now have to do anything they can to save their customer $.06 a month. You should never guarantee rates, guarantee the lowest rates, etc if you rely on outside vendors to deliver a significant part of your service.
If you start blocking sites because you don't like what's in them (or because you think it will "offend" other people), where do you stop?
Two problems with this statement:
1. You misinterpret the intentions of the people trying to block these sites. It is not because they are offended. It is to protect children. Your rights to free speech take a back seat when it comes to child safety. These children are exploited. They haven't the ability to defend themselves, or to make decisions about their sexuality, morality, or their future, which is why it is society's responsibility to protect them. Given this, I don't care how child pornographers are stopped, as long as they are stopped.
2. Your slippery slope argument is laughable at best. I get irritated by people using the "where does it stop" argument. Don't get me wrong, I agree that it would be criminal to use this ruling to stop other sites that are merely "offensive" rather than "exploitive of young children", but it simply is not going to happen. The government is not going to go straight for a foot fetish site, simply because they won a ruling on child pornography.
And as for your "websites don't appear magically in my browser" comment: I get a lot of spam. Probably far more than average. Today, I happened to get some child porn spam. I have never asked for porn spam, don't visit porn sites at work, never signed up for anything at a porn site, never given my e-mail address to anyone remotely porn related. Yet I got child porn spam. So even though I did not seek this type of material, it appeared in my inbox. If you take down the child pornography sites, then what do they have to advertise? Of course it won't eliminate child pornography. But it is a step in the right direction.
The Black Crowes did this with their Lions cd. You put the cd into your computer and it would bring up an application that let you download entire concerts from that tour, already sized to fit on cds. You could only download a certain number of concerts, but you could stream as many as you like.
Of course, you could use the methods I use. I set up mailboxes for all my accounts and rules that filter anything coming to any of those accounts into their own box. Then, my Inbox is usually the only place I get a lot of spam, because usually the To: does not contain any of my mail addresses, so they are dumped into my inbox.
And really, all you need is your delete key anyway. It's not that big of a pain. I get hundreds of spams and I simply don't allow it to bother me.
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Hold on a minute...
What Viacom has asked for is not only legal, but it is common practice. Viacom is not "punishing" Dish subscribers. They have asked for a reasonable, and fair, price hike. And they have asked for a legal bundling of their products. If Dish wants to change the legality of this, go theough the proper channels to do so. If Dish doesn't want to go through the proper channels to change the law, then by all means pull the channels, but suffer the consequenses.
Putting your customers in the middle, not providing them with a service they paid for, is a violation of Customer Service 101. As a Dish subscriber, I don't CARE who is to blame. I care that I have gone to my job and worked hard all day, making less than $50,000 a year, and come home to find that my favorite channels have been replaced by rhetoric because some BILLIONAIRES have decided to have a little fight with each other.
Dish saw this coming a mile away. They could have avoided it. And if they could not avoid it, make whatever deal you need to, service your customers, and go back and sue Viacom.
Dish has put themselves in a really bad position here because they banked a lot on a marketing scheme that bagged on all other services saying they were "pigs" for raising rates, and that Dish was the cheapest. They now have to do anything they can to save their customer $.06 a month. You should never guarantee rates, guarantee the lowest rates, etc if you rely on outside vendors to deliver a significant part of your service.
Maybe yes, maybe no. If ten people listen to the song on the radio and don't buy the CD is that theft too?
Actually, when a song is on the radio, the artist, publishers, etc are getting paid. Maybe not by you, but they are getting paid.
If you start blocking sites because you don't like what's in them (or because you think it will "offend" other people), where do you stop? Two problems with this statement: 1. You misinterpret the intentions of the people trying to block these sites. It is not because they are offended. It is to protect children. Your rights to free speech take a back seat when it comes to child safety. These children are exploited. They haven't the ability to defend themselves, or to make decisions about their sexuality, morality, or their future, which is why it is society's responsibility to protect them. Given this, I don't care how child pornographers are stopped, as long as they are stopped. 2. Your slippery slope argument is laughable at best. I get irritated by people using the "where does it stop" argument. Don't get me wrong, I agree that it would be criminal to use this ruling to stop other sites that are merely "offensive" rather than "exploitive of young children", but it simply is not going to happen. The government is not going to go straight for a foot fetish site, simply because they won a ruling on child pornography. And as for your "websites don't appear magically in my browser" comment: I get a lot of spam. Probably far more than average. Today, I happened to get some child porn spam. I have never asked for porn spam, don't visit porn sites at work, never signed up for anything at a porn site, never given my e-mail address to anyone remotely porn related. Yet I got child porn spam. So even though I did not seek this type of material, it appeared in my inbox. If you take down the child pornography sites, then what do they have to advertise? Of course it won't eliminate child pornography. But it is a step in the right direction.
The Black Crowes did this with their Lions cd. You put the cd into your computer and it would bring up an application that let you download entire concerts from that tour, already sized to fit on cds. You could only download a certain number of concerts, but you could stream as many as you like.
Of course, you could use the methods I use. I set up mailboxes for all my accounts and rules that filter anything coming to any of those accounts into their own box. Then, my Inbox is usually the only place I get a lot of spam, because usually the To: does not contain any of my mail addresses, so they are dumped into my inbox. And really, all you need is your delete key anyway. It's not that big of a pain. I get hundreds of spams and I simply don't allow it to bother me.