You know damn well when you download "Star Wars Episode III.wmv" that it's a copyrighted work.
Sure, but you don't know that it's not being distributed with permission of the copyright holder. In fact, the only way you're going to get caught is if you're downloading from the copyright holder, in which case you surely have permission!
Downloading is unauthorized copying, while uploading is unauthorized distribution. Both are outlawed in Title 17.
With the caveat that only distribution falls under criminal law.
You're right, though, the difference is in the severity.
There's another difference though, in that the easiest way to get evidence that someone is downloading something is to upload it to them, in which case you need to advertise that it's available for download, which implicitly gives them permission to copy it. There are of course other ways, but most of them aren't very feasible to do on a grand scale.
Unfortunately, this system will only work if you only allow incoming mail from a server that supports it.
I think that's the key point, there. It's easy to solve spam if you can convince everyone in the world to switch to a new email system. The problem is convincing everyone in the world to switch to the same system, and then getting everyone to switch, pretty much all at once.
This reduces the whole setup to a glorified whitelist, and dooms it to failure.
More specifically, I think this solves the only real problem with whitelists - making the first contact.
You'd get no spam, but you'd lose the ability to get mail from anonymous sources.
It's easy enough to set up an e-gold account. Sure, it's not completely anonymous, in that the people running e-gold ask for your information, but they don't give that info to anyone else except law enforcement, and they don't really check it anyway.
Even your friends would pay money to send you email, but since you'd mark all of their messages as "worthwhile" it wouldn't cost them anything.
Presumably you'd have a whitelist for your friends anyway, so they'd only have to pay when they email you from a new account.
It would also make it hard to subscribe to things like joke-of-the-day services, since they'd have to filter out dimwits who subscribe and then mark the message as worthless to receive the attention bond.
Assuming we have really cheap micropayments, this wouldn't be such a problem, as the joke-of-the-day service could just require people to pay them the fee that they send out with the email. But, even better, just use that whitelist feature. Eventually maybe you'll have people spoofing the joke-of-the-day address, I guess, really you'd want to combine this with some sort of digital signature for people sending emails without payment.
This is aimed at people genuinely marketing genuine products via mass-email.
True, but it could also be used for other unsolicited email. The classic example being the long-lost friend who just stumbled upon your email address. Or it might be someone who saw your slashdot post and wanted to send you a private reply.
So there are variations of this plan, but basically they all crumble under the weight of lots of small bits of money moving around, which is currently too expensive to solve.
That's not at all true. It's actually very easy to solve micropayments. E-gold, for instance, allows payments of just a fraction of a penny. The biggest reason we don't have the major players allowing micropayments is lack of demand, not the expense of implementing it. The incremental cost of making a micropayment is tiny, basically just the cost of a few bytes of transfer, a few hundred CPU cycles, and a disk seek or two. The minimum E-silver fee is just two tenths of a penny, and I'm sure the big boys could do even better than that.
Probably. Bill Gates proposed it in The Road Ahead in 1995.
As I first described in my book "The Road Ahead" in 1995, I expect that eventually you'll be paid to read unsolicited e-mail. You'll tell your e-mail program to discard all unsolicited messages that don't offer an amount of money that you'll choose. If you open a paid message and discover it's from a long-lost friend or somebody else who has a legitimate reason to contact you, you'll be able to cancel the payment. Otherwise, you'll be paid for your time.
Bill Gates put this idea in The Road Ahead back in 1996. Basically, in order to send an unsolicited message, you have to attach some e-cash to it. If it's just a message from some long lost friend presumably you won't actually redeem the attached e-cash.
Anyway, like a million other ideas about solving spam, it'd work if you could just convince everyone in the world to adopt it. Convincing everyone in the world to switch over to the new system is left as an exercise for the reader.
My biggest concern now isn't that benign software will be punished; rather, I suspect this bill will be useless because spyware companies will just embed "You give us permission to blah blah blah" clauses deep into those EULAs that no one really reads.
That's why spyware is a problem which simply can't be solved through legislation. You either restrict the right of people to do whatever they want with their computer or you leave the door wide open for companies to do whatever they want by getting you to click "OK". Spyware will only be solved through a combination of technology and education. Technology to disallow installation of software which does certain "evil" things, and education to teach the end-user when it's OK to override the defaults and allow the "evil" thing anyway.
