In line with the current MPAA stance that backups cause illegal distribution of copywrited materials, I propose the following:
I. Both hands shall be cut off from every person over the age of 12. This will prevent people from being able to physically do the act of breaking copywrite law.
II. Both eyes shall be removed from every person over the age of 12. This will prevent people from breaking copywrite law via viewing copywrited material.
III. Both ears shall be cut off from every person over the age of 12. This will prevent people from breaking copywrite law via hearing copywrited material.
I live in atlanta. Comcast here charges $35-50 for basic cable.
However, what they DONT tell you is that most cable companies have 'basic BASIC cable'. They don't advertise it, but when my wife called the company and asked for the basic cable, and then asked for the 'real basic cable', she was told that for $12.99 a month we would get the first 20 channels.
1 week later, the guy was installing it, finished up, and said 'here's your 74 channels'. I'm guessing they can't filter it out. So, for $12.99 a month, we DO get Discovery, History, TLC, ESPN, Food channel (i love this one), as well as all the other BS that's on. If I can do this in Atlanta, I'm betting it's available other places as wel.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has counseled about 30 of the 261 people sued, Cohn said, adding that some have settled for fear of spending too much money fighting powerful corporations.
Isn't that the crutch of the matter? It really doesn't matter if what they are doing is right or wrong, as long as they have the money to take it to court and the people they are sueing do not, this will always be the case. What would really be nice would be for some noble rich person to start a trust fund for RIAA 'victems' to help pay for their legal battle if they so wish to fight this in the courts.
Otherwise this will just continue. Let's face it, as fair or unfair as the RIAA may be, most people aren't going to stop buying cds because of this; IMO, most people will just say 'oh that's too bad' like they did with the 12-year old girl and then go out and do what they normally do, if that includes buying a cd than so be it.
The only way to stop such practices is to
a) Educate the masses
or
b) Fight this in court
Actually, in this case the copy protection has more than once hindered my playing.
I bought BF1942 when it came out, and am an avid player. However, sometimes I will be disconnected from a server (because of a bug, or the server goes down, etc) and it will say 'CD Key in Use' for sometimes as long as the next 6 hours, and in that time it won't let me play because it thinks I'm still logged in. The same thing has occured in Tribes2, although it usually resets within 20 minute.
I understand the reasoning behind using CD keys, but when they prevent me, a valid user of the game from playing, it really starts to make me angry.
I have no idea about the facts and figures of how many people actually look at pop-up ads before they close them. I myself don't even _see_ them, since as soon as I hear the little *click* of a new browser openning, I go to the bottom of the screen and close it before it even comes up.
This leads me to this: assuming that very few people even bother to look at the ads, there must exist some portion that do, or else they wouldn't still be around. My idea would be for websites to have ONE (and only one) browser popup when you first enter their website (either through front page or links). This Browser can contain multiple ads, say 5-10. You are then free to peruse these at your leisure, or you can can close it down and not have to worry about any more popping up, at least while your webbrowser remains. This way, ads can still be shown, but only once, which is much less annoying.
One last quick post, I came across this article and thought I would share it, it was well written and quite informative. You probably already know everything listed, but you might find it interesting; I did.
Thank you for your informative reply. I never even knew that copyright was even mentioned in the constitution, IANAL. It has spurred me to go and do a bit of research on the topic myself, including reading up on the Eldred v. Ashcroft case (and reading the relative constitution passage). But yes, I now can understand better some of the posts I've read here and other places, and also makes some of my earlier posts seem pretty ludicrous. Oh well.
