An AC, waiting for his IO, and deserving of a moderation uptick, writes: > I'm a bit disturbed that the Netpliance page mentions that the internal IDE header has been disabled.
Maybe in BIOS, but everyone who's bought one has been able to hack it. It just takes a little more effort (either boot with a hard drive and proper geometry settings, or remove the epoxy from the old BIOS socket and swap in a new chip) now than it did in March:-)
If you've ordered one, it'll eventually get there, and you'll eventually be able to hack it.
The AC continues: > If Netpliance just wanted a stable Java environment and a suitable browser, they'd need to look no further than Tao's Elate for the OS and JRE side and Espial's Escape for the browser solution
When you get your IO, hack away. The resources (Ken's BBS, the IO mailing list @scsiboy.com, and all the web sites) are all still out there. I for one would love to see what you come up with. I wimped out and got a 6.4G hard drive for one of my boxen, but I still have another one for which "no moving parts" is my design objective.
> This is obviously about saving money, not delivering the best product, although in light of how much money us cheapskates have cost them (have a heart, guys, you might end up working at a startup with a crappy business model someday), they probably need the break to stay alive
The "arms race" between NPLI's hardware mods and the hackers countering them served only to provide the hackers with amusement. The real way to stop sales to the hacker community (as you correctly point out, this is something they pretty much had to do) was to beef up their TOS. Which they did.
It's just that with the credit card charging issues to people who really did buy them for their parents, and their strong-arm phone tactics on people who ordered pre-TOS (trying to tell them that the new "$500 termination fee" TOS applied retroactively) they (IMHO) overstepped the bounds of good taste and sound business practices.
That said, these tactics have stopped now, and NPLI has behaved well for the past month or two. Yes, they're constrained in their ability to meet demand for the units, but they no longer appear to be engaged in questionable business practices.
(Sadly, that was another reason I passed on the Developer's Corner. At the time I would have been most tempted to sign up, they were (IMHO again) really skirting the limits of the bait-and-switch laws, I just didn't trust them. I'm immensely gratified to see they've cleaned up their act.)
Don't knock yourself or the other MP3 box developers, heck, that was the first thing I thought of and built:-)
Ideas you may wish to take back to NPLI for future hardware revisions:
Replace the IDE port with a SanDisk port and make it accessible. The thing boots off the 16M SanDisk, and a user-supplied 32- or 64-M CompactFlash card can be used to "load" the stereo with MP3s.
NTSC-out. The 10" screen is cool for day-to-day use, but if you hooked the MP3-loaded CompactFlash-enhanced thing up to your TV and ran visualizations... This would require a major redesign of the motherboard, but might still be cheaper than going active matrix on the display.
Wireless (IR) keyboard interface and software to support the use of a remote control.
Line-out, which, as we know, is already 99% built into the existing design.
Basically, I'm thinking there's a secondary market - there's obvious demand for turnkey MP3 solutions. MP3 solutions that give the user a "home audio component" feel plus things like TV visualizations that they can't get anywhere else may be a big market.
Since NPLI derives revenue from service fees, how about either adding a CDROM built-in and phoning-home to get the CDDB data. The aggregated data of who listens to what and when could be resold. The user's value-add is that it's a CD player that tells them what the name of the song is, as well as has all that funky NTSC-out visualization.
Not terribly nice from a privacy point of view, I know, but hey, it's what CDDB is probably doing anyway;-)
BTW, there's a VGA-out port in the I-Opener, so if your grandparents wanna try the 14" monitor for readability, it should work (sync/refresh rates permitting) fine with the IO. Total time invested, about 15 minutes with a soldering iron;-)
I agree with those commenting that it looked a little too easy to get on the list.
But as for theories that NPLI is doing this as "only a publicity stunt", it may be so -- but there's one other option that hasn't been considered. As pure market research, that project list is easily worth the $40000-odd in hardware it cost them to get it. And I applaud them for sharing it with us.
I was going for an MP3 player out of one of mine, and use the serial port for input for my digicam and/or embedded GPS unit (Garmin GPS-25). The other one was gonna run a stripped-down Linux and vgetty to act as a voice mail terminal.
I didn't sign up, mainly because I figured that while this would be fun for me to do, it didn't really involve enough development on my part to qualify for the programme. I mean, I was just gonna put together some software that other people had already built, and tell the compiler to optimize for size instead of speed. While I've enjoyed poking around with the hardware (headphone-out, line-out, VGA-out, mounting an external IDE CDROM case for MP3s, and lots of fun with a Dremel tool to make sure all my mods looked as though they'd been built into the machine from the factory) I figured my software projects were "too lame".
Hmph! Looks like I missed out on a free IO!;-)
Meanwhile, my congratulations to all whose projects were selected. While some may have the look of "gee, someone got a free IO for doing that", some look very promising. But the bottom line is that whatever the project, folks are getting their hands dirty and their feet wet, and a company is rewarding them for it. This can only be a Good Thing.
The beauty of open source (and the thing I overlooked when evaluating my project) is that with open source, "nothing's too lame". Because we're developing on our own time, we're allowed (even encouraged!) to follow our whims.
Out of any 100 ideas, only a handful will find market acceptance anyways - but only in our development model can we afford to make the 99 mistakes before we get the Killer App. We make lots of mistakes, but we can afford to, so we learn from them. We evolve. We - to resurrect a much-abused term these days - innovate.
> OK, I am a big fan of Bladeenc. You must realize that it is meant for 160kbps and above, period, so all you low-bandwidth, joint stereo types use something else. Everyone else, crank it up at 192 or 256.
This is the part I don't get about Blade users. I mean, c'mon. What's MP3 designed to do? Lossy compression of an audio bitstream. Nothing less, nothing more. If you have to jack up the bit rate to get the same quality as with another encoder, you're using the wrong encoder.
MP3 is about maintaining audio quality under lossy compression. "Better quality at the same bitrate", or "the same quality at a lower bitrate" compared to another encoder mean the same thing: good. If you're writing an encoder, they're your design goals. To the extent that you meet those goals, your encoder "rocks". To the extent that it fails to meet these goals, your encoder "sucks".
Compared to just about every encoder out there, Blade produces a poorer quality encode at the same bitrate. Blade requires a higher bitrate to eliminate the artifacts it introduces into the signal. So if you're comparing encoders' ability to faithfully reproduce the music, Blade is a poor MP3 encoder.
Don't get me wrong, AC -- I also like the fact that it's open source. And I also really like the fact that it's not patent-encumbered like Fraun. That's worth something on a political level, but that doesn't mean that it's superior on a technical level.
Jacking up the bitrate to make up for the poor quality of your MP3 encoder is like rendering the dancing paperclip in M$Word in 1600x1280x32-bit color at 60 fps (and 12 gigabytes per install) to make up for the quality of the rest of the office suite. You can't polish a turd.
Scary writes: > Does that mean that I can be jailed if I say "Microsoft Sucks"
Nope. Truth is an absolute defence against libel. From the article:
> "and prove that there is a basis for everything said on his Web site."