So what if I have to give up something 'good' because the purveyors of that 'good' thing felt it might fit into the broad definition of Spyware and thusly discontinued it. I lose.
This I think is avoided by this law. Pretty much all the restrictions require that the behavior be "intentionally deceptive". This is basically defined to mean that the program intentionally lies about what it's going to do or intentionally omits a description of what it's going to do in order to deceive.
On the other hand, the creepy porn junk and the crud that wants my bank account so they can sell me into slavery in Korea definitely (again, in MY definition of...) fit the model
At that extreme, it'll probably be covered, of course, selling someone into slavery is already illegal:). In my opinion this will probably be useful against software which is already illegal, and pretty much useless against any legitimate company, who will just add text into its EULA saying that you give it permission to do whatever it is it does.
Basically, I'd say the law is harmless, but useless.
What is that supposed to mean? Bottled spring water is not the same as tap water (not to mention that tap water isn't free).
People are happy to pay for bottled water, despite it not being meaningfully different from the stuff they get for "free" out of the tap.
You must live somewhere with quality tap water. Believe me when I tell you that the quality of tap water is pretty damn bad in many parts of the country. And you can't carry water around in your hands if you're working outside or otherwise not near a tap.
Easy - simply make them think paying for it is worth it, or make the cost less than the perceived "hassle cost" of doing it free.
Oh, I see. Easy. LOL.
Again, I point back to my examples where marketing has achieved this quite admirably.
And I reiterate my statement that your examples sucked. Besides this, marketing isn't free. You're suggesting that the movie companies lower prices and increase costs and that they're going to somehow magically make money this way.
In case you hadn't noticed, a rather large proportion of society now has an incredibly low tolerance for "hassle", an even greater urge to "keep up with the Jones's" and substantial disposable incomes (for a better example of this, it's hard to go past Sunbeam's dedicated *egg boiler* appliance, or the mere *existance* of plastic surgery for pets).
Oh don't get me wrong, there will still be people who will pay to watch movies. But whether you want to call that portion of the population "large" or "small" it's still only a fraction of the people who currently pay to watch movies.
Whoa now, hold on a second. I never said P2P would kill "art". I said that if left unchecked it'll kill most of the profits in making DVDs.
This is a matter of semantics. The principle argument being made (your variation being but one of many) is that "P2P" will make it impossible to make money from films, music, books, etc.
I'm certainly arguing that it'll cut down those profits dramatically, if left unchecked. Anyone with a high school knowledge of supply and demand can see that. The only real variable is whether or not P2P will be left unchecked; how many laws will we have, how strictly will those laws be enforced, and what kind of technical barriers will the content distributors be able to put on the content to inhibit copyright infringement. To the extent that P2P provides a cheaper and more viable substitute, demand for the product will decrease.
Not a good example - nobody[0] *wants* Linux.
That would only argue my point further. In case you didn't understand, I was explaining why killing the *profit* in arts won't kill the arts themselves.
It might eat into profit margins somewhat, but people will still be more than happy to go to the movies for a night out, a date, or just to get that experience most of them can't replicate at home.
You're forgetting that the initial costs for blockbuster films is extemely high compared to the marginal costs. It costs $X to make the film, and if you don't have enough people willing to pay for the film, then you won't make a profit. For small independent films this is much less pronounced. And remember, most big budget films already cost more money to make than they make in profits from the theatre release. Movie companies are already reliant on DVD and video sales.
Many would argue Linux *isn't* worthwhile yet for most things.
Most things? What set of things are we talking about here? Linux is certainly worthwhile for some things. That's why people use it, after all.
Ironically, while you're still pushing the line that "free downloads" will make (large scale) movie creation completely unviable you've just mentioned at least one alternative revenue stream movie makers could tap - product placement.
It's not ironic at all. I admit that there are some possible revenue streams for movie makers even in a world without any copyright laws at all. But I seriously doubt you're going to pay for a $100 million movie with product placements.
Water certainly can (or, at least, at a cost with the same principle that downloading stuff "for free" still costs for the internet connection).