You replied to some of my other posts about copyright, and some of the stuff you said makes sense. I then assume that you have a working knowledge of copyright law and how it works. I, however, do not. I only know that if I try and and take someone else's work, be it a book or a video game or a movie, and make copies to resell, that it is against the law. And it doesn't seem to have any time limit to it
You imply that copyright is not for an unlimited time. I won't refute that, since I've already stated I really have no knowledge of copyright law. However, I do know a women (Alice Randall) was recently sued and because she wrote an parody to 'Gone With the Wind', a book that was made into a movie back in 1936. She won the suit, but only because she proved it was a 'parody' and not a 'sequel', and thus protected by our 1st amendment rights as you have stated in other posts. Had it been a 'sequel', it would have been against copyright law (so I read). In this case, perhaps the copyright for the book wasn't unlimited, but 66 years (and still going) is pretty long.
I'm really not trying to be trite, I'm just trying to understand how the systems works as of now.
I really don't know much about copyright law. However, I do know that when pharmaceutical create a new drug, the get a limited patent on it for a certain number of years, and then other companies can make generic versions of the drug. This is done so that the pharmaceutical company can recuperate some of its research spending to research the drug (and all drugs that didn't work, but still were researched), as well as make money (of course!).
I don't see why a similar thing can't be done in general. A company makes something, and gets the full use and privacy of its item for a certain number of years. During this time it makes money and is happy. Then, after the time limit is up, everyone can then do what they want with it, take it apart, improve it, sell their idea, etc.
True, big businesses would never go for this, because it would make much less powerful and much less money. But it sounds like a good idea, right?
For example, had the dinosaurs and half of all other species not been wiped out 65 million years ago, we wouldn't be here, stacking their bones in our museums
I recently rewatched "V - the series" and "V - the final battle". For those few here that haven't seen it, a bunch of seemingly humanoid aliens come to earth. However, these aliens end up being lizards who wear human skin to disguise themselves. A group of partisans realize the intent behind these aliens (to steal our water and use us for food).
One of the partisans makes what I consider a pretty good point (and makes this whole post on-topic). He notions the idea that unlike Earth, where some sort of disaster (meteor) wipes out many of the reptile species, the alien planet had no such disruption and the reptiles were free to evolve into sentient human-like beings.
Perhaps this is far-fetched. However, it is possible given our current idea of evolution. Why couldn't reptiles evolve into conscious beings? I'm not very knowledgable about the physiology of the human brain, but I do remember that temperature may have been a big factor in our evolution. The again, the word may implies that no one really knows exactly how evolution occured, and until we do I would say it is possible that reptiles may very well have been a predominent life on this planet if not for the meteor or whatever that wiped out all the dinosaurs.
I agree, I don't know how many times my parents asked me or my brother to do something and we'd be like "just a minute" because we were on some place in a game that couldn't be paused or the like. Yet give them a video game and you need a crowbar to get them off:)
I actually would think that many people would have had such stories, since 'video games' in most cases are ahead of many of our parent's times in terms of something you could play at home as opposed to arcades (at least back in the early 90's). It would be interesting to see how many others have stories to ours...
My mom, as with most people's mothers, does not play video games. However, back around 1992-4 after gameboy had hit it off my brother and I both owned one. I remember one day, a saturday afternoon, and my mom, who was the musical director at a local church, was scheduled to play the organ for a wedding that afternoon. She had just recently picked up on the 'tetris' fever, and come 1 hour before the wedding was to start she was still chugging away on one of our gameboys in our living room, despite my brother and I's efforts to remove her. It finally took a phone call from the bride's parents to drag her away from the evil that is Tetris.
I love video games, and I give my respect to those games out today which strain even the most expensive video games with their high-end graphics. But any game, even that as simple as Tetris, which can hold the interest and delay my mother from a wedding is something that I will always give tribute too.
I never said the technology wasn't here at the moment. But lets face it, you won't see my grandma popping a DVD in her recording, taping all her favorite shows (and programming it to ignore commercials), and then watching it later, at least not for a while yet. Hence why I said 'mainstream'. And of course I wasn't referring to watching DVDs you purchased at work, I was referring to taped shows burned onto DVD, as an example, and personally I see nothing wrong with being able to watch them at work, at least per what I say below.