Which means I'd really like to see the transcripts of the kid's trial:
Failing that, let's crank up the time machine and read the following fictional account of the trial from "Tackhead's Ideal Universe Where People Who Launch Stupid Lawsuits Get What's Coming To Them":
"Your Honor, I have here a love note from Miss Kaitlynn Frobozznitz, age 16, to Richard (to whom she coloquially refers as "Big Dickie") Johnson, Principal, age 37, and I have here an office memo from the same Principal to the custodial staff, detailing that the custodial staff is to have every third Wednesday off work and is to vacate the building by 4:00 pm. I will now present another memo in the same handwriting, addressed to 'Katiep00', arranging what appears to be a tryst at 4:15 pm, and telling her to bring her brother Bratney and three gerbils, for reasons which should probably not be discussed in open court.
An nslookup and WHOIS query reveal a "Dick Johnson" as the owner of "kaitlynnspanties.com", which purports itself to be a pornographic web site, hosted in the principality of Sealand. A subpoena to AOL revealed that the katiep00 account is, indeed, owned by Ms. Frobozznitz. The folks at Sealand were kind enough to provide us with a full mirror, but we (surprisingly) found a copy in the cache of the DA's web browser, so the tapes from Sealand may be redundant. We have also subpoenaed Kaitlynn, Bratney's, and Big Dick Johnson's computers and are able to present their chat logs and emails for the past two months, because the threesome were obviously too stupid to use PGP.
But we believe the circumstancial evidence alone is sufficient to prove Kaitlynn's sluttishness. The defence rests."
> Thus the absolute maximum income tax you will pay is 43.35%
Add in the "federal surtax" and the "federal high income surtax", and remember that you pay provincial income taxes on both of those taxes. There are also provincial surtaxes for people deemed "rich".
There are also tax deductions in the US. I don't think Canadians can deduct the interest on their mortgages! And 401(k)s can get employer matching contributions, tax-free to the employee. RRSPs can't. (And your 401(k) assets can be invested anywhere on the plnaet. 80% of your RRSP assets have to be invested in the Canadian markets, which have historically underperformed US markets.)
Finally, with the Canadian dollar at about two-thirds of the American dollar, that "maximum income tax" bracket is reached at about $40,000 US. That's right, you're considered "really disgustingly filthy rich so you can have the hell taxed out of you" in Canada at the whopping sum of $US 40K. Sheesh.
In fairness to the original poster, the standard of living is probably comparable on both sides of the border - the cost of living is much lower in Canada, you don't need private school if you've got kids, and your (and your kids') medical coverage is "free" (in that you've paid for it with the taxes). That's a big equalizer.
But to say that the maximum tax rate in BC is 43% is just nuts. You want low (relative to Canada) taxes, try Alberta or Ontario. You'll roughly match California's tax structure -- but if we're talking about MSFT employees, WA has *no* state income tax, IIRC. On the income tax side, no jurisdiction in Canada comes close to that.
There's a whole lotta Canadian tax calculators at the Canadian sites for KPMG and Ernst & Young.
I like MP3 for "portability", in that it's what everyone else is using, but if bandwidth isn't a consideration, and you're after lossless compression for archival purposes, Monkey kicks mucho ass.
To the one who asked for a repost of the files, I no longer have them, but I do have a bit of the README from the USENET posting that convinced me.
> These 8 mp3s were made from the same wav file - the first 15 secs. of > New Order's "Blue Monday". While this is not a "typical" musical passage, > it demonstrates the output of several encoders. I did not include the > wav file, but it sounds indistinguishable from the LAME, MP3ENC and FhG > (Audioactive/Radium codec/Producer) mp3s. The files include: > > Blade 128 - Blade 0.91 128 S > Blade 160 - " 160 S > Blade 192 - " 192 S > LAME - 3.58 dll 128 JS > scmpx - SCMPX 1.5.1 128 JS > mp3enc - MP3ENC 3.1 128 JS > fhg JS - Fraunhofer/Radium codec 1.263 128 JS > fhg stereo - " 128 S > > Note that even the Blade 192 file has noticeable artifacts. > The SCMPX file has minor artifacts (which vanish at 160kbps), > while the LAME, FhG and MP3ENC files exhibit none. To show that > this is not just the result of a joint stereo encode producing > a better result on a quasi-mono track I have included a 128 > stereo mp3 made with the FhG codec. >
Which reminds me, why the hell did I forget LAME? LAME kicked ass too.
Basically, if you hear a track where the drum kicks, guitars, or what-not, sound like someone's splashing through water or slicing through a layer of jello before they hit the note, it's Blade:-(
Hey, I dunno about you, but as cool as Blade is, being open-source and all, I have serious reservations about its psychoacoustic model. If you're transferring over anything less than a T1, bandwidth still matters, and that means quality-at-a-given-bitrate matters.
Ignore IP law for a few minutes, and try something like the first few seconds New Order's "Blue Monday" or some other "simple drum track". Encode it with Blade/128, Blade/160, and Blade/192. Then try Fraun, Gogo, or even friggin' Xing at the same bitrates.
I'm no fan of Xing, but I'll betcha you'll be able to hear the difference between Blade and Fraun at least at 160, and maybe even 192.
I consider Blade/128 unlistenable - but even I was surprised when I could tell the difference between Blade/160 and Fraun/160. And after a few tries, I was able to distinguish between Blade/192 and Fraun/192.
For reference purposes, as far as my ears went, (um, and my headphones went) Fran/128 sounded as good as Blade/192, and Fraun/160 and Fraun/192 were indistinguishable from each other and the CD.
Yes, some encoders perform better than others on different types of music. But for many types of music, Blade isn't the right answer from a quality point of view.
Does it have as much caffeine as Jolt, and does it taste as good? (Hey, I like Jolt. Deal with it.)
Since the recipe's open-sourced, I presume it's OK to grind up a whole mess of No-Doz or other caffeine supplement to make something even better than Jolt, right?
(Mmm, all the sugar and twice the caffeine of Jolt;-)
> > So, if I patent the smell of horseshit, will Microsoft owe my a royalty > > for each of their press releases? > > No, you'd need to register the smell of bullshit. Products themselves might > fall under the protection of dogshit. There's a big difference you know.
OK, kids, let's get our shit straight.
Dogshit comes out of a dog's ass. Bullshit comes out of a bull's ass. So where does horseshit come from?
Right. Gates and Balmer. I mean, one read of their performances during the antitrust trial, how can anyone not realize they're a pair of Grade-A horses' asses?
Now if it's runny, slimy sheepshit you want, (as opposed to run-of-the-mill bullshit), try the goo spewing forth from the Freedom to Innovate Network. That's some serious shit.
But whether it's dogshit(tm), bullshit(R), sheepshit(c), or horseshit(pat. pending), like the man said, there is a difference.
...and if he can't get in, what hope is there for anyone else?
> There just isn't enough employment to go around
Then why are US high-tech companies chronically starved for talent and hiring foreigners? Why are the 115,000 H-1B visas subject to the cap used up in the first 6 months of the fiscal year? Surely it's not because companies want to file paperwork and wait for 3-6 months for INS to authorize them to hire these people?
We are in a period of record low unemployment - when even burger flippers with no experience are demanding $10-15 per hour. When Denny's is resorting to recruiting from Canada, fer fsck's sake, you can't expect to be taken seriously when you say something like "there just isn't enough employment to go around".