Bottled spring water certainly can't.
The other two examples are there to show how people are quite happy to pay more if they perceive a need, or for convenience.
Sure, if they can't obtain the thing for free with the same convenience. You still haven't explained why people are going to pay for movies when they can download and watch them for free. Right now we can't, at least, it is very inconvenient to do so. But it's obviously going to get easier and easier unless there are some serious changes to the copy protection or legal protection of DVDs.
In other words, with the proper marketing and/or level of convenience, people will pay $X for something, even if they could acquire another product with vanishingly few differences for some amount less than X.
It'd take some magic marketing to sell something that can be downloaded for free and make a profit. You just couldn't do it.
The doom and gloom rhetoric of P2P killing "art" conveniently ignores the massive body of historical evidence contradicting its premise.
Whoa now, hold on a second. I never said P2P would kill "art". I said that if left unchecked it'll kill most of the profits in making DVDs. We'll probably never know, because the government and the industry are fighting hard to stop copyright infringement. But to think otherwise ignores all the evidence. The vast majority of people don't pay for Linux, after all, and those who do pay for it generally don't pay the developers. So yeah, P2P would never kill art. It'll probably eventually kill the blockbuster (unless we turn into a police state), but it won't kill the independent film. But you were speaking to the the motion picture companies, and their motive isn't solely to "protect art". Their motivation is to protect their profits, and simply "making the content worthwhile" doesn't do that. Again, just look at how much all those people who make Linux worthwhile make.
We'll still have film, because there are intangible benefits to making a film, but corporate shareholders don't benefit very much from these intangible benefits (maybe if the films get infused with product placement, or something, but the days of the blockbuster are numbered).
So discrimination based on how someone looks isn't discrimination because it's not in the laws?
No, it is discrimination, it's just not illegal or wrong.
My bad, I'm thinking spirit, not letter of the law.
There's nothing in the spirit of any law I can think of which would imply that it should be illegal to discriminate against ugly people, especially when hiring them for something where they need to be good looking in order to perform their job well. Like I said, that would be like discriminating against weak people when hiring them for something where they need to be strong, or like discriminating against dumb people when hiring them for something where they need to be smart.
Aside from that I don't frequent trade shows, so I've been under the impression that this whole concept was women pitching a sales product, while looking pretty for the customer.
Well, according to the article, "these scantily clad vixens may not be relevant to a company's products but they draw in people so the reps can give them a free pen and do some talking." IOW, it's the reps that focus on the talking. The booth babes focus on bringing people to the table in the first place.
I'll see if I can find something, but this was just something I heard a while ago which might not in fact be true. In fact, looking for some info to show you I've actually read a lot which leads me to believe I was previously misinformed.
Of course, the main problem is backwards compatibility. Changing CSS would mean that new discs wouldn't work in old players.
Well, yeah, but this story is about a new type of DVD which wouldn't be backwards compatible.
The fact is, unless a new format has no computer-readable equivalent (i.e. no blu-ray- or HD-DVD-ROMs) then the next DeCSS is a hacker away from being released. Even if the key isn't left plaintext in memory, it should be recoverable.
Absolutely, you couldn't allow a software player, and even then you'd probably eventually lose a lot of the keys. And even then, it wouldn't really matter as even if the current writers can't write to the CSS sector, you can be sure that new writers would be made that could (and I doubt the government would be able to stop that, there are just too many legal uses for writing to hidden sectors on DVDs).
The best way for the MPAA to secure their next format would be to require players that have to phone home to receive playback authority.
To be effective, they'd have to combine it with watermarking and direct sales (no buying from a distributor with cash). Then I suppose they'd get most people to pay. There would still be some who'd have their hacked DVD player sitting next to their hacked satellite receiver, but that's relatively rare.
And none of this is really in immediate need. Between the cost of dual layer DVDs, the cost of hard drive space, and the speeds of internet connections, as well as the heavy laws in place against even non-profit copyright infringing distributors, it's not really feasible for any but the uber-geek to pirate DVDs in the comfort of his/her home. Give it 5 or 10 years and this will change, of course (the laws will probably get stricter, but solve the other three and it really won't matter).