Also, I disagree about what you say regarding purchasing cable and satellite and the like. You are not paying for a hard copy or the rights to the show you are watching; you are only paying for the priveledge of viewing it.
To be perfectly fair, if I pay my cable bill, and tape one of the shows, I should have the right to watch the show whenever I want. However, I don't have the right to watch it and then show it to someone else who doesn't pay for cable. That is stealing, technically, since two people are watching something that only one paid to see. Of course, if I were to give it to a friend without watching it, then that should be ok.
This is my own personal view on it. Of course we all tape shows and let other people watch them, and for the most part it is harmless and doesn't really affect the television/movie industry. But that doesn't make it right. An analogy to your arguement would be that since I bought this software, I should be able to let a friend of mine use it, since after all I paid for it and should be able to do what I want with it, right?
"If you were to take today's episode of 'E.R.' and tape it and give it to your mother, it would be copyright infringement under this bill," said Jessica Litman, a professor at Wayne State University who specializes in copyright law.
At first glance this seemed the most rediculous thing I've ever heard. I mean, taping shows in VCRs is the best way to catch a show you missed, and letting a friend or parent watch it if they missed it too is second nature.
Then I got to thinking about this in terms of today's technology. Pretty soon, we could be burning these shows onto DVDs with DVD-like quality and giving them to people. Of course this could happen today, but I'm talking mainstream ala VCRs. But then, with that kind of technology you could tape the shows and then sell whole series on DVDs to people. You could even edit out commericials. The possibilities are endless.
Is this a bad thing? Not inherently, but it could get worse, imho. VCRs are tediously outdated, but are used because they are simple. With DVD or like technology, shows can be uploaded online with ease, carried around, played on your work computer, etc. It really changes the way you think about the whole TV/Movie/Music watching concept, and as such our laws around them must change as well.
I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It may be that pretty soon you can't let anyone else listen to a CD you bought.
The funny thing, the sequence for smallpox has been available for quite some time at NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information, as are the sequences for at least 2000 viruses and phages (per my last count).
I'm all for public knowledge of such sequences if they lead to productive research in the areas of disease control. However, with the current technology of being able to construct viruses from sequence data, it might be prudent to restrict such data to only respectable research centers.
So, playing too much video games leads to problems, socially and otherwise? I'll hold that that's true of anything. I saw a 20/20 once that told the story of a girl who exercised too much, and was just about killing her body. And exercise is supposed to be good for you. Eating too much leads to obesity, although food is a requirement for life. Too much water leads to drowning (ok, that's a stretch:) ).
The point is, this is nothing new. Video games, like everything else, should be played in moderation. Certainly, someone who spends 8 hours a day playing EQ or the like is going to have trouble. Just like someone who exercises too much, eats too much, drinks too much, etc.
We use f-secure on our workstations to connect to both a server running AIX and one running Solaris 8. Both of these are running OpenSSH. However, with f-secure s-ftp it never transfers text files properly from a windows environment to a unix (the end of line character), while secure-ssh does. With respect to this, unless I've missed a setting somewhere, I would prefer secure-ssh for sftp.
Well, its seems I have quite the dilemna. Should I buy FFXI on PS2 or PC? My PC more than meets the requirements listed (64 Geforce2 GTS Pro, 1.2 Ghz t-bird, etc). However, my home entertainment system (surround sound, 36' WEGA TV) makes PS2 games look and sound really good, much better in fact than PC games. I've played EQ on PC before for a bit; was fun, but sitting in an armchair in front of a computer for long periods of time can get pretty stale, especially after doing it all day at work, while with the PS2 version I can sit on my couch, in my living room. Of course, then I would have to somehow fit the keyboard in somewhere so that I can use it comfortably.
Its a hard choice to make, and I'm interested in what opinions people have as to which would be a better buy, the PC or the PS2 version, given these attributes? This isn't something I've ever had to thought about before in terms of an MMORPG, since there havn't really been any cross-platform games until now (or at least none that I've been interested in).