My beef with US immigration policy is threefold:
Emphasis on amnesty for impoverished illegals in order to get votes -- but nothing to service legal, taxpaying nonimmigrants (TNs and H-1Bs), and active measures to delay immigrant (Green Card) processing to render it impossible for people getting green cards through work. You can come into the country poor as dirt and marry an American, and you can apply for the green card in a matter of weeks. But actually contribute to the economy? Have skills and get hired? Your application passes through four bureaucracies (SESA, DOL, INS, DOS) for years, during which time your temporary visa expires or your company ceases to exist. You're skilled enough to get another job the next morning by walking across the street to the next.com, but you have to start the paperwork over again. Got a good job and get paid six figures? We don't want your kind.
A labor certification process that, at least in California, takes 3-6 months for the labor cert (or three years if you fill the paperwork out wrong), a year (!) for the I-140, where the employer asks INS for permission to apply for a green card, and either "another 6 months for processing by the State Department" or "3-5 years for processing by INS". That is, a system in which green card applicants tend to have their H-1Bs expire before the company can hire them. The US wants TNs - because they have to leave the country when the job goes away and applying for a green card makes it easy to reject a TN renewal. They want H-1Bs for the same reason - you still gotta leave when your time's up. But US immigration policy is heavily stacked against anyone coming here with the intention of working permanently in the US.
A budgetary structure where INS' "enforcement" arm (mission: imprison and deport legals and illegals alike) is funded from Congress, but their "service" arm (mission: process forms from businesses seeking to exercise their rights under the law) is funded from service fees. Guess which arm actually has a hope in hell of fulfilling its mandate? Guess which arm is underfunded to the point where the fastest transactions are measured in weeks, and the slowest are measured in years?
Bottom line - I'm strongly in favor of requirements that ensure foreigners can't be underpaid relative to US workers. But especially in high tech, where there are Simply Not Enough skilled workers, if a company wants to hire a foreigner on a permanent basis let 'em. Geeks make companies grow. Geeks pay taxes. Geeks rarely consume social services. They're about as low-drag as it gets on the economy.
When a governmental bureaucracy can't move fast enough to let someone like Linus Torvalds into the country in a sane timeframe, their game plan is made pretty fscking obvious. We live in an environment where our companies come and go in two years - any process whereby it's expected to take 2-3 years to hire a person permanently is obviously designed with the sole purpose of keeping people out, and it's plain to see that INS doesn't give a rat's arse about the damage they're doing to our economy in the process.
> RealPlayer keeps bugging me to "register" it. Lately, it's been asking me to > download (from within RealPlayer) an "update" for the player, as well.
Which update is that? I got two of these for my 'doze RealG2 install. The first was a few hundred K long, and without it, some of my downloaded South Park episodes wouldn't play (hey, I was away from cable for a few months, I downloaded 'em in the name of interoperability:-).
ObHack1:
On a whim, I took a checksum of every file on my Winblows machine, did the update, redid the checksum, and diffed the output. GNU utilz make DOS useful.
The "update" is merely the replacement/addition of a couple of.DLL files for the G2 codec. I backed up the.DLLs, restored the disk image and replicated the "upgrade" by simply unzipping the.DLLs into the proper directory. Which meant that only one Win9x install had to phone home to Real. The rest were done offline. Sweet.
RealG2 is now whining at me to get an update that's about 3.1M in length. Since all of my.RM files play just fine without it, I'm repeatedly telling it to fsck off. Why fix what ain't broke?
Request:
What I'd really like to see is a registry hack to permanently disable (or set the "30 days" limit to "30 years") the nag.
Thoughts:
The problem with.RM is the problem with.AVI and M$Word's.DOC. One file extension, multiple incompatible formats. Since they're traditionally generated with closed-source software, all Real has to do is disable the ability to generate "old-sk00l".RM files in their encoder; content providers will subsequently generate data that can only be played back with "new-sk00l" players. Everyone's forced to upgrade in order to view content, and Real gets to install whatever trojans it wants. (At least most of the progress in.AVI codecs was made before the invention of spyware.)
The general rule of thumb I use is still never to upgrade any component of a Windoze system unless something is both (a) not working, and (b) there's reason to believe the upgrade will fix it.
Meanwhile, I'm also glad that MP3 is basically as good as it ever needs to be. For Windoze users - there will never be any reason to download "AOL-amp 9.99" that plays MP3s with embedded banner ads, and/or supports user profiling.
ObHack2:
Speaking of profiling, someone pointed me to a WindozeMedia video file (.ASF?) that, after it had played, spawned a browser and attempted to connect to the 'net and view a URL. Every time it was viewed -- even if you'd saved it to your local drive and were playing it locally. The URL was in ASCII embedded within the file. A few minutes with a hex editor solved that problem.
All of which is a long way of saying "me too". A cross-platform open-sourced solution for streaming and locally-stored video content would go a *long* way towards eliminating these kinds of abuses.
Excellent reply. Thanks. And yeah, I'm with you on the radio side - despite the fact that I think mp3.com had a valid defence here, the question of whether or not mp3.com was profiting off the service of providing "uploads" via a hash of some data blocks from the original CD, or off the playback of MP3 data was an interesting one, and there's a strong argument that mp3.com should have been cutting RIAA a piece of the action. Methinks mp3.com protests a bit too much, for instance, when they say they're only selling a "quick-upload" service.
What I find funny about the file-storage systems is that they're theoretically vulnerable to the same kinds of charges as Napster; that of contributory copyright infringement by facilitating a means whereby end-users can upload infringing content and access it from anywhere. (It's just not as blatant:)
I also agree with you that the fact that there is such overwhelming legal significance attached to this nit is evidence of an inherently self-contradictory legal system.
Fer that matter, I also agree that the main reason that it's not being changed is because the bugs work to the benefit of the monopolies, but I've been known to be cynical on occasion. OTOH, under our present legislative system, a wholesale throwing-out and restructuring of IP law would likely result in a set of laws so draconian that we'd see Richard Stallman begging for the tender mercies of the "goold old days" under DMCA.
Sloppy: Your example of reverse-engineered BIOS is excellent!
I'm not sure how/if it applies to this case - but it certainly does prove (contrary to my thesis) that there exist at least some circumstances in which ancestry matters. Whether this case is such a circumstance is something I'd really like to see the judge look at.
> No proof of ownership was ever required. Proof of posession of the CD was required.
Incidentally, if RIAA had used this argument against my.mp3.com, I think they'd have had a much stronger case, and I'd have had no problem with a ruling against mp3.com on such grounds.
What's interesting is that uploading "the mp3 you rip" to something like myplay.com or idrive.com, doesn't even prove that you ever had the CD in your posession. But these services aren't getting sued, while mp3.com did.
Yet more evidence that RIAA is far more interested in eliminating people who've pissed it off than in protecting the intellectual property of its artists.
The reason radio stations pay royalties is because they broadcast music to people who haven't purchased the shiny metal discs.
The reason I believe mp3.com should not have to pay such royalties is because they don't broadcast - they merely allow one-to-one transfer of licensed content from a server on mp3.com to your hard drive, given that you've proven you at one time had a shiny metal disc. No shiny metal? No music.
Your description of the distinction between my.mp3.com giving you their copy and myplay.com giving you your copy is "nitpicky but legally important" neatly encapsulates my problem with Rakoff's ruling.
If it's "nitpicky", then why are there multibillion dollar penalties associated with picking the nit with one tool, and no penalty for picking the same nit with the other tool?
If it's not nitpicky, why isn't myplay.com getting sued into the ground? It's precisely the same threat (in terms of users accessing unlicensed content and thereby threatening RIAA's revenue stream) as my.mp3.com.