The first few DDoS attacks on their servers should be more than enough to convince the public that this is a Bad Idea.
DDoS attack using what, a virus and people's modems? Doesn't seem very feasible.
So have you successfully copied a DVD without removing the CSS encryption and then played it back in a DVD player? It's pretty shocking that that worked.
No, I haven't.
The encrypted key is stored on the disc in an area which is non-writeable.
Like I said, I thought there were some DVD writers which allowed this. If not, then hey, I was wrong.
Your link covers DVD-R and DVD-RW, but doesn't say anything about DVD+RW, which is what I've heard is able to write to the CSS sector (at least on some writers).
I'm not sure you understand how DeCSS (or, more appropriately, CSS) works. The contents of the DVD are encrypted, so "just bit copy[ing] the whole damn thing" doesn't help you at all. You still need to be able to decrypt the content to view it.
Umm, you can use any DVD player to view it.
The decryption key for pressed DVD's is stored in the innermost track of the disc.
Sure, and those keys themselves (the disk keys) are encrypted using the player keys which are hard coded into the DVD players.
This area is readable by DVD players and DVD-ROM drives, but DVD-RW drives cannot write to this track. Thus, if you copied the "entire" disc, you would have only actually copied the encrypted video but not decryption key, making the disc rather useless to you.
It was my understand that these areas were accessible by some DVD+RW drives.
This is the reason programs like DVDDecrypter are so popular.
Actually, the bigger reason they are popular is that once you have the decrypted data you can play it in any MPEG player and/or compress it and burn it to a cheap single layer DVD.
Anyway, if it really is so hard to just bit copy the whole DVD disc, then wouldn't a new version of CSS which isn't so easily cracked work pretty damn well? As long as you only allow hardware players it's going to be extremely difficult and expensive to figure out the player keys.
Maybe if the motion picture companies focused more on making the content worthwhile, there would be less motivation to copy movies.
Huh? Wouldn't there be more motivation to copy movies if the movies were more worthwile?
Note to the **AA: focus more on making the content/experience worth the price of admission/sale/whatever, and people will purchase it.
Oh, right, because people are just dying to volunteer to pay for something they could otherwise get for free. All those songs on Napster, they're the least popular ones, the ones that no one wants to buy.
They could stop all piracy if they just released everything for free. Of course they wouldn't make very much money that way, and no, they could make up for it with volume.
I think you overestimate the number of people who used Napster because it was the fastest way to get the product vs. those who used it because they didn't have to pay for the product. I certainly fell under the latter, and most people I knew at the time did too.
A whole lot of people don't care about seeing every movie the instant it is released. Just look at how many people wait until the movie is released on DVD. And of the people who do want to see the movie as soon as it's released, the vast majority of them see it in the theatre.
So yeah, if all you care about is stopping piracy, it's really easy. But that's not what the MPAA's main concern is, it's with making money.
Make sure the extra's wardrobe includes a fur coat the same size as your wife's size and make the coat an expense and not a wardrobe department investment.
Well, yeah, if you want to commit tax evasion you can get away with paying taxes. But if not, then you have to pay taxes on that fur coat just like any other non-monetary compensation.
Order real pizzas for props at snack time etc.
Sure, that'd fall under a non-taxable fringe benefit. But it's not going to add up to that much money.
Other businesses don't do that do they?
Bagels, coffee, the occassional pizza party. These are common in lots of businesses, and they're usually non-taxable fringe benefits.
The local Self Help business in my town is non profit but the president's salary (founder also) is a little too nice.
The President of a non-profit still pays taxes on his salary.
Yeah yeah, the point is that these are simulations of the images that would be taken by a pinhole camera, apparently one with an extremely short exposure time.
Same reason you get fined $1000 for littering on the highway. It's not that your litter costs $1000 to clean up (more like $0.10), it's that you have to pay for the 10,000 other people who littered and didn't get caught.
With actors, sure, if you hit it big you make lots of money. But for every Brad Pitt there are 10,000 Nic Wegener's. It's not really fair, but for now it's the best we've got. At least we've got the freedom to choose whether to hack code for a decent living or to risk it all trying to be the next Will Smith.
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You know damn well when you download "Star Wars Episode III.wmv" that it's a copyrighted work.