I was actually posting that in reply to your post about buying it for $10 (ie why spend $4 renting it when I can spend $6 more and get it new) Also, it would be $14 for a used copy, not $16 ($4 rent, $10 cost).
But yeah, like I said if I had known I would have done the pricematch thing and just got it new for $10, I'm not rich enough such that $4 is pocket change:)
Really? That's pretty cool, thanks for the post, shame I already rented it:(. Not that I'm a _huge_ fan of Harry Potter or anything (although I _did_ enjoy the books), but if I'm going to spend $4.00 to rent a movie, why not spend $6.00 more to own it? Still, as it is $10 isn't _that_ much more to own it.
When I want to see a movie, I want to see the whole effect: the sound, the quality, everything. I have never watched a pirated DVD movie before, so I will be the first to admit that I don't know how good of a quality the rip may be. Perhaps very good, I just don't know.
In terms of actually _watching_ the movie it doesn't matter. Anyone can hook up on the web and grab pretty much whatever movie they want to watch. From what I've seen, movies found online are substandard quality. Yes, some are top-notch; however, then you must watch them on you computer system (which for some people a 21 inch monitor suffices).
Personally, I would prefer to watch movies with my wife in my living room on my TV with surround sound and DVD component quality. Perhaps this is old fashioned; yet I believe the atmosphere of a movie is just as important as the movie itself. I know quite a few people who had rips of AToC who refused to watch them until they had seen it in the theatres for the _full_ effect. Those same people will buy the DVD when it comes out regardless of their opinions of the movies itself (after all its Star Wars, though this has been debated already a million times already). This isn't always the case, obviously. However, I think the majority of people (ie computer-illterate) would much rather prefer to shell out a few bucks for the actual DVD than watch some ripped version on a computer screen (or burned to a DVD, which again I have not yet seen and maybe it IS as good as the original). I myself have taken to buying pre-viewed DVDs from blockbuster, they usually cost around $15.00 and in most cases are in perfect condition.
In terms of Harry Potter, Blockbuster actually has a deal where if you rent the movie, you can can come in later and buy a previewed DVD for only $10.00. Not to sound like an ad for BB, but 10.00 for a DVD is not a bad deal (although you have to add in the 4.00 you spent to rent it in the first place).
AFAIK, AIX comes standard with all of IBM's RS/6000s . Hardly 'out of date'. Of course, I don't know how many of those RS/6000s are used as webservers, but ours is and we've never had a problem with it.
So, if the TV giants win, could this apply to pop-up ads? I mean, if i go to a website that supports itself with ads, and I have a program (or setting) that prevents me from seeing them, would that be against the law?
Slashdot Mirror
I. Both hands shall be cut off from every person over the age of 12. This will prevent people from being able to physically do the act of breaking copywrite law.
II. Both eyes shall be removed from every person over the age of 12. This will prevent people from breaking copywrite law via viewing copywrited material.
III. Both ears shall be cut off from every person over the age of 12. This will prevent people from breaking copywrite law via hearing copywrited material.
I live in atlanta. Comcast here charges $35-50 for basic cable. However, what they DONT tell you is that most cable companies have 'basic BASIC cable'. They don't advertise it, but when my wife called the company and asked for the basic cable, and then asked for the 'real basic cable', she was told that for $12.99 a month we would get the first 20 channels. 1 week later, the guy was installing it, finished up, and said 'here's your 74 channels'. I'm guessing they can't filter it out. So, for $12.99 a month, we DO get Discovery, History, TLC, ESPN, Food channel (i love this one), as well as all the other BS that's on. If I can do this in Atlanta, I'm betting it's available other places as wel.
...only mine will say F.U.R.I.A.A
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has counseled about 30 of the 261 people sued, Cohn said, adding that some have settled for fear of spending too much money fighting powerful corporations.
