People use cars to drive faster than the speed limit on roads. Does that mean we need to ban cars or roads? Have fun walking to work.
Oh, that's right - you don't work, you just sit in your parents' basement all day drinking mountain dew and jerking off to badly photoshopped Seven of Nine porn.
Playing games on a LAN, and setting up a ladder system that will equitably work for months of play? Two entirely different things. We enjoyed having a ladder system, thanks.
We used Bnetd to try to set up a local ladder for play with my friends, without a whole bunch of other people's handles getting in the way. Nothing serious, and the cry about authorized CD keys... I really don't give a shit about that.
Because of bnetd, there was no incentive for people to buy Warcraft III because they could just pirate the game and still enjoy internet mutliplayer at it's fullest.
If you really think that was the reasoning, you're certifiable.
They could have also potentially lost significant revenue to people who bought the game but still played on bnetd servers because they used Battle.net to advertise.
Which maybe, perhaps maybe, they should have realized there are some people who don't want to have to play on "their" network. Bnetd was awesome for the potential of setting up a local ladder and even the possibility to do that at a LAN party.
That's a lot like finding some of these things now.
Find a Divx disc with a movie on it? You're out of luck even if you have a player.
There's also MovieCD, good luck getting those to work.
Certain MMORPG's were shut down - imagine if they'd let their server source loose? Might be room for some interesting single-player implementations or even local-player setups.
Then there's Blizzard, who actively fucked over people making local-type servers for games like Warcraft and Starcraft.
DRM alone doesn't cause this either - a lot of earlier (Directx 4-5-6ish) games have a TON of problems getting set up on modern systems, or glitch horribly when you try to run them. There are also a few titles you can't even install because they try to access the hard drive directly and don't understand the FAT32 and NTFS formats.
And consider the following ironic thought: what are the chances that, 10 years from now on your (10th? 15th? 25th?) anniversary, you'll be able to find a working VHS player to watch your wedding video?
Ah, but how profitable is an artist's tour going to be if nobody knows who they are?
But since the MafiAA doesn't try out new acts any more, that's not a risk. And all of the "promotional" work done by the label is charged back to the band, again. The MafiAA don't actually pay for shit.
Mind you, one of my all-time favorite bands was pretty much snuffed out by Capitol - had their album produced and recorded and then just sat on it for a couple years without releasing it, until finally the band called it quits.
Many bands have this happen, usually because the label's holding them slave/hostage trying to force them to re-up for an even longer/worse contract.
They also backed the production of that album, taking the risk that it wouldn't sell. They need to recover those costs.
That's what the sales price is for, not duplicitously using FRAUDULENT ACCOUNTING to hide the profits and try to charge the costs to the band AS WELL.
The goal of the MafiAA companies is simple: milk for every penny. It's slave labor, unless you hit it super-big (metallica/etc). They don't ever take a real risk - the times someone didn't hit it ultra-big, the labels "made money" off of them anyways, then forced them through bankruptcy with all the charge-backs. This happens even to the big names.
You want to know why there are so many so-called "singer/songwriter" acts these days? Because it's one of the few ways out - get one song you "wrote" onto the album, and they have to pay you writers' royalties. You want to know why half or more of the album is shit? Because desperately trying to save their own asses financially, every bandmember wrote at least one track on the album. And it doesn't matter, because the MafiAA's dirty accounting always comes out a rape-job anyways.
The CD cost has to support not just the artist but also the promotion and distribution of that album...which they will charge to the artist in their corrupt and insane fraudulent contract schemes, ensuring that actual profit on the artist's part will only come about from tour/merchandise/product endorsement sales (and the MafiAA will even try to get most of THAT money too)...
plus there has to be enough revenue left over to support the label's business of representing new acts in the hope that one of them will be successful...which they don't do any more, instead we get mass-pushed crap of the latest Britney "boobjob" Spears/Hannah Nopantsa/K-Fed/Snoop Crapping Dogg/Cop Killa Ni**a Wannabe Poser/etc etc, courtesy of the payola system ensuring there's no decent music on the radio without shelling out $50/month for satellite radio (wonder how much stake the MafiAA had in THAT plan)...
to find that one act that people will really like they have to gamble...nope, they don't gamble or give new acts a chance any more, they wait until someone gets youtube/net buzz for free and THEN try to enslave them...