Sure, but you don't know that it's not being distributed with permission of the copyright holder. In fact, the only way you're going to get caught is if you're downloading from the copyright holder, in which case you surely have permission!
Downloading is unauthorized copying, while uploading is unauthorized distribution. Both are outlawed in Title 17.
With the caveat that only distribution falls under criminal law.
You're right, though, the difference is in the severity.
There's another difference though, in that the easiest way to get evidence that someone is downloading something is to upload it to them, in which case you need to advertise that it's available for download, which implicitly gives them permission to copy it. There are of course other ways, but most of them aren't very feasible to do on a grand scale.
Unfortunately, this system will only work if you only allow incoming mail from a server that supports it.
I think that's the key point, there. It's easy to solve spam if you can convince everyone in the world to switch to a new email system. The problem is convincing everyone in the world to switch to the same system, and then getting everyone to switch, pretty much all at once.
This reduces the whole setup to a glorified whitelist, and dooms it to failure.
More specifically, I think this solves the only real problem with whitelists - making the first contact.
You'd get no spam, but you'd lose the ability to get mail from anonymous sources.
It's easy enough to set up an e-gold account. Sure, it's not completely anonymous, in that the people running e-gold ask for your information, but they don't give that info to anyone else except law enforcement, and they don't really check it anyway.
Even your friends would pay money to send you email, but since you'd mark all of their messages as "worthwhile" it wouldn't cost them anything.
Presumably you'd have a whitelist for your friends anyway, so they'd only have to pay when they email you from a new account.
It would also make it hard to subscribe to things like joke-of-the-day services, since they'd have to filter out dimwits who subscribe and then mark the message as worthless to receive the attention bond.
Assuming we have really cheap micropayments, this wouldn't be such a problem, as the joke-of-the-day service could just require people to pay them the fee that they send out with the email. But, even better, just use that whitelist feature. Eventually maybe you'll have people spoofing the joke-of-the-day address, I guess, really you'd want to combine this with some sort of digital signature for people sending emails without payment.
This is aimed at people genuinely marketing genuine products via mass-email.
True, but it could also be used for other unsolicited email. The classic example being the long-lost friend who just stumbled upon your email address. Or it might be someone who saw your slashdot post and wanted to send you a private reply.
So there are variations of this plan, but basically they all crumble under the weight of lots of small bits of money moving around, which is currently too expensive to solve.
That's not at all true. It's actually very easy to solve micropayments. E-gold, for instance, allows payments of just a fraction of a penny. The biggest reason we don't have the major players allowing micropayments is lack of demand, not the expense of implementing it. The incremental cost of making a micropayment is tiny, basically just the cost of a few bytes of transfer, a few hundred CPU cycles, and a disk seek or two. The minimum E-silver fee is just two tenths of a penny, and I'm sure the big boys could do even better than that.
Probably. Bill Gates proposed it in The Road Ahead in 1995.
On Spam: Wasting time on the Internet (3/25/98)Bill Gates put this idea in The Road Ahead back in 1996. Basically, in order to send an unsolicited message, you have to attach some e-cash to it. If it's just a message from some long lost friend presumably you won't actually redeem the attached e-cash.
Anyway, like a million other ideas about solving spam, it'd work if you could just convince everyone in the world to adopt it. Convincing everyone in the world to switch over to the new system is left as an exercise for the reader.
My biggest concern now isn't that benign software will be punished; rather, I suspect this bill will be useless because spyware companies will just embed "You give us permission to blah blah blah" clauses deep into those EULAs that no one really reads.
That's why spyware is a problem which simply can't be solved through legislation. You either restrict the right of people to do whatever they want with their computer or you leave the door wide open for companies to do whatever they want by getting you to click "OK". Spyware will only be solved through a combination of technology and education. Technology to disallow installation of software which does certain "evil" things, and education to teach the end-user when it's OK to override the defaults and allow the "evil" thing anyway.
So what if I have to give up something 'good' because the purveyors of that 'good' thing felt it might fit into the broad definition of Spyware and thusly discontinued it. I lose.