Isn't that the crutch of the matter? It really doesn't matter if what they are doing is right or wrong, as long as they have the money to take it to court and the people they are sueing do not, this will always be the case. What would really be nice would be for some noble rich person to start a trust fund for RIAA 'victems' to help pay for their legal battle if they so wish to fight this in the courts.
Otherwise this will just continue. Let's face it, as fair or unfair as the RIAA may be, most people aren't going to stop buying cds because of this; IMO, most people will just say 'oh that's too bad' like they did with the 12-year old girl and then go out and do what they normally do, if that includes buying a cd than so be it.
The only way to stop such practices is to
a) Educate the masses
or
b) Fight this in court
Both take money unfortunately...
Actually, in this case the copy protection has more than once hindered my playing. I bought BF1942 when it came out, and am an avid player. However, sometimes I will be disconnected from a server (because of a bug, or the server goes down, etc) and it will say 'CD Key in Use' for sometimes as long as the next 6 hours, and in that time it won't let me play because it thinks I'm still logged in. The same thing has occured in Tribes2, although it usually resets within 20 minute. I understand the reasoning behind using CD keys, but when they prevent me, a valid user of the game from playing, it really starts to make me angry.
-- wonders if Papa Smurf will get sued now for using 'smurf' as a verb? I smurfed the web!
This leads me to this: assuming that very few people even bother to look at the ads, there must exist some portion that do, or else they wouldn't still be around. My idea would be for websites to have ONE (and only one) browser popup when you first enter their website (either through front page or links). This Browser can contain multiple ads, say 5-10. You are then free to peruse these at your leisure, or you can can close it down and not have to worry about any more popping up, at least while your webbrowser remains. This way, ads can still be shown, but only once, which is much less annoying.
http://open-spaces.com/article-v2n1-loren.php
Thank you for your informative reply. I never even knew that copyright was even mentioned in the constitution, IANAL. It has spurred me to go and do a bit of research on the topic myself, including reading up on the Eldred v. Ashcroft case (and reading the relative constitution passage). But yes, I now can understand better some of the posts I've read here and other places, and also makes some of my earlier posts seem pretty ludicrous. Oh well.
You imply that copyright is not for an unlimited time. I won't refute that, since I've already stated I really have no knowledge of copyright law. However, I do know a women (Alice Randall) was recently sued and because she wrote an parody to 'Gone With the Wind', a book that was made into a movie back in 1936. She won the suit, but only because she proved it was a 'parody' and not a 'sequel', and thus protected by our 1st amendment rights as you have stated in other posts. Had it been a 'sequel', it would have been against copyright law (so I read). In this case, perhaps the copyright for the book wasn't unlimited, but 66 years (and still going) is pretty long.
I'm really not trying to be trite, I'm just trying to understand how the systems works as of now.
I don't see why a similar thing can't be done in general. A company makes something, and gets the full use and privacy of its item for a certain number of years. During this time it makes money and is happy. Then, after the time limit is up, everyone can then do what they want with it, take it apart, improve it, sell their idea, etc.
True, big businesses would never go for this, because it would make much less powerful and much less money. But it sounds like a good idea, right?
I recently rewatched "V - the series" and "V - the final battle". For those few here that haven't seen it, a bunch of seemingly humanoid aliens come to earth. However, these aliens end up being lizards who wear human skin to disguise themselves. A group of partisans realize the intent behind these aliens (to steal our water and use us for food).
One of the partisans makes what I consider a pretty good point (and makes this whole post on-topic). He notions the idea that unlike Earth, where some sort of disaster (meteor) wipes out many of the reptile species, the alien planet had no such disruption and the reptiles were free to evolve into sentient human-like beings.
Perhaps this is far-fetched. However, it is possible given our current idea of evolution. Why couldn't reptiles evolve into conscious beings? I'm not very knowledgable about the physiology of the human brain, but I do remember that temperature may have been a big factor in our evolution. The again, the word may implies that no one really knows exactly how evolution occured, and until we do I would say it is possible that reptiles may very well have been a predominent life on this planet if not for the meteor or whatever that wiped out all the dinosaurs.