Were I in Rakoff's shoes, I'd declare my.mp3.com guilty of the copyright violation in question, for which I'd award RIAA a judgement of $1.00 in damages.
In view of RIAA's willingness to attack mp3.com for using a method that's more secure than its competitors, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to every other file-storage system, I'd then tell RIAA's lawyers that the next time they set foot in my courtroom, they'd better be prepared to defend themselves against charges of barratry.
> It's a difference of opinion: you say that digital copies are all the same and any copy is as good as any other copy. > Rakoff disagrees: he distinguishes between copies on the basis of their ancestry. This is a perfectly valid viewpoint.
I'm glad you're taking up this side of the argument; I hold the opposite view, namely that from an information-theoretic point of view the files are identical, and that lineage is (and ought to be) irrelevant.
My argument goes as follows:
If the purpose of intellectual property law is to safeguard the interests of the owners of said IP, and the IP in question is a bitstream on a shiny metal disc, then the information-theoretic point of view trumps lineage.
If the objection is piracy and the goal is the protection of the revenue stream of the artist and record label, the purpose of IP law should be to make the bitstream (or substantially-identical copies thereof) scarce - to restrict access to bitstreams to those who have paid for access.
This implies to me that what matters is whether the listener has paid for access to the bistreams on the CD. I fail to see where lineage (who does the ripping/encoding/uploading) enters into it.
I would be very interested in reading your argument in favor of the thesis that distinguishing between copies on the basis of their ancestry is a Useful Thing.
If the purpose of IP law is to stop piracy, how does a lineage-centric interpretation of the law (third-party-encoded MP3s / mp3.com bad, but user-encoded-and-uploaded / myplay.com MP3s good) help meet that goal, when an information-theoretical-centric interpretation could be used to attack (or defend) both the models behind mp3.com and myplay.com?
> if I borrowed 100 CDs from a friend for an afternoon and registered them, > then returned the CDs, I would be able to listen to music I hadn't purchased.
Agreed - but how does ripping and uploading your own MP3 prove that you purchased the CD either?
All it means is that you had your mitts on the CD for 15-20 minutes to do the ripping to your hard drive, rather than 1-2 minutes to do the CD-registration at my.mp3.com.
Either space- and format-shifting of CDDA media to MP3 files to be downloaded over a network is legal, or it's not.
I know that you didn't make this distinction in your post - and that you (and I, and most others) would all agree that a user who brorrowed 100 CDs from a friend to rip them and upload them to a secure web space was just as much a copyright violator as one who pulled the same kind of stunt with mp3.com registrations on borrowed CDs.
But the judge did make this distinction, and in so doing, IMNSHO, displayed a shocking lack of clue as to what IP law was intended to do.
What should matter is whether or not the end user has a right to listen to (an MP3 representation of music transmitted over a network) to which he or she has purchased the right to hear (a CDDA representation of music stored on a compact disc).
The mechanism by which the space- and format-shift occurs ought to be irrelevant.
Arguing that it matters who/when/how the rip took place is like saying that it's legal to grow peas in your own garden and store them in your freezer for the winter, but illegal to purchase peas grown and frozen by someone else from the grocery store.
> If I was MP3.com I would wave a magic wand and then tell the courts and RIAA > "We didn't make that music. It was uploaded by hundreds of users who own the albums".
That's my problem with the ruling.
Premise1: The aim of copyright law is to protect the IP of the owner
Premise2: a secure technology which requires ownership of physical media is a good mechanism to ensure that the downloader has a license (in the form of physical media) to listen to the content embedded thereon.
Premise3: Space-shifting is legit because it's fair use.
Conclusion: Any technology which requires users to prove ownership of a piece of music before allowing them to space-shift ought to be, a priori, legit.
It should make no fscking difference whether MP3.COM does the ripping and asks you to prove you own the CD, or if myplay.com requires the end user to do the ripping and upload the MP3.
Since what's really happened is:
Services like mp3.com which do the ripping for you and require proof of ownership of physical media are Deemed Naughty.
Services like myplay.com which require the end user to do his or her own ripping and uploading as proof of ownership of physical media are Deemed Non-Naughty
And since:
Nobody's seriously argued that owning the CD doesn't constitute proof that the owner has a right to listen to the content on it.
Nobody's overturned space-shifting as fair use lately
I can only concluce that the first premise is false, and that RIAA really doesn't give a wet slap about consistent enforcement of intellectual property rights as anything other than a club to beat an old enemy, MP3.COM, into submission.
Am I the only one on the face of this earth who doesn't see a glaring inconsistency here? If it were about protecting intellecutal property, RIAA would be arguing that both mp3.com and myplay.com ought to be burned to the ground
You can't have it both ways.
If you care for consistency in the application of IP law, you must conclude that either mp3.com and myplay.com are legit, or both are violating (or facilitating the violation of) copyright. I don't care which side of that fence you fall on - the as long as you don't try to have it both ways. End users who own media should be able to space- and format-shift, or they should not. In terms of protection of intellectual property, the mechanism is utterly irrelevant.
Furthermore, if you reject this conclusion (that the method of shifting is irrelevant) on the basis of law - if you really believe that what mp3.com did is/ought-to-be illegal, but that what myplay.com is doing is/ought-to-be allowed - and you still pretend to give a damn about consistency in IP law, you must conclude that IP law as it exists on the books is fundamentally flawed and needs to be rewritten.
A final note to Judge Rackoff - and it's a pity we can't bring him in for an interview - but if we could, I'd like to ask him the following:
Is space- and time-shifting legal, regardless of mechanism, or not? To be sure, the law makes a distinction in terms of mechanism, and it's on those grounds that you've rendered your judgement. But you've utterly failed to explain why the mechanism matters in anything but the most narrow legalistic sense. In so doing, all you've accomplished is to bolster the argument that IP law as it exists on the books is hopelessly outdated and needs to be thrown out and replaced with something that accomplishes what it was intended to do.
Trying to pretend that mp3.com and myplay.com are somehow fundamentally different bespeaks a grave lack of understanding of what IP law was designed to accomplish, and with all due respect, brings both the law and your court into disrepute.
Seriously, I've been trolling for vinyl too. Very hard to find. All I have is the more recent stuff on CD. I'm regularly polling a couple of good indie record stores that have good industrial coverage and will let you know if I find anything rare. Meanwhile, keep your eyes on the obvious site that you've probably found from the Tackhead site I mentioned. (It was news to me too:)
As for Tackhead - I'll heartily recommend the three "Power, Inc." volumes, which should still be available on CD. They're also being done through Keith LeBlanc's own label, which I would hope means that Keith actually gets some of the proceeds from the sales...
(...getting back on topic, at least marginally...)...unlike certain other bands which don't want their music *traded* as a commodity, but being bought and sold as a commodity is just fine. *g*
sterwill wrote: > Sendmail is an MTA, not an MUA. I don't see how Sendmail > (or any of the better mailers like postfix or qmail) would ever have this problem.
When your outgoing mail is handled by Sendmail, but your end-lusers are running M$ Outlook, and all 5000 of them are emailing everybody they know multiple copies of the virus, your Sendmail server is at risk of crashing too. It's basically an internally-generated DOS attack.