This I think is avoided by this law. Pretty much all the restrictions require that the behavior be "intentionally deceptive". This is basically defined to mean that the program intentionally lies about what it's going to do or intentionally omits a description of what it's going to do in order to deceive.
On the other hand, the creepy porn junk and the crud that wants my bank account so they can sell me into slavery in Korea definitely (again, in MY definition of...) fit the model
At that extreme, it'll probably be covered, of course, selling someone into slavery is already illegal :). In my opinion this will probably be useful against software which is already illegal, and pretty much useless against any legitimate company, who will just add text into its EULA saying that you give it permission to do whatever it is it does.
Basically, I'd say the law is harmless, but useless.
Water is water - that's the point.
What is that supposed to mean? Bottled spring water is not the same as tap water (not to mention that tap water isn't free).
People are happy to pay for bottled water, despite it not being meaningfully different from the stuff they get for "free" out of the tap.
You must live somewhere with quality tap water. Believe me when I tell you that the quality of tap water is pretty damn bad in many parts of the country. And you can't carry water around in your hands if you're working outside or otherwise not near a tap.
Easy - simply make them think paying for it is worth it, or make the cost less than the perceived "hassle cost" of doing it free.
Oh, I see. Easy. LOL.
Again, I point back to my examples where marketing has achieved this quite admirably.
And I reiterate my statement that your examples sucked. Besides this, marketing isn't free. You're suggesting that the movie companies lower prices and increase costs and that they're going to somehow magically make money this way.
In case you hadn't noticed, a rather large proportion of society now has an incredibly low tolerance for "hassle", an even greater urge to "keep up with the Jones's" and substantial disposable incomes (for a better example of this, it's hard to go past Sunbeam's dedicated *egg boiler* appliance, or the mere *existance* of plastic surgery for pets).
Oh don't get me wrong, there will still be people who will pay to watch movies. But whether you want to call that portion of the population "large" or "small" it's still only a fraction of the people who currently pay to watch movies.
This is a matter of semantics. The principle argument being made (your variation being but one of many) is that "P2P" will make it impossible to make money from films, music, books, etc.
I'm certainly arguing that it'll cut down those profits dramatically, if left unchecked. Anyone with a high school knowledge of supply and demand can see that. The only real variable is whether or not P2P will be left unchecked; how many laws will we have, how strictly will those laws be enforced, and what kind of technical barriers will the content distributors be able to put on the content to inhibit copyright infringement. To the extent that P2P provides a cheaper and more viable substitute, demand for the product will decrease.
Not a good example - nobody[0] *wants* Linux.
That would only argue my point further. In case you didn't understand, I was explaining why killing the *profit* in arts won't kill the arts themselves.
It might eat into profit margins somewhat, but people will still be more than happy to go to the movies for a night out, a date, or just to get that experience most of them can't replicate at home.
You're forgetting that the initial costs for blockbuster films is extemely high compared to the marginal costs. It costs $X to make the film, and if you don't have enough people willing to pay for the film, then you won't make a profit. For small independent films this is much less pronounced. And remember, most big budget films already cost more money to make than they make in profits from the theatre release. Movie companies are already reliant on DVD and video sales.
Many would argue Linux *isn't* worthwhile yet for most things.
Most things? What set of things are we talking about here? Linux is certainly worthwhile for some things. That's why people use it, after all.
Ironically, while you're still pushing the line that "free downloads" will make (large scale) movie creation completely unviable you've just mentioned at least one alternative revenue stream movie makers could tap - product placement.
It's not ironic at all. I admit that there are some possible revenue streams for movie makers even in a world without any copyright laws at all. But I seriously doubt you're going to pay for a $100 million movie with product placements.
Water certainly can (or, at least, at a cost with the same principle that downloading stuff "for free" still costs for the internet connection).
Bottled spring water certainly can't.
The other two examples are there to show how people are quite happy to pay more if they perceive a need, or for convenience.
Sure, if they can't obtain the thing for free with the same convenience. You still haven't explained why people are going to pay for movies when they can download and watch them for free. Right now we can't, at least, it is very inconvenient to do so. But it's obviously going to get easier and easier unless there are some serious changes to the copy protection or legal protection of DVDs.
