It's got nothing to do with active code. It's to do with browsers being large, complex applications. Breaking large parts of the web by stopping scripting reduces the surface area for attack but does not eliminate it. There have been too many image decoder or URL exploits for anybody to believe that.
In many years we have had no malware incidents (that I know of)
Modern virus scanners have an observed 80% miss rate.
You don't need to. Usability studies have shown conclusively that nobody (and I do mean absolutely nobody) will avoid browsing to a site because of an SSL warning. Even software engineers and other computer experts will just click through the dialog. SSL is an absolute failure at avoiding spoofing due to poor UI.
You're assuming a market system is a given, seeing that without copyright easily duplicated things have no value, and concluding therefore that they have no value. That's pretty ridiculous. More likely, the base assumption is wrong - if we can't enforce copyright, then we need some alternative to markets for encouraging the creation of copyable things. Nobody knows what though, which isn't surprising, our economic thinking is clouded by capitalist religion. We have yet to reach the Enlightenment period of economics.
I believe that his real point is that it is no longer sufficient to 'create' something and then retire on royalties but you must go out and continually provide value for that creation in the ways he lists. This is the great shock to traditional businesses publishing books, music, software, etc.
You're exaggerating. The number of people working on music, books and software who can actually retire on the basis of one hit are vanishingly small. The vast majority need to be continually creating new things if they are to have a living wage. Look at 99% of the programmers in the video game industry for instance.
Actually, I kind of like the concept that you have to work for a living by continually providing value rather than create a monopoly on some idea or expression of an idea and coast on monopoly rents.
You're also using language manipulatively:-( Especially on slashdot, most peoples connotation of "monopoly" is "sole provider of something I need". Saying copyright holders are a monopoly is like saying that Nike have a monopoly on producing Nike trainers. It doesn't say anything useful. Nobody needs Nike trainers specifically, just like nobody needs Britney Spears' music specifically (regardless of what the little sisters of the world may think). What you say might apply in very, very special circumstances, like with Windows but certainly doesn't apply to most copyrighted works.
Well, not really. Unless you consider "most" of the history of the human race to have taken place in the last three hundred years (a New Chronologist perhaps?) for most of human history there were practically no creative works, and what few did exist were usually religious in nature - paid for either by a totalitarian religious authority, or by believers own devotion.
Art, literature etc all started appearing during the renaissance, (or during the pre-dark age antiquity, depending which timeline you subscribe to) and were inaccessible to the vast majority of the population. Your Roman poet is a good example - he didn't care that somebody was copying his poetry because he wasn't relying on his poetry for his income. The size of the population who had disposable income to spend on poetry just was too small for it to be an issue. Anyway, a combination of illiteracy and expense of duplication meant that only the ultra-wealthy families like the Medici could indulge in owning books and paintings. The problem of copyright infringement didn't exist, because the scale was too small. As you note, fraud was the issue of the day.
The invention of copyright was triggered by "piracy" of books, effectively, and it happened only about four centuries ago. Even then, it would be a long time until the number of people making a living off of producing creative works was >1% of the population.
So what history shows us is not that artists can do fine without copyright. It's that it's possible to have the arts, as long as you have amazingly rich patrons willing to fund it, in which case not only would most of the creativity be oriented towards a 50 year old+ bankers tastes (forget Half Life!), but there'd be much less of it. We'd have an abundance of copies but a shortage of new, interesting things. Doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
nobody inherently deserves to be able to survive decades from doing something once early in life unless it was truly highly valuable to society
Yea but how do you judge that. A lot of people seem to be forgetting that if after 50 years nobody cares anymore about some music, it makes no money for its creator copyrighted or not. And if lots of people still want to listen to it after 50 years, maybe it is actually highly valuable to society. Maybe we want more music like that.
That said, I agree that copyright should probably be limited to when the creator dies, the problem being then how do you define creator, or how do you define when it was made for a perpetually evolving work like software. Is the creator the person who wrote the melodies, or the person who wrote the lyrics, or the person who performed the track, or the producer or the corporation that paid them all to do it (and which presumably never "dies")? What about MS Windows or MacOS X? When do they fall out of copyright?