Someone posted that Outlook is basically a DDOS tool. I couldn't agree more. If "freedom to innovate" means "freedom to build more security holes into an MUA than swiss cheese", then I, for one, would like to see the DOJ give up their talk about a M$ breakup and just pull a Waco on the Mickeysoft campus.
If you're an administrator, you already know that your end-lusers will never disable the security holes in Outlook, and that viruses flourish in monocultures. Seriously consider mandating - as a matter of corporate security - that the risks of using Outlook outweigh the benefits, and that it not be used in your organization. Deinstall or disable it on every new desktop you set up before the user gets their hands on it.
So what if they can't understand elm, mutt, or pine? Give 'em Eudora, Pegasus, or hell, even Nutscrape's built-in mail client. Anything but Outlook and MSexchange.
I always wondered why FBI never set up a series of "sting" sites for just such logging. It wouldn't take much to convince a judge that regularly searching for, and downloading, files with names like those mentioned on the site could constitute reasonable grounds to begin an investigation. And while we're on the subject, why hasn't RIAA/MPAA done the same thing for Gnutella or Napster.
Of course, maybe they have. Oops, here come the men in black...
Bottom line, if you're (l)using anything that involves direct connection over IP between your box and the other guy's box, you have to trust the server on the other end of the connection.
Meanwhile, why hasn't anyone posted that the logs mentioned in today's article are available as screenshots, not text, and are consequently unlikely to be indexed by search engines? I'd say the loggers went as far out of their way as they could to preserve the loggees privacy while still making it very clear that Everything You Download From Someone Else's Computer Can Be Logged.
Maynard: What's my mission now? Now what? Now to get a good line-out signal from my hacked I-opener, plug in a 30G hard drive, and change the boot logo from Tux the Penguin to a scan of the Nostromo's self-destruct panel from the movie "Alien"... In other words, yes, I was wondering when someone would spot the reference:)
ObTack: This Tackhead site has pretty up-to-date info. And some really interesting links. Nuff said:)
Slashdot Mirror
> I'm a bit disturbed that the Netpliance page mentions that the internal IDE header has been disabled.
Maybe in BIOS, but everyone who's bought one has been able to hack it. It just takes a little more effort (either boot with a hard drive and proper geometry settings, or remove the epoxy from the old BIOS socket and swap in a new chip) now than it did in March :-)
If you've ordered one, it'll eventually get there, and you'll eventually be able to hack it.
The AC continues:
> If Netpliance just wanted a stable Java environment and a suitable browser, they'd need to look no further than Tao's Elate for the OS and JRE side and Espial's Escape for the browser solution
When you get your IO, hack away. The resources (Ken's BBS, the IO mailing list @scsiboy.com, and all the web sites) are all still out there. I for one would love to see what you come up with. I wimped out and got a 6.4G hard drive for one of my boxen, but I still have another one for which "no moving parts" is my design objective.
> This is obviously about saving money, not delivering the best product, although in light of how much money us cheapskates have cost them (have a heart, guys, you might end up working at a startup with a crappy business model someday), they probably need the break to stay alive
The "arms race" between NPLI's hardware mods and the hackers countering them served only to provide the hackers with amusement. The real way to stop sales to the hacker community (as you correctly point out, this is something they pretty much had to do) was to beef up their TOS. Which they did.
It's just that with the credit card charging issues to people who really did buy them for their parents, and their strong-arm phone tactics on people who ordered pre-TOS (trying to tell them that the new "$500 termination fee" TOS applied retroactively) they (IMHO) overstepped the bounds of good taste and sound business practices.
That said, these tactics have stopped now, and NPLI has behaved well for the past month or two. Yes, they're constrained in their ability to meet demand for the units, but they no longer appear to be engaged in questionable business practices.
(Sadly, that was another reason I passed on the Developer's Corner. At the time I would have been most tempted to sign up, they were (IMHO again) really skirting the limits of the bait-and-switch laws, I just didn't trust them. I'm immensely gratified to see they've cleaned up their act.)
Ideas you may wish to take back to NPLI for future hardware revisions:
- Replace the IDE port with a SanDisk port and make it accessible. The thing boots off the 16M SanDisk, and a user-supplied 32- or 64-M CompactFlash card can be used to "load" the stereo with MP3s.
- NTSC-out. The 10" screen is cool for day-to-day use, but if you hooked the MP3-loaded CompactFlash-enhanced thing up to your TV and ran visualizations... This would require a major redesign of the motherboard, but might still be cheaper than going active matrix on the display.
- Wireless (IR) keyboard interface and software to support the use of a remote control.
- Line-out, which, as we know, is already 99% built into the existing design.
Basically, I'm thinking there's a secondary market - there's obvious demand for turnkey MP3 solutions. MP3 solutions that give the user a "home audio component" feel plus things like TV visualizations that they can't get anywhere else may be a big market.Since NPLI derives revenue from service fees, how about either adding a CDROM built-in and phoning-home to get the CDDB data. The aggregated data of who listens to what and when could be resold. The user's value-add is that it's a CD player that tells them what the name of the song is, as well as has all that funky NTSC-out visualization.
Not terribly nice from a privacy point of view, I know, but hey, it's what CDDB is probably doing anyway ;-)
Poor/unmaintainable/insecure code always sucks.
(P.S. Thanks for calling me on my misuse of "allowed". To develop software is an inherent right, not something bestowed upon us.)
BTW, there's a VGA-out port in the I-Opener, so if your grandparents wanna try the 14" monitor for readability, it should work (sync/refresh rates permitting) fine with the IO. Total time invested, about 15 minutes with a soldering iron ;-)
But as for theories that NPLI is doing this as "only a publicity stunt", it may be so -- but there's one other option that hasn't been considered. As pure market research, that project list is easily worth the $40000-odd in hardware it cost them to get it. And I applaud them for sharing it with us.
I was going for an MP3 player out of one of mine, and use the serial port for input for my digicam and/or embedded GPS unit (Garmin GPS-25). The other one was gonna run a stripped-down Linux and vgetty to act as a voice mail terminal.
I didn't sign up, mainly because I figured that while this would be fun for me to do, it didn't really involve enough development on my part to qualify for the programme. I mean, I was just gonna put together some software that other people had already built, and tell the compiler to optimize for size instead of speed. While I've enjoyed poking around with the hardware (headphone-out, line-out, VGA-out, mounting an external IDE CDROM case for MP3s, and lots of fun with a Dremel tool to make sure all my mods looked as though they'd been built into the machine from the factory) I figured my software projects were "too lame".
Hmph! Looks like I missed out on a free IO! ;-)
Meanwhile, my congratulations to all whose projects were selected. While some may have the look of "gee, someone got a free IO for doing that", some look very promising. But the bottom line is that whatever the project, folks are getting their hands dirty and their feet wet, and a company is rewarding them for it. This can only be a Good Thing.
The beauty of open source (and the thing I overlooked when evaluating my project) is that with open source, "nothing's too lame". Because we're developing on our own time, we're allowed (even encouraged!) to follow our whims.
Out of any 100 ideas, only a handful will find market acceptance anyways - but only in our development model can we afford to make the 99 mistakes before we get the Killer App. We make lots of mistakes, but we can afford to, so we learn from them. We evolve. We - to resurrect a much-abused term these days - innovate.