I agree, I don't know how many times my parents asked me or my brother to do something and we'd be like "just a minute" because we were on some place in a game that couldn't be paused or the like. Yet give them a video game and you need a crowbar to get them off :)
I actually would think that many people would have had such stories, since 'video games' in most cases are ahead of many of our parent's times in terms of something you could play at home as opposed to arcades (at least back in the early 90's). It would be interesting to see how many others have stories to ours...
My mom, as with most people's mothers, does not play video games. However, back around 1992-4 after gameboy had hit it off my brother and I both owned one. I remember one day, a saturday afternoon, and my mom, who was the musical director at a local church, was scheduled to play the organ for a wedding that afternoon. She had just recently picked up on the 'tetris' fever, and come 1 hour before the wedding was to start she was still chugging away on one of our gameboys in our living room, despite my brother and I's efforts to remove her. It finally took a phone call from the bride's parents to drag her away from the evil that is Tetris.
I love video games, and I give my respect to those games out today which strain even the most expensive video games with their high-end graphics. But any game, even that as simple as Tetris, which can hold the interest and delay my mother from a wedding is something that I will always give tribute too.
Also, I disagree about what you say regarding purchasing cable and satellite and the like. You are not paying for a hard copy or the rights to the show you are watching; you are only paying for the priveledge of viewing it.
To be perfectly fair, if I pay my cable bill, and tape one of the shows, I should have the right to watch the show whenever I want. However, I don't have the right to watch it and then show it to someone else who doesn't pay for cable. That is stealing, technically, since two people are watching something that only one paid to see. Of course, if I were to give it to a friend without watching it, then that should be ok.
This is my own personal view on it. Of course we all tape shows and let other people watch them, and for the most part it is harmless and doesn't really affect the television/movie industry. But that doesn't make it right. An analogy to your arguement would be that since I bought this software, I should be able to let a friend of mine use it, since after all I paid for it and should be able to do what I want with it, right?
At first glance this seemed the most rediculous thing I've ever heard. I mean, taping shows in VCRs is the best way to catch a show you missed, and letting a friend or parent watch it if they missed it too is second nature.
Then I got to thinking about this in terms of today's technology. Pretty soon, we could be burning these shows onto DVDs with DVD-like quality and giving them to people. Of course this could happen today, but I'm talking mainstream ala VCRs. But then, with that kind of technology you could tape the shows and then sell whole series on DVDs to people. You could even edit out commericials. The possibilities are endless.
Is this a bad thing? Not inherently, but it could get worse, imho. VCRs are tediously outdated, but are used because they are simple. With DVD or like technology, shows can be uploaded online with ease, carried around, played on your work computer, etc. It really changes the way you think about the whole TV/Movie/Music watching concept, and as such our laws around them must change as well.
I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It may be that pretty soon you can't let anyone else listen to a CD you bought.
The funny thing, the sequence for smallpox has been available for quite some time at NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information, as are the sequences for at least 2000 viruses and phages (per my last count).
I'm all for public knowledge of such sequences if they lead to productive research in the areas of disease control. However, with the current technology of being able to construct viruses from sequence data, it might be prudent to restrict such data to only respectable research centers.
So, playing too much video games leads to problems, socially and otherwise? I'll hold that that's true of anything. I saw a 20/20 once that told the story of a girl who exercised too much, and was just about killing her body. And exercise is supposed to be good for you. Eating too much leads to obesity, although food is a requirement for life. Too much water leads to drowning (ok, that's a stretch :) ).
The point is, this is nothing new. Video games, like everything else, should be played in moderation. Certainly, someone who spends 8 hours a day playing EQ or the like is going to have trouble. Just like someone who exercises too much, eats too much, drinks too much, etc.