In other words, with the proper marketing and/or level of convenience, people will pay $X for something, even if they could acquire another product with vanishingly few differences for some amount less than X.
It'd take some magic marketing to sell something that can be downloaded for free and make a profit. You just couldn't do it.
The doom and gloom rhetoric of P2P killing "art" conveniently ignores the massive body of historical evidence contradicting its premise.
Whoa now, hold on a second. I never said P2P would kill "art". I said that if left unchecked it'll kill most of the profits in making DVDs. We'll probably never know, because the government and the industry are fighting hard to stop copyright infringement. But to think otherwise ignores all the evidence. The vast majority of people don't pay for Linux, after all, and those who do pay for it generally don't pay the developers. So yeah, P2P would never kill art. It'll probably eventually kill the blockbuster (unless we turn into a police state), but it won't kill the independent film. But you were speaking to the the motion picture companies, and their motive isn't solely to "protect art". Their motivation is to protect their profits, and simply "making the content worthwhile" doesn't do that. Again, just look at how much all those people who make Linux worthwhile make.
We'll still have film, because there are intangible benefits to making a film, but corporate shareholders don't benefit very much from these intangible benefits (maybe if the films get infused with product placement, or something, but the days of the blockbuster are numbered).
So discrimination based on how someone looks isn't discrimination because it's not in the laws?
No, it is discrimination, it's just not illegal or wrong.
My bad, I'm thinking spirit, not letter of the law.
There's nothing in the spirit of any law I can think of which would imply that it should be illegal to discriminate against ugly people, especially when hiring them for something where they need to be good looking in order to perform their job well. Like I said, that would be like discriminating against weak people when hiring them for something where they need to be strong, or like discriminating against dumb people when hiring them for something where they need to be smart.
Aside from that I don't frequent trade shows, so I've been under the impression that this whole concept was women pitching a sales product, while looking pretty for the customer.
Well, according to the article, "these scantily clad vixens may not be relevant to a company's products but they draw in people so the reps can give them a free pen and do some talking." IOW, it's the reps that focus on the talking. The booth babes focus on bringing people to the table in the first place.
I'll see if I can find something, but this was just something I heard a while ago which might not in fact be true. In fact, looking for some info to show you I've actually read a lot which leads me to believe I was previously misinformed.
Translation: Take a chance on them.
Funny how when the music industry tries something like that. They get lambasted by slashdotters.
Who go out and buy their products in hoardes anyway? Getting lambasted by Slashdotters doesn't exactly affect the bottom line that much.
Of course, the main problem is backwards compatibility. Changing CSS would mean that new discs wouldn't work in old players.
Well, yeah, but this story is about a new type of DVD which wouldn't be backwards compatible.
The fact is, unless a new format has no computer-readable equivalent (i.e. no blu-ray- or HD-DVD-ROMs) then the next DeCSS is a hacker away from being released. Even if the key isn't left plaintext in memory, it should be recoverable.
Absolutely, you couldn't allow a software player, and even then you'd probably eventually lose a lot of the keys. And even then, it wouldn't really matter as even if the current writers can't write to the CSS sector, you can be sure that new writers would be made that could (and I doubt the government would be able to stop that, there are just too many legal uses for writing to hidden sectors on DVDs).
The best way for the MPAA to secure their next format would be to require players that have to phone home to receive playback authority.
To be effective, they'd have to combine it with watermarking and direct sales (no buying from a distributor with cash). Then I suppose they'd get most people to pay. There would still be some who'd have their hacked DVD player sitting next to their hacked satellite receiver, but that's relatively rare.
And none of this is really in immediate need. Between the cost of dual layer DVDs, the cost of hard drive space, and the speeds of internet connections, as well as the heavy laws in place against even non-profit copyright infringing distributors, it's not really feasible for any but the uber-geek to pirate DVDs in the comfort of his/her home. Give it 5 or 10 years and this will change, of course (the laws will probably get stricter, but solve the other three and it really won't matter).
The first few DDoS attacks on their servers should be more than enough to convince the public that this is a Bad Idea.
DDoS attack using what, a virus and people's modems? Doesn't seem very feasible.
So have you successfully copied a DVD without removing the CSS encryption and then played it back in a DVD player? It's pretty shocking that that worked.