The next step is to ask what we, as the science, engineering and computer-loving community who have been using BitTorrent and various other protocols for legitimate uses before all the kids figured out they could score Amy Winehouse albums for free, can do to either circumvent the policies initiated by the above various groups or to bypass them completely.
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. ISPs and especially governments don't hate BitTorrent. They probably don't give a crap about BitTorrent. They care about illegal copying because [a] it's illegal and [b] tons of people do it, which uses up loads of bandwidth and breaks the financial models that let them offer high burst speeds for low prices.
If you had a way of marking individual BitTorrents in such a way that it's easy to see they aren't illegal the bulk of the problem would be solved. Usage would be pretty low (linux ISOs etc) so it wouldn't bother ISPs bandwidth-wise, and governments would go away. Having some kind of tracker aggregator like TPB, but with a zero tolerance policy on copyright violation, would be a place to start, but the problem is you can't easily segregate the legal from the illegal stuff because of how the BitTorrent protocol works. At least, not without some kind of fancy hardware which checks that torrent traffic is digitally signed by some trusted authority (legaltorrents.org or something).
But that's not a big deal. BitTorrent is sort of an inherently crappy protocol for distributing files anyway. A large, community oriented CDN/mirror network would be a better way forward from a traffic engineering perspective, but this already exists for some kinds of content like Linux ISOs and is being rapidly built out by companies like MP3.com, Apple, and others for non-free-software content.
Er, well electricity companies and telephone companies will actually cut you off if they suspect abuse, and they don't have to prove it beyond all reasonable doubt - they just go ahead and do it. See here for an example. Abuse for electricity providers usually means stealing electricity without paying for it. Abuse for telecoms companies can involve all kinds of things that cause trouble on their network. You don't hear much about it, because it's rare.
What about all the people falsely accused? Are they going to have to go to court and prove they DIDN'T do anything illegal just to get internet access back?
Obviously you can't do that, because cutting off somebodies internet access is not illegal in and of itself. You would have to sue ISPs or the government for damages, and that would probably involve proving that their evidence was not strong enough to be worth a ban. And you would actually have to demonstrate some harm. But, because it's civil, it's "balance of probabilities" rather than hard proof. However, that's why there's a three strikes system, right? If you actually are being falsely accused because some legit behavior of yours trips the monitors, you can take that up with the ISPs when you get the first warning.
I'm not sure it's a sad day for the UK. I think it's basically inevitable and a lot of countries are looking at doing this, or ISPs are starting to do it on their own. Look at it from the governments perspective - one of the more important laws of the land (eg, in terms of the employment it creates) is being actively flouted. They can turn a blind eye when it's a small problem, but it's no longer small. Or they can turn a blind eye when it's a big problem, and basically say "we do not care for enforcing our own laws", which apart from pissing off those who rely on copyright for their living is rather unfair to those who did things the hard way because they didn't want to break the law.
Slashdotters can (and will) turn this into a free speech issue, as always, but it won't change anything - this will degenerate into a crap "war" between freeloaders and law enforcement which will probably result in all encrypted traffic being heavily throttled on residential connections by default. That would suck for everybody but do I expect people addicted to free movies to stop? No. The race to the bottom will continue.
I would note that you can do all those things on Windows with COM. In fact that's how transparent PNG support was added to Internet Explorer, and is why you have to invoke them in such a funny way (MS could have done a better job of the IE/COM integration in the images department).
Well that's what I thought. But it appears that's actually not the case. If you RTFA and click through, you find a page that explicitly says that friends applications can view my data. Which presumably they can then do more or less anything with, seeing as how keeping that data is only "enforced" by the terms of service. The defaults are set such that my friends apps, any by implication anybody who can code, can view everything except my sexual preferences, basically.