We use f-secure on our workstations to connect to both a server running AIX and one running Solaris 8. Both of these are running OpenSSH. However, with f-secure s-ftp it never transfers text files properly from a windows environment to a unix (the end of line character), while secure-ssh does. With respect to this, unless I've missed a setting somewhere, I would prefer secure-ssh for sftp.
Well, its seems I have quite the dilemna. Should I buy FFXI on PS2 or PC? My PC more than meets the requirements listed (64 Geforce2 GTS Pro, 1.2 Ghz t-bird, etc). However, my home entertainment system (surround sound, 36' WEGA TV) makes PS2 games look and sound really good, much better in fact than PC games. I've played EQ on PC before for a bit; was fun, but sitting in an armchair in front of a computer for long periods of time can get pretty stale, especially after doing it all day at work, while with the PS2 version I can sit on my couch, in my living room. Of course, then I would have to somehow fit the keyboard in somewhere so that I can use it comfortably.
Its a hard choice to make, and I'm interested in what opinions people have as to which would be a better buy, the PC or the PS2 version, given these attributes? This isn't something I've ever had to thought about before in terms of an MMORPG, since there havn't really been any cross-platform games until now (or at least none that I've been interested in).
I was actually posting that in reply to your post about buying it for $10 (ie why spend $4 renting it when I can spend $6 more and get it new) Also, it would be $14 for a used copy, not $16 ($4 rent, $10 cost). But yeah, like I said if I had known I would have done the pricematch thing and just got it new for $10, I'm not rich enough such that $4 is pocket change :)
Really? That's pretty cool, thanks for the post, shame I already rented it :(. Not that I'm a _huge_ fan of Harry Potter or anything (although I _did_ enjoy the books), but if I'm going to spend $4.00 to rent a movie, why not spend $6.00 more to own it? Still, as it is $10 isn't _that_ much more to own it.
(I say this in terms of DVD not VHS)
When I want to see a movie, I want to see the whole effect: the sound, the quality, everything. I have never watched a pirated DVD movie before, so I will be the first to admit that I don't know how good of a quality the rip may be. Perhaps very good, I just don't know.
In terms of actually _watching_ the movie it doesn't matter. Anyone can hook up on the web and grab pretty much whatever movie they want to watch. From what I've seen, movies found online are substandard quality. Yes, some are top-notch; however, then you must watch them on you computer system (which for some people a 21 inch monitor suffices).
Personally, I would prefer to watch movies with my wife in my living room on my TV with surround sound and DVD component quality. Perhaps this is old fashioned; yet I believe the atmosphere of a movie is just as important as the movie itself. I know quite a few people who had rips of AToC who refused to watch them until they had seen it in the theatres for the _full_ effect. Those same people will buy the DVD when it comes out regardless of their opinions of the movies itself (after all its Star Wars, though this has been debated already a million times already). This isn't always the case, obviously. However, I think the majority of people (ie computer-illterate) would much rather prefer to shell out a few bucks for the actual DVD than watch some ripped version on a computer screen (or burned to a DVD, which again I have not yet seen and maybe it IS as good as the original). I myself have taken to buying pre-viewed DVDs from blockbuster, they usually cost around $15.00 and in most cases are in perfect condition.
In terms of Harry Potter, Blockbuster actually has a deal where if you rent the movie, you can can come in later and buy a previewed DVD for only $10.00. Not to sound like an ad for BB, but 10.00 for a DVD is not a bad deal (although you have to add in the 4.00 you spent to rent it in the first place).
AFAIK, AIX comes standard with all of IBM's RS/6000s . Hardly 'out of date'. Of course, I don't know how many of those RS/6000s are used as webservers, but ours is and we've never had a problem with it.
So, if the TV giants win, could this apply to pop-up ads? I mean, if i go to a website that supports itself with ads, and I have a program (or setting) that prevents me from seeing them, would that be against the law?