No, I haven't.
The encrypted key is stored on the disc in an area which is non-writeable.
Like I said, I thought there were some DVD writers which allowed this. If not, then hey, I was wrong.
Your link covers DVD-R and DVD-RW, but doesn't say anything about DVD+RW, which is what I've heard is able to write to the CSS sector (at least on some writers).
Your examples aren't very good. Bottled water, fancy shampoos, and cafe food, none of these things can be obtained for free.
Apparently you didn't get the analogy. If 9,999 people pay nothing, and one person has to pay $1000, then it's "not even split up".
I'm not sure you understand how DeCSS (or, more appropriately, CSS) works. The contents of the DVD are encrypted, so "just bit copy[ing] the whole damn thing" doesn't help you at all. You still need to be able to decrypt the content to view it.
Umm, you can use any DVD player to view it.
The decryption key for pressed DVD's is stored in the innermost track of the disc.
Sure, and those keys themselves (the disk keys) are encrypted using the player keys which are hard coded into the DVD players.
This area is readable by DVD players and DVD-ROM drives, but DVD-RW drives cannot write to this track. Thus, if you copied the "entire" disc, you would have only actually copied the encrypted video but not decryption key, making the disc rather useless to you.
It was my understand that these areas were accessible by some DVD+RW drives.
This is the reason programs like DVDDecrypter are so popular.
Actually, the bigger reason they are popular is that once you have the decrypted data you can play it in any MPEG player and/or compress it and burn it to a cheap single layer DVD.
Anyway, if it really is so hard to just bit copy the whole DVD disc, then wouldn't a new version of CSS which isn't so easily cracked work pretty damn well? As long as you only allow hardware players it's going to be extremely difficult and expensive to figure out the player keys.
Maybe if the motion picture companies focused more on making the content worthwhile, there would be less motivation to copy movies.
Huh? Wouldn't there be more motivation to copy movies if the movies were more worthwile?
Note to the **AA: focus more on making the content/experience worth the price of admission/sale/whatever, and people will purchase it.
Oh, right, because people are just dying to volunteer to pay for something they could otherwise get for free. All those songs on Napster, they're the least popular ones, the ones that no one wants to buy.
They could stop all piracy if they just released everything for free. Of course they wouldn't make very much money that way, and no, they could make up for it with volume.
I think you overestimate the number of people who used Napster because it was the fastest way to get the product vs. those who used it because they didn't have to pay for the product. I certainly fell under the latter, and most people I knew at the time did too.
A whole lot of people don't care about seeing every movie the instant it is released. Just look at how many people wait until the movie is released on DVD. And of the people who do want to see the movie as soon as it's released, the vast majority of them see it in the theatre.
So yeah, if all you care about is stopping piracy, it's really easy. But that's not what the MPAA's main concern is, it's with making money.
It's in the this explanation. There's a diagram at the bottom which explains it much better than I can in words.
Make sure the extra's wardrobe includes a fur coat the same size as your wife's size and make the coat an expense and not a wardrobe department investment.
Well, yeah, if you want to commit tax evasion you can get away with paying taxes. But if not, then you have to pay taxes on that fur coat just like any other non-monetary compensation.
Order real pizzas for props at snack time etc.
Sure, that'd fall under a non-taxable fringe benefit. But it's not going to add up to that much money.
Other businesses don't do that do they?
Bagels, coffee, the occassional pizza party. These are common in lots of businesses, and they're usually non-taxable fringe benefits.
The local Self Help business in my town is non profit but the president's salary (founder also) is a little too nice.
The President of a non-profit still pays taxes on his salary.
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move.
Yeah yeah, the point is that these are simulations of the images that would be taken by a pinhole camera, apparently one with an extremely short exposure time.
Same reason you get fined $1000 for littering on the highway. It's not that your litter costs $1000 to clean up (more like $0.10), it's that you have to pay for the 10,000 other people who littered and didn't get caught.
With actors, sure, if you hit it big you make lots of money. But for every Brad Pitt there are 10,000 Nic Wegener's. It's not really fair, but for now it's the best we've got. At least we've got the freedom to choose whether to hack code for a decent living or to risk it all trying to be the next Will Smith.