That's pretty surprising, and I'm glad Ms Felt has called this out. It means that anybody who writes a moderately successful app can build a giant database of things that I never intended to be in any database other than Facebooks. Part of the reason Facebook has been successful is that it does actually have privacy controls, and people feel they can share their data with only their friends (and facebook inc, of course, but that's only one company). The fact that it's not true is a pretty gaping oversight.
What I find especially funny is the big bold sign at the top saying "Facebook does not sell your personal data". No, they give it away for free instead. Great.
Dude, this isn't net neutrality. It's cheap for an Australian ISP to have their users download from iTunes because iTunes content is distributed using Akamai, a caching CDN. Bandwidth inside Australia is plentiful and cheap. Bandwidth out of Australia is extremely expensive. Because they're caching the content inside Australia the ISP only has to pay for each separate file once. EG when they sell Lost, the first user that downloads it hits the trans-pacific links and from then on it stays within Australia.
If Amazon wanted to come to the same arrangement, I'm sure that'd be OK with those ISPs. It's basic HTTP caching. I suspect they could, in theory, not charge for any content which hits the ISP HTTP caches and it'd mean that everyone competes on a level playing field (if the caches are large enough), but that'd be a complete nightmare to track and explain to users. So it's sold as "iTunes is free, other stuff isn't" because that's easy for the punters to understand.
Almost certainly not. A gigabyte isn't a useful measurement for most people. Even if your average technically inclined person knows some basic metrics (eg, an mp3 of a pop song is about 3.5mb, a movie is 700mb or whatever) they are usually unable to estimate how large something is if they haven't encountered it before. For instance how much would listening to net radio for a few hours a day cost you under this new scheme. Sure you can work it out but most won't.
That's why ISPs use unlimited subscriptions. It means users don't have to think about this techno-crap. They pay an easily understood, fixed amount and there are no surprises. Unfortunately a few people use completely disproportionate amounts of bandwidth which breaks the statistical overcommitting ISPs do which is why consumer connections are so much cheaper than dedicated business connections.
This extra traffic is practically always P2P by the way. I don't know what that guy is smoking if he thinks iTunes Store adds up to significant bandwidth usage. Pretty much anything where people have to pay isn't going to create a big problem, and sticking an Akamai node in the ISPs network is going to solve 90% of the bandwidth issues if they do exist (eg, in australia there are several akamai nodes)
ISPs usually don't want customers who sit on torrents all day, they'd love for them to just go away. So they tried filtering the traffic, but BT users just went encrypted meaning that ISPs would have to throttle all encrypted traffic, pissing off legit users. So now they're thinking of tiered pricing. Well, I can't say I'm surprised. They'll aim to hit the "sweet spot" where non-p2p users are always under the basic cap and so they can continue "as if" they're on an unlimited connection, but if you are using BitTorrent a lot, you go over the transfer limits and need to pay more.
In theory, in a competitive market, this results in a better deal for the non-torrent users. The fact that ISPs are something of a failed market in the US means that probably, it just means torrent users pay more.
Why would it be so complicated when cutting these cables already forces traffic to be rerouted via the US, where the NSA can tap at major switching centers.
BitTorrent isn't crucial for the success of open source projects - open source was around long before BitTorrent and the larger files that are suited to the protocol are always heavily mirrored by HTTP mirroring services anyway. If BitTorrent were to disappear tomorrow it wouldn't affect the open source world at all.
Struggling musicians being bankrupted by bandwidth costs? I'd be interested to see examples of that. Bandwidth is pretty cheap these days if you shop around. There are plenty of services out there to help such people... mp3.com being one obvious site. MySpace being another.
Anyway, your point that BitTorrent has legal uses is sound, but to be frank, I'm not convinced it is used that much for legal stuff in practice. I mean, BitTorrent is an inherently crappy way to distribute stuff. It generates way more traffic than is strictly necessary by using a mesh instead of a tree structure, it requires custom clients (it's not in a web browser) and it doesn't tend to play nicely with NAT. Or at least, never did for me. If you want to distribute large files via HTTP in an efficient way, that's what CDNs like Akamai are for. It solves all of the above problems for distributing large, legal files. If you don't have any money (eg, Linux distros) there are usually volunteer "mini CDNs" like the mirror network which exist for this. And if you're distributing only very small files but want to insulate yourself against bandwidth spikes, specialised services like MP3.COM or various "web drive" systems can help with that.