This is the part I don't get about Blade users. I mean, c'mon. What's MP3 designed to do? Lossy compression of an audio bitstream. Nothing less, nothing more. If you have to jack up the bit rate to get the same quality as with another encoder, you're using the wrong encoder.
MP3 is about maintaining audio quality under lossy compression. "Better quality at the same bitrate", or "the same quality at a lower bitrate" compared to another encoder mean the same thing: good. If you're writing an encoder, they're your design goals. To the extent that you meet those goals, your encoder "rocks". To the extent that it fails to meet these goals, your encoder "sucks".
Compared to just about every encoder out there, Blade produces a poorer quality encode at the same bitrate. Blade requires a higher bitrate to eliminate the artifacts it introduces into the signal. So if you're comparing encoders' ability to faithfully reproduce the music, Blade is a poor MP3 encoder.
Don't get me wrong, AC -- I also like the fact that it's open source. And I also really like the fact that it's not patent-encumbered like Fraun. That's worth something on a political level, but that doesn't mean that it's superior on a technical level.
Jacking up the bitrate to make up for the poor quality of your MP3 encoder is like rendering the dancing paperclip in M$Word in 1600x1280x32-bit color at 60 fps (and 12 gigabytes per install) to make up for the quality of the rest of the office suite. You can't polish a turd.
> Does that mean that I can be jailed if I say "Microsoft Sucks"
Nope. Truth is an absolute defence against libel. From the article:
> "and prove that there is a basis for everything said on his Web site."
Which means I'd really like to see the transcripts of the kid's trial:
Failing that, let's crank up the time machine and read the following fictional account of the trial from "Tackhead's Ideal Universe Where People Who Launch Stupid Lawsuits Get What's Coming To Them":
"Your Honor, I have here a love note from Miss Kaitlynn Frobozznitz, age 16, to Richard (to whom she coloquially refers as "Big Dickie") Johnson, Principal, age 37, and I have here an office memo from the same Principal to the custodial staff, detailing that the custodial staff is to have every third Wednesday off work and is to vacate the building by 4:00 pm. I will now present another memo in the same handwriting, addressed to 'Katiep00', arranging what appears to be a tryst at 4:15 pm, and telling her to bring her brother Bratney and three gerbils, for reasons which should probably not be discussed in open court.
An nslookup and WHOIS query reveal a "Dick Johnson" as the owner of "kaitlynnspanties.com", which purports itself to be a pornographic web site, hosted in the principality of Sealand. A subpoena to AOL revealed that the katiep00 account is, indeed, owned by Ms. Frobozznitz. The folks at Sealand were kind enough to provide us with a full mirror, but we (surprisingly) found a copy in the cache of the DA's web browser, so the tapes from Sealand may be redundant. We have also subpoenaed Kaitlynn, Bratney's, and Big Dick Johnson's computers and are able to present their chat logs and emails for the past two months, because the threesome were obviously too stupid to use PGP.
But we believe the circumstancial evidence alone is sufficient to prove Kaitlynn's sluttishness. The defence rests."
Add in the "federal surtax" and the "federal high income surtax", and remember that you pay provincial income taxes on both of those taxes. There are also provincial surtaxes for people deemed "rich".
There are also tax deductions in the US. I don't think Canadians can deduct the interest on their mortgages! And 401(k)s can get employer matching contributions, tax-free to the employee. RRSPs can't. (And your 401(k) assets can be invested anywhere on the plnaet. 80% of your RRSP assets have to be invested in the Canadian markets, which have historically underperformed US markets.)
Finally, with the Canadian dollar at about two-thirds of the American dollar, that "maximum income tax" bracket is reached at about $40,000 US. That's right, you're considered "really disgustingly filthy rich so you can have the hell taxed out of you" in Canada at the whopping sum of $US 40K. Sheesh.
In fairness to the original poster, the standard of living is probably comparable on both sides of the border - the cost of living is much lower in Canada, you don't need private school if you've got kids, and your (and your kids') medical coverage is "free" (in that you've paid for it with the taxes). That's a big equalizer.
But to say that the maximum tax rate in BC is 43% is just nuts. You want low (relative to Canada) taxes, try Alberta or Ontario. You'll roughly match California's tax structure -- but if we're talking about MSFT employees, WA has *no* state income tax, IIRC. On the income tax side, no jurisdiction in Canada comes close to that.
There's a whole lotta Canadian tax calculators at the Canadian sites for KPMG and Ernst & Young.
I like MP3 for "portability", in that it's what everyone else is using, but if bandwidth isn't a consideration, and you're after lossless compression for archival purposes, Monkey kicks mucho ass.
To the one who asked for a repost of the files, I no longer have them, but I do have a bit of the README from the USENET posting that convinced me.
> These 8 mp3s were made from the same wav file - the first 15 secs. of
> New Order's "Blue Monday". While this is not a "typical" musical passage,
> it demonstrates the output of several encoders. I did not include the
> wav file, but it sounds indistinguishable from the LAME, MP3ENC and FhG
> (Audioactive/Radium codec/Producer) mp3s. The files include:
>
> Blade 128 - Blade 0.91 128 S
> Blade 160 - " 160 S
> Blade 192 - " 192 S
> LAME - 3.58 dll 128 JS
> scmpx - SCMPX 1.5.1 128 JS
> mp3enc - MP3ENC 3.1 128 JS
> fhg JS - Fraunhofer/Radium codec 1.263 128 JS
> fhg stereo - " 128 S
>
> Note that even the Blade 192 file has noticeable artifacts.
> The SCMPX file has minor artifacts (which vanish at 160kbps),
> while the LAME, FhG and MP3ENC files exhibit none. To show that
> this is not just the result of a joint stereo encode producing
> a better result on a quasi-mono track I have included a 128
> stereo mp3 made with the FhG codec.
>
Which reminds me, why the hell did I forget LAME? LAME kicked ass too.
Basically, if you hear a track where the drum kicks, guitars, or what-not, sound like someone's splashing through water or slicing through a layer of jello before they hit the note, it's Blade :-(
Ignore IP law for a few minutes, and try something like the first few seconds New Order's "Blue Monday" or some other "simple drum track". Encode it with Blade/128, Blade/160, and Blade/192. Then try Fraun, Gogo, or even friggin' Xing at the same bitrates.
I'm no fan of Xing, but I'll betcha you'll be able to hear the difference between Blade and Fraun at least at 160, and maybe even 192.
I consider Blade/128 unlistenable - but even I was surprised when I could tell the difference between Blade/160 and Fraun/160. And after a few tries, I was able to distinguish between Blade/192 and Fraun/192.
For reference purposes, as far as my ears went, (um, and my headphones went) Fran/128 sounded as good as Blade/192, and Fraun/160 and Fraun/192 were indistinguishable from each other and the CD.
Yes, some encoders perform better than others on different types of music. But for many types of music, Blade isn't the right answer from a quality point of view.
- Does it have as much caffeine as Jolt, and does it taste as good? (Hey, I like Jolt. Deal with it.)
- Since the recipe's open-sourced, I presume it's OK to grind up a whole mess of No-Doz or other caffeine supplement to make something even better than Jolt, right?
(Mmm, all the sugar and twice the caffeine of Jolt> > for each of their press releases?
>
> No, you'd need to register the smell of bullshit. Products themselves might
> fall under the protection of dogshit. There's a big difference you know.
OK, kids, let's get our shit straight.
Dogshit comes out of a dog's ass.