I use Linux, and buy MP3s from minor struggling artists, but I never use BitTorrent. Partly because I don't need to, and partly because the few times I did try to use it (for a few game demos?) it didn't work properly and gave far inferior speeds to regular HTTP servers. Probably some misconfiguration on my end, but whatever. Life is short.
Linux has its own security theatre... the idea that "root vs user" DAC is sufficient to stop malware/viruses etc, when in reality it does no such thing (consider the permissions needed to do the things most botnets do). If I had a penny for every time I see a Linux user tell some hapless n00b that Linux is more secure than Windows because you don't have to run as superuser, I'd be a very rich guy.
That's cool, and I wish a lot more labels were like that. But your brother should realise a couple of things:
Somebody who downloads his music isn't his customer, by definition.
He's relying on a "hard core" of honest people to pay for his lifestyle and carry the rest, who are freeloading. That's fine but it's relying on a trick of human psychology, which is that the people who pay can't see or interact with the ones who don't pay. Try charging concert-goers money but keeping the back door open so anybody can wander in off the street, then see how people react.
Recording a song, filming a movie, or writing a program takes just as much effort, and deserves just as much compensation, no matter how many copies are eventually made. At least that's what common sense tells us.
Common sense tells us the exact opposite actually. If two people produce a movie costing $100 million, and one movie sucks and the other movie rules, why would we not want to reward the producer of the movie that ruled more? How else are you going to encourage the creation of stuff that people actually want, instead of artistic navel-gazing?
In the economic system you suggest:
Anything very expensive wouldn't get made. Lord of the Rings movies, Mass Effect, etc. Copyright lets you amortize the cost of an expensive production over huge numbers of people, who only have to pay a little bit. If the alternative was to pay up front, far fewer people would do so, because they would have no idea what their money would actually buy them. Thus the amount each individual would have to pay is much higher, further restricting those who would it.
Anything risky wouldn't get made. Now you've collected some money from people who want you to make something, you'd better make sure they're happy with the end result. Forget about edgy third albums. Forget about experimental forms of directing. With copyright, if you spend money making something that sucks, you shoulder the financial loss but that's about it. In your scheme, if you spend other peoples money you might be facing a lawsuit. Or at least the end of your career.
So? I don't see how this is anything except rationalization. There are films you simply must see, and you must see them right now, but you don't want to see them enough to actually go to the cinema. That sounds pretty lame to me.
The thing is that you don't have any inherent right to watch movies or TV shows. It's actually not a grey area at all. You didn't make that stuff, it's not yours, you watch it at the pleasure of those who put in the effort to make it. If they decide that DVDs come out at a different time to the cinema release, tough on you! Yeah I don't like it either, but it's not my decision, it's theirs, because they made the film! If it was really such a huge deal, some movie makers would start releasing movies with different schedule, that's how the market works.
Pretty much every problem you have can be solved by just waiting for these movies or TV shows to come out on DVD and then renting them.
I don't see how it can be a quirk of Swedish law or not, actually. The whole concept of whether something that is substantially used to break the law, but might be legitimately used, is pretty general and can apply to lots of different things.
In an extreme interpretation it'd make enforcement of some laws practically impossible. Is that a bomb in your van sir? Yes guvnor, I'm using it to teach my son chemistry. Oh goodo, carry on then.
The "google defence" works because it's possible to demonstrate that the vast majority of traffic is not infringing the law. The Pirate Bay can't do that, hell it's even in their name - they exist to allow piracy. If you put a bunch of oiks like the one interviewed on Slashdot recently in front of a judge, and they named their operation after the crime they plead they don't want to assist, how do you think that judge will react? They're flicking the Vs at the entire legal establishment and even in Sweden that sort of approach sounds dangerous to me.
Why not use D? If you had used Haskell or something as your example then I'd have agreed, but any competent developer should be able to pick up D within a few hours. After all, it's basically Java/C# with some of the features of C++. Hardly going to strain anybodies brain. Now, if you want to talk about maturity of toolchains, etc, then sure...
Why are you using tapes? A 1T hard disk from Hitachi costs ~$380. So let's say we need to store 80T that's ~$30,000 worth of hard disks. Triple it for redundancy and you are at $90,000. Much cheaper than the tape based solution.
I don't want to sign a 3-page contract full of fine print defining exactly what "reproduction" is every time I buy a book, piece of music, movie, word processor or video game. That's absurd. EULAs are bad enough and they are only easily skippable because companies livelyhoods don't depend on enforcing them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's got nothing to do with active code. It's to do with browsers being large, complex applications. Breaking large parts of the web by stopping scripting reduces the surface area for attack but does not eliminate it. There have been too many image decoder or URL exploits for anybody to believe that.
Modern virus scanners have an observed 80% miss rate.
I'd like to second the guy who thanked you for the submissions. I also enjoy reading them.
You don't need to. Usability studies have shown conclusively that nobody (and I do mean absolutely nobody) will avoid browsing to a site because of an SSL warning. Even software engineers and other computer experts will just click through the dialog. SSL is an absolute failure at avoiding spoofing due to poor UI.
You're assuming a market system is a given, seeing that without copyright easily duplicated things have no value, and concluding therefore that they have no value. That's pretty ridiculous. More likely, the base assumption is wrong - if we can't enforce copyright, then we need some alternative to markets for encouraging the creation of copyable things. Nobody knows what though, which isn't surprising, our economic thinking is clouded by capitalist religion. We have yet to reach the Enlightenment period of economics.
You're exaggerating. The number of people working on music, books and software who can actually retire on the basis of one hit are vanishingly small. The vast majority need to be continually creating new things if they are to have a living wage. Look at 99% of the programmers in the video game industry for instance.
You're also using language manipulatively :-( Especially on slashdot, most peoples connotation of "monopoly" is "sole provider of something I need". Saying copyright holders are a monopoly is like saying that Nike have a monopoly on producing Nike trainers. It doesn't say anything useful. Nobody needs Nike trainers specifically, just like nobody needs Britney Spears' music specifically (regardless of what the little sisters of the world may think). What you say might apply in very, very special circumstances, like with Windows but certainly doesn't apply to most copyrighted works.
Well, not really. Unless you consider "most" of the history of the human race to have taken place in the last three hundred years (a New Chronologist perhaps?) for most of human history there were practically no creative works, and what few did exist were usually religious in nature - paid for either by a totalitarian religious authority, or by believers own devotion.
Art, literature etc all started appearing during the renaissance, (or during the pre-dark age antiquity, depending which timeline you subscribe to) and were inaccessible to the vast majority of the population. Your Roman poet is a good example - he didn't care that somebody was copying his poetry because he wasn't relying on his poetry for his income. The size of the population who had disposable income to spend on poetry just was too small for it to be an issue. Anyway, a combination of illiteracy and expense of duplication meant that only the ultra-wealthy families like the Medici could indulge in owning books and paintings. The problem of copyright infringement didn't exist, because the scale was too small. As you note, fraud was the issue of the day.
The invention of copyright was triggered by "piracy" of books, effectively, and it happened only about four centuries ago. Even then, it would be a long time until the number of people making a living off of producing creative works was >1% of the population.
So what history shows us is not that artists can do fine without copyright. It's that it's possible to have the arts, as long as you have amazingly rich patrons willing to fund it, in which case not only would most of the creativity be oriented towards a 50 year old+ bankers tastes (forget Half Life!), but there'd be much less of it. We'd have an abundance of copies but a shortage of new, interesting things. Doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
Yea but how do you judge that. A lot of people seem to be forgetting that if after 50 years nobody cares anymore about some music, it makes no money for its creator copyrighted or not. And if lots of people still want to listen to it after 50 years, maybe it is actually highly valuable to society. Maybe we want more music like that.