Bullshit comes out of a bull's ass.
So where does horseshit come from?
Right. Gates and Balmer. I mean, one read of their performances during the antitrust trial, how can anyone not realize they're a pair of Grade-A horses' asses?
Now if it's runny, slimy sheepshit you want, (as opposed to run-of-the-mill bullshit), try the goo spewing forth from the Freedom to Innovate Network. That's some serious shit.
But whether it's dogshit(tm), bullshit(R), sheepshit(c), or horseshit(pat. pending), like the man said, there is a difference.
> There just isn't enough employment to go around
Then why are US high-tech companies chronically starved for talent and hiring foreigners? Why are the 115,000 H-1B visas subject to the cap used up in the first 6 months of the fiscal year? Surely it's not because companies want to file paperwork and wait for 3-6 months for INS to authorize them to hire these people?
We are in a period of record low unemployment - when even burger flippers with no experience are demanding $10-15 per hour. When Denny's is resorting to recruiting from Canada, fer fsck's sake, you can't expect to be taken seriously when you say something like "there just isn't enough employment to go around".
My beef with US immigration policy is threefold:
You think I'm making that up? I'm talking about Linus fscking Torvalds fer chrissakes.
Bottom line - I'm strongly in favor of requirements that ensure foreigners can't be underpaid relative to US workers. But especially in high tech, where there are Simply Not Enough skilled workers, if a company wants to hire a foreigner on a permanent basis let 'em. Geeks make companies grow. Geeks pay taxes. Geeks rarely consume social services. They're about as low-drag as it gets on the economy.
When a governmental bureaucracy can't move fast enough to let someone like Linus Torvalds into the country in a sane timeframe, their game plan is made pretty fscking obvious. We live in an environment where our companies come and go in two years - any process whereby it's expected to take 2-3 years to hire a person permanently is obviously designed with the sole purpose of keeping people out, and it's plain to see that INS doesn't give a rat's arse about the damage they're doing to our economy in the process.
> download (from within RealPlayer) an "update" for the player, as well.
Which update is that? I got two of these for my 'doze RealG2 install. The first was a few hundred K long, and without it, some of my downloaded South Park episodes wouldn't play (hey, I was away from cable for a few months, I downloaded 'em in the name of interoperability :-).
ObHack1:
On a whim, I took a checksum of every file on my Winblows machine, did the update, redid the checksum, and diffed the output. GNU utilz make DOS useful.
The "update" is merely the replacement/addition of a couple of .DLL files for the G2 codec. I backed up the .DLLs, restored the disk image and replicated the "upgrade" by simply unzipping the .DLLs into the proper directory. Which meant that only one Win9x install had to phone home to Real. The rest were done offline. Sweet.
RealG2 is now whining at me to get an update that's about 3.1M in length. Since all of my .RM files play just fine without it, I'm repeatedly telling it to fsck off. Why fix what ain't broke?
Request:
What I'd really like to see is a registry hack to permanently disable (or set the "30 days" limit to "30 years") the nag.
Thoughts:
The problem with .RM is the problem with .AVI and M$Word's .DOC. One file extension, multiple incompatible formats. Since they're traditionally generated with closed-source software, all Real has to do is disable the ability to generate "old-sk00l" .RM files in their encoder; content providers will subsequently generate data that can only be played back with "new-sk00l" players. Everyone's forced to upgrade in order to view content, and Real gets to install whatever trojans it wants. (At least most of the progress in .AVI codecs was made before the invention of spyware.)
The general rule of thumb I use is still never to upgrade any component of a Windoze system unless something is both (a) not working, and (b) there's reason to believe the upgrade will fix it.
Meanwhile, I'm also glad that MP3 is basically as good as it ever needs to be. For Windoze users - there will never be any reason to download "AOL-amp 9.99" that plays MP3s with embedded banner ads, and/or supports user profiling.
ObHack2:
Speaking of profiling, someone pointed me to a WindozeMedia video file (.ASF?) that, after it had played, spawned a browser and attempted to connect to the 'net and view a URL. Every time it was viewed -- even if you'd saved it to your local drive and were playing it locally. The URL was in ASCII embedded within the file. A few minutes with a hex editor solved that problem.
All of which is a long way of saying "me too". A cross-platform open-sourced solution for streaming and locally-stored video content would go a *long* way towards eliminating these kinds of abuses.
What I find funny about the file-storage systems is that they're theoretically vulnerable to the same kinds of charges as Napster; that of contributory copyright infringement by facilitating a means whereby end-users can upload infringing content and access it from anywhere. (It's just not as blatant :)
I also agree with you that the fact that there is such overwhelming legal significance attached to this nit is evidence of an inherently self-contradictory legal system.
Fer that matter, I also agree that the main reason that it's not being changed is because the bugs work to the benefit of the monopolies, but I've been known to be cynical on occasion. OTOH, under our present legislative system, a wholesale throwing-out and restructuring of IP law would likely result in a set of laws so draconian that we'd see Richard Stallman begging for the tender mercies of the "goold old days" under DMCA.
I'm not sure how/if it applies to this case - but it certainly does prove (contrary to my thesis) that there exist at least some circumstances in which ancestry matters. Whether this case is such a circumstance is something I'd really like to see the judge look at.
Meantime, major thanks for the clue.
Incidentally, if RIAA had used this argument against my.mp3.com, I think they'd have had a much stronger case, and I'd have had no problem with a ruling against mp3.com on such grounds.
What's interesting is that uploading "the mp3 you rip" to something like myplay.com or idrive.com, doesn't even prove that you ever had the CD in your posession. But these services aren't getting sued, while mp3.com did.
Yet more evidence that RIAA is far more interested in eliminating people who've pissed it off than in protecting the intellectual property of its artists.
The reason radio stations pay royalties is because they broadcast music to people who haven't purchased the shiny metal discs.
The reason I believe mp3.com should not have to pay such royalties is because they don't broadcast - they merely allow one-to-one transfer of licensed content from a server on mp3.com to your hard drive, given that you've proven you at one time had a shiny metal disc. No shiny metal? No music.
Your description of the distinction between my.mp3.com giving you their copy and myplay.com giving you your copy is "nitpicky but legally important" neatly encapsulates my problem with Rakoff's ruling.
If it's "nitpicky", then why are there multibillion dollar penalties associated with picking the nit with one tool, and no penalty for picking the same nit with the other tool?
If it's not nitpicky, why isn't myplay.com getting sued into the ground? It's precisely the same threat (in terms of users accessing unlicensed content and thereby threatening RIAA's revenue stream) as my.mp3.com.
Were I in Rakoff's shoes, I'd declare my.mp3.com guilty of the copyright violation in question, for which I'd award RIAA a judgement of $1.00 in damages.
In view of RIAA's willingness to attack mp3.com for using a method that's more secure than its competitors, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to every other file-storage system, I'd then tell RIAA's lawyers that the next time they set foot in my courtroom, they'd better be prepared to defend themselves against charges of barratry.
> Rakoff disagrees: he distinguishes between copies on the basis of their ancestry. This is a perfectly valid viewpoint.
I'm glad you're taking up this side of the argument; I hold the opposite view, namely that from an information-theoretic point of view the files are identical, and that lineage is (and ought to be) irrelevant.