That said, I agree that copyright should probably be limited to when the creator dies, the problem being then how do you define creator, or how do you define when it was made for a perpetually evolving work like software. Is the creator the person who wrote the melodies, or the person who wrote the lyrics, or the person who performed the track, or the producer or the corporation that paid them all to do it (and which presumably never "dies")? What about MS Windows or MacOS X? When do they fall out of copyright?
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. ISPs and especially governments don't hate BitTorrent. They probably don't give a crap about BitTorrent. They care about illegal copying because [a] it's illegal and [b] tons of people do it, which uses up loads of bandwidth and breaks the financial models that let them offer high burst speeds for low prices.
If you had a way of marking individual BitTorrents in such a way that it's easy to see they aren't illegal the bulk of the problem would be solved. Usage would be pretty low (linux ISOs etc) so it wouldn't bother ISPs bandwidth-wise, and governments would go away. Having some kind of tracker aggregator like TPB, but with a zero tolerance policy on copyright violation, would be a place to start, but the problem is you can't easily segregate the legal from the illegal stuff because of how the BitTorrent protocol works. At least, not without some kind of fancy hardware which checks that torrent traffic is digitally signed by some trusted authority (legaltorrents.org or something).
But that's not a big deal. BitTorrent is sort of an inherently crappy protocol for distributing files anyway. A large, community oriented CDN/mirror network would be a better way forward from a traffic engineering perspective, but this already exists for some kinds of content like Linux ISOs and is being rapidly built out by companies like MP3.com, Apple, and others for non-free-software content.
Er, well electricity companies and telephone companies will actually cut you off if they suspect abuse, and they don't have to prove it beyond all reasonable doubt - they just go ahead and do it. See here for an example. Abuse for electricity providers usually means stealing electricity without paying for it. Abuse for telecoms companies can involve all kinds of things that cause trouble on their network. You don't hear much about it, because it's rare.
Obviously you can't do that, because cutting off somebodies internet access is not illegal in and of itself. You would have to sue ISPs or the government for damages, and that would probably involve proving that their evidence was not strong enough to be worth a ban. And you would actually have to demonstrate some harm. But, because it's civil, it's "balance of probabilities" rather than hard proof. However, that's why there's a three strikes system, right? If you actually are being falsely accused because some legit behavior of yours trips the monitors, you can take that up with the ISPs when you get the first warning.
I'm not sure it's a sad day for the UK. I think it's basically inevitable and a lot of countries are looking at doing this, or ISPs are starting to do it on their own. Look at it from the governments perspective - one of the more important laws of the land (eg, in terms of the employment it creates) is being actively flouted. They can turn a blind eye when it's a small problem, but it's no longer small. Or they can turn a blind eye when it's a big problem, and basically say "we do not care for enforcing our own laws", which apart from pissing off those who rely on copyright for their living is rather unfair to those who did things the hard way because they didn't want to break the law.
Slashdotters can (and will) turn this into a free speech issue, as always, but it won't change anything - this will degenerate into a crap "war" between freeloaders and law enforcement which will probably result in all encrypted traffic being heavily throttled on residential connections by default. That would suck for everybody but do I expect people addicted to free movies to stop? No. The race to the bottom will continue.
I would note that you can do all those things on Windows with COM. In fact that's how transparent PNG support was added to Internet Explorer, and is why you have to invoke them in such a funny way (MS could have done a better job of the IE/COM integration in the images department).
Well that's what I thought. But it appears that's actually not the case. If you RTFA and click through, you find a page that explicitly says that friends applications can view my data. Which presumably they can then do more or less anything with, seeing as how keeping that data is only "enforced" by the terms of service. The defaults are set such that my friends apps, any by implication anybody who can code, can view everything except my sexual preferences, basically.