My argument goes as follows:
If the purpose of intellectual property law is to safeguard the interests of the owners of said IP, and the IP in question is a bitstream on a shiny metal disc, then the information-theoretic point of view trumps lineage.
If the objection is piracy and the goal is the protection of the revenue stream of the artist and record label, the purpose of IP law should be to make the bitstream (or substantially-identical copies thereof) scarce - to restrict access to bitstreams to those who have paid for access.
This implies to me that what matters is whether the listener has paid for access to the bistreams on the CD. I fail to see where lineage (who does the ripping/encoding/uploading) enters into it.
I would be very interested in reading your argument in favor of the thesis that distinguishing between copies on the basis of their ancestry is a Useful Thing.
If the purpose of IP law is to stop piracy, how does a lineage-centric interpretation of the law (third-party-encoded MP3s / mp3.com bad, but user-encoded-and-uploaded / myplay.com MP3s good) help meet that goal, when an information-theoretical-centric interpretation could be used to attack (or defend) both the models behind mp3.com and myplay.com?
> then returned the CDs, I would be able to listen to music I hadn't purchased.
Agreed - but how does ripping and uploading your own MP3 prove that you purchased the CD either?
All it means is that you had your mitts on the CD for 15-20 minutes to do the ripping to your hard drive, rather than 1-2 minutes to do the CD-registration at my.mp3.com.
Either space- and format-shifting of CDDA media to MP3 files to be downloaded over a network is legal, or it's not.
I know that you didn't make this distinction in your post - and that you (and I, and most others) would all agree that a user who brorrowed 100 CDs from a friend to rip them and upload them to a secure web space was just as much a copyright violator as one who pulled the same kind of stunt with mp3.com registrations on borrowed CDs.
But the judge did make this distinction, and in so doing, IMNSHO, displayed a shocking lack of clue as to what IP law was intended to do.
What should matter is whether or not the end user has a right to listen to (an MP3 representation of music transmitted over a network) to which he or she has purchased the right to hear (a CDDA representation of music stored on a compact disc).
The mechanism by which the space- and format-shift occurs ought to be irrelevant.
Arguing that it matters who/when/how the rip took place is like saying that it's legal to grow peas in your own garden and store them in your freezer for the winter, but illegal to purchase peas grown and frozen by someone else from the grocery store.
(Visualize whirled peas! :)
> "We didn't make that music. It was uploaded by hundreds of users who own the albums".
That's my problem with the ruling.
It should make no fscking difference whether MP3.COM does the ripping and asks you to prove you own the CD, or if myplay.com requires the end user to do the ripping and upload the MP3.
Since what's really happened is:
- Services like mp3.com which do the ripping for you and require proof of ownership of physical media are Deemed Naughty.
- Services like myplay.com which require the end user to do his or her own ripping and uploading as proof of ownership of physical media are Deemed Non-Naughty
And since:- Nobody's seriously argued that owning the CD doesn't constitute proof that the owner has a right to listen to the content on it.
- Nobody's overturned space-shifting as fair use lately
I can only concluce that the first premise is false, and that RIAA really doesn't give a wet slap about consistent enforcement of intellectual property rights as anything other than a club to beat an old enemy, MP3.COM, into submission.Am I the only one on the face of this earth who doesn't see a glaring inconsistency here? If it were about protecting intellecutal property, RIAA would be arguing that both mp3.com and myplay.com ought to be burned to the ground
You can't have it both ways.
- If you care for consistency in the application of IP law, you must conclude that either mp3.com and myplay.com are legit, or both are violating (or facilitating the violation of) copyright. I don't care which side of that fence you fall on - the as long as you don't try to have it both ways. End users who own media should be able to space- and format-shift, or they should not. In terms of protection of intellectual property, the mechanism is utterly irrelevant.
- Furthermore, if you reject this conclusion (that the method of shifting is irrelevant) on the basis of law - if you really believe that what mp3.com did is/ought-to-be illegal, but that what myplay.com is doing is/ought-to-be allowed - and you still pretend to give a damn about consistency in IP law, you must conclude that IP law as it exists on the books is fundamentally flawed and needs to be rewritten.
A final note to Judge Rackoff - and it's a pity we can't bring him in for an interview - but if we could, I'd like to ask him the following:Is space- and time-shifting legal, regardless of mechanism, or not? To be sure, the law makes a distinction in terms of mechanism, and it's on those grounds that you've rendered your judgement. But you've utterly failed to explain why the mechanism matters in anything but the most narrow legalistic sense. In so doing, all you've accomplished is to bolster the argument that IP law as it exists on the books is hopelessly outdated and needs to be thrown out and replaced with something that accomplishes what it was intended to do.
Trying to pretend that mp3.com and myplay.com are somehow fundamentally different bespeaks a grave lack of understanding of what IP law was designed to accomplish, and with all due respect, brings both the law and your court into disrepute.
Seriously, I've been trolling for vinyl too. Very hard to find. All I have is the more recent stuff on CD. I'm regularly polling a couple of good indie record stores that have good industrial coverage and will let you know if I find anything rare. Meanwhile, keep your eyes on the obvious site that you've probably found from the Tackhead site I mentioned. (It was news to me too :)
As for Tackhead - I'll heartily recommend the three "Power, Inc." volumes, which should still be available on CD. They're also being done through Keith LeBlanc's own label, which I would hope means that Keith actually gets some of the proceeds from the sales...
(...getting back on topic, at least marginally...) ...unlike certain other bands which don't want their music *traded* as a commodity, but being bought and sold as a commodity is just fine. *g*
> Sendmail is an MTA, not an MUA. I don't see how Sendmail
> (or any of the better mailers like postfix or qmail) would ever have this problem.
When your outgoing mail is handled by Sendmail, but your end-lusers are running M$ Outlook, and all 5000 of them are emailing everybody they know multiple copies of the virus, your Sendmail server is at risk of crashing too. It's basically an internally-generated DOS attack.
Someone posted that Outlook is basically a DDOS tool. I couldn't agree more. If "freedom to innovate" means "freedom to build more security holes into an MUA than swiss cheese", then I, for one, would like to see the DOJ give up their talk about a M$ breakup and just pull a Waco on the Mickeysoft campus.
If you're an administrator, you already know that your end-lusers will never disable the security holes in Outlook, and that viruses flourish in monocultures. Seriously consider mandating - as a matter of corporate security - that the risks of using Outlook outweigh the benefits, and that it not be used in your organization. Deinstall or disable it on every new desktop you set up before the user gets their hands on it.
So what if they can't understand elm, mutt, or pine? Give 'em Eudora, Pegasus, or hell, even Nutscrape's built-in mail client. Anything but Outlook and MSexchange.
Of course, maybe they have. Oops, here come the men in black...
Bottom line, if you're (l)using anything that involves direct connection over IP between your box and the other guy's box, you have to trust the server on the other end of the connection.
Meanwhile, why hasn't anyone posted that the logs mentioned in today's article are available as screenshots, not text, and are consequently unlikely to be indexed by search engines? I'd say the loggers went as far out of their way as they could to preserve the loggees privacy while still making it very clear that Everything You Download From Someone Else's Computer Can Be Logged.
Meanwhile, for sheer laughs, dig The Misanthropic Bitch's list of referrers.
And no discussion of stupid people on the 'net would be complete without a link to Baiting.
ObTack: :)
This Tackhead site has pretty up-to-date info. And some really interesting links. Nuff said