That's pretty surprising, and I'm glad Ms Felt has called this out. It means that anybody who writes a moderately successful app can build a giant database of things that I never intended to be in any database other than Facebooks. Part of the reason Facebook has been successful is that it does actually have privacy controls, and people feel they can share their data with only their friends (and facebook inc, of course, but that's only one company). The fact that it's not true is a pretty gaping oversight.
What I find especially funny is the big bold sign at the top saying "Facebook does not sell your personal data". No, they give it away for free instead. Great.
Somebody doing a web crawl from home? Somebody who found an index of trackers and wrote a script to download them all?
Dude, this isn't net neutrality. It's cheap for an Australian ISP to have their users download from iTunes because iTunes content is distributed using Akamai, a caching CDN. Bandwidth inside Australia is plentiful and cheap. Bandwidth out of Australia is extremely expensive. Because they're caching the content inside Australia the ISP only has to pay for each separate file once. EG when they sell Lost, the first user that downloads it hits the trans-pacific links and from then on it stays within Australia.
If Amazon wanted to come to the same arrangement, I'm sure that'd be OK with those ISPs. It's basic HTTP caching. I suspect they could, in theory, not charge for any content which hits the ISP HTTP caches and it'd mean that everyone competes on a level playing field (if the caches are large enough), but that'd be a complete nightmare to track and explain to users. So it's sold as "iTunes is free, other stuff isn't" because that's easy for the punters to understand.
Almost certainly not. A gigabyte isn't a useful measurement for most people. Even if your average technically inclined person knows some basic metrics (eg, an mp3 of a pop song is about 3.5mb, a movie is 700mb or whatever) they are usually unable to estimate how large something is if they haven't encountered it before. For instance how much would listening to net radio for a few hours a day cost you under this new scheme. Sure you can work it out but most won't.
That's why ISPs use unlimited subscriptions. It means users don't have to think about this techno-crap. They pay an easily understood, fixed amount and there are no surprises. Unfortunately a few people use completely disproportionate amounts of bandwidth which breaks the statistical overcommitting ISPs do which is why consumer connections are so much cheaper than dedicated business connections.
This extra traffic is practically always P2P by the way. I don't know what that guy is smoking if he thinks iTunes Store adds up to significant bandwidth usage. Pretty much anything where people have to pay isn't going to create a big problem, and sticking an Akamai node in the ISPs network is going to solve 90% of the bandwidth issues if they do exist (eg, in australia there are several akamai nodes)
ISPs usually don't want customers who sit on torrents all day, they'd love for them to just go away. So they tried filtering the traffic, but BT users just went encrypted meaning that ISPs would have to throttle all encrypted traffic, pissing off legit users. So now they're thinking of tiered pricing. Well, I can't say I'm surprised. They'll aim to hit the "sweet spot" where non-p2p users are always under the basic cap and so they can continue "as if" they're on an unlimited connection, but if you are using BitTorrent a lot, you go over the transfer limits and need to pay more.
In theory, in a competitive market, this results in a better deal for the non-torrent users. The fact that ISPs are something of a failed market in the US means that probably, it just means torrent users pay more.
Why would it be so complicated when cutting these cables already forces traffic to be rerouted via the US, where the NSA can tap at major switching centers.
BitTorrent isn't crucial for the success of open source projects - open source was around long before BitTorrent and the larger files that are suited to the protocol are always heavily mirrored by HTTP mirroring services anyway. If BitTorrent were to disappear tomorrow it wouldn't affect the open source world at all.
Struggling musicians being bankrupted by bandwidth costs? I'd be interested to see examples of that. Bandwidth is pretty cheap these days if you shop around. There are plenty of services out there to help such people ... mp3.com being one obvious site. MySpace being another.
Anyway, your point that BitTorrent has legal uses is sound, but to be frank, I'm not convinced it is used that much for legal stuff in practice. I mean, BitTorrent is an inherently crappy way to distribute stuff. It generates way more traffic than is strictly necessary by using a mesh instead of a tree structure, it requires custom clients (it's not in a web browser) and it doesn't tend to play nicely with NAT. Or at least, never did for me. If you want to distribute large files via HTTP in an efficient way, that's what CDNs like Akamai are for. It solves all of the above problems for distributing large, legal files. If you don't have any money (eg, Linux distros) there are usually volunteer "mini CDNs" like the mirror network which exist for this. And if you're distributing only very small files but want to insulate yourself against bandwidth spikes, specialised services like MP3.COM or various "web drive" systems can help with that.
I use Linux, and buy MP3s from minor struggling artists, but I never use BitTorrent. Partly because I don't need to, and partly because the few times I did try to use it (for a few game demos?) it didn't work properly and gave far inferior speeds to regular HTTP servers. Probably some misconfiguration on my end, but whatever. Life is short.
I never thought I'd see that on Slashdot! I wonder if Sweden agrees :-)
Linux has its own security theatre ... the idea that "root vs user" DAC is sufficient to stop malware/viruses etc, when in reality it does no such thing (consider the permissions needed to do the things most botnets do). If I had a penny for every time I see a Linux user tell some hapless n00b that Linux is more secure than Windows because you don't have to run as superuser, I'd be a very rich guy.
That's cool, and I wish a lot more labels were like that. But your brother should realise a couple of things:
Common sense tells us the exact opposite actually. If two people produce a movie costing $100 million, and one movie sucks and the other movie rules, why would we not want to reward the producer of the movie that ruled more? How else are you going to encourage the creation of stuff that people actually want, instead of artistic navel-gazing?
In the economic system you suggest:
So? I don't see how this is anything except rationalization. There are films you simply must see, and you must see them right now, but you don't want to see them enough to actually go to the cinema. That sounds pretty lame to me.
The thing is that you don't have any inherent right to watch movies or TV shows. It's actually not a grey area at all. You didn't make that stuff, it's not yours, you watch it at the pleasure of those who put in the effort to make it. If they decide that DVDs come out at a different time to the cinema release, tough on you! Yeah I don't like it either, but it's not my decision, it's theirs, because they made the film! If it was really such a huge deal, some movie makers would start releasing movies with different schedule, that's how the market works.
Pretty much every problem you have can be solved by just waiting for these movies or TV shows to come out on DVD and then renting them.
I don't see how it can be a quirk of Swedish law or not, actually. The whole concept of whether something that is substantially used to break the law, but might be legitimately used, is pretty general and can apply to lots of different things.
In an extreme interpretation it'd make enforcement of some laws practically impossible. Is that a bomb in your van sir? Yes guvnor, I'm using it to teach my son chemistry. Oh goodo, carry on then.
The "google defence" works because it's possible to demonstrate that the vast majority of traffic is not infringing the law. The Pirate Bay can't do that, hell it's even in their name - they exist to allow piracy. If you put a bunch of oiks like the one interviewed on Slashdot recently in front of a judge, and they named their operation after the crime they plead they don't want to assist, how do you think that judge will react? They're flicking the Vs at the entire legal establishment and even in Sweden that sort of approach sounds dangerous to me.
Why not use D? If you had used Haskell or something as your example then I'd have agreed, but any competent developer should be able to pick up D within a few hours. After all, it's basically Java/C# with some of the features of C++. Hardly going to strain anybodies brain. Now, if you want to talk about maturity of toolchains, etc, then sure ...
Why are you using tapes? A 1T hard disk from Hitachi costs ~$380. So let's say we need to store 80T that's ~$30,000 worth of hard disks. Triple it for redundancy and you are at $90,000. Much cheaper than the tape based solution.
I don't want to sign a 3-page contract full of fine print defining exactly what "reproduction" is every time I buy a book, piece of music, movie, word processor or video game. That's absurd. EULAs are bad enough and they are only easily skippable because companies livelyhoods don't depend on enforcing them.