I think it's a fair bet their business model will have to adjust
Most of the ARTISTS are even saying this - in other words, the SLAVERY of the crappy contracts, of the constant accounting FRAUD by the MafiAA companies, needs to end.
but to say that the cost of that $20 CD is limited just to the per-copy production cost of the disc itself is not at all realistic.
Actually as far as the labels are concerned, it is. If the artist were actually getting the money, and I was satisfied I was buying a good product, great. The problem is, the MafiAA pays the artists what amounts to less than minimum wage after all the chargebacks and accounting fraud, and THEN piles it on by locking the artists into contracts for years with no way out to seek a better deal, AND then holds them hostage when they've got 1 CD to go by refusing to accept the last offered CD unless the band/artist signs their soul on for another series under the gun. End result? The artist is getting less than 1 cent of the money from that $20 CD, and any other actual services involved (studio time, mixer, etc) are getting likewise hosed.
Artists I like who've put stuff up to purchase/download themselves? GREAT. Love it, have purchased on a regular basis.
We have a serial sockpuppetteer, working in conjunction with some pretty vitriolic and biased posters who want to remove all mention of Hebrew language and Israeli cultural involvement in certain dishes and push a "they stole the food" POV; instead of taking it seriously, the admins protect the two POV pushers and run the guy who's caught their sockpuppets off of wikipedia.
And of course to be thorough, AGK and his cronies do the usual abuse tactic: blank, alter, and lock the user's talk page to prevent an honest investigation to their abuse: check the history.
I have no doubt the email is genuinely AGK gloating, I also have no doubt the behavior of the wikipedia arbcom and the other administrators is to protect AGK and prevent an honest investigation into why he abused his power, either expecting him to do the same for them in the future or because he did it for them in the past. "One hand washes the other... but they remain dirty."
This user M1rth was also involved in exposing blatantly bad behavior by multiple admins, including an abusive set of boobs who banned a user under false accusations of sockpuppetry and left him blocked even when Alison, a Checkuser-authorized admin, said Checkuser had come back negative.
This is typical abusive wikiadmin judge-dredd type stuff. Wikipedia should be ashamed these boobs were ever let have the admin bit.
According to their description, it's a memory cell that retains information without needing power. In other words, non-volatile RAM. It actually (according to their description) looks pretty darn similar to FeRAM.
Of course, to "Read" this stuff, you have to pass current through it to measure its resistance... so then you have to refresh it back to state... not sure how serious the power savings can be compared to simply improving the power required for other memory devices there.
In fact, the whole article is a bit misleading. They've come up with a new "memory element", just like how FeRAM and MRAM and now PRAM are new memory elements jockeying for position, and each of those comes with the same pie-in-the-sky pronouncements: computers that retain state when turned off without needing to cache to disk, lower power consumption/resiliency, neural networks, blabbity blah blah blah.
Some of the real jokes come later - pattern recognition, facial recognition, etc. Those come from either improving your software, or actually making a non-binary machine so that it's easier to express multiple states, not from just having a new way to store the same data set.
having worked in businesses full of young Jews as in the religion
I really doubt you have, I've never met any more Jews who felt that way than I've met any others who insisted that they marry a fellow Catholic, or Buddhist, or anything else.
this is a core part of their religion, a systematic thing..."
I call bullshit. It may be a part of certain extreme ultra-conservative (and ultra-minority) sects, but it's not true for the vast majority. It sounds more like you're an ignorant fellow who's been told a lot of bullshit about the Jewish faith.
Actually, being a Catholic son of a Catholic and a Methodist, and having family members who are Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Shinto (yes really)... I'll let you puzzle it out.
Let's see... "hearsay" is telling a court of law something that you overheard. In this case, the person has direct written correspondence that can be transmitted.
YOU, meanwhile, are trolling trying to discredit it. Based on that and based on your ignoring their request for an acceptable method by which to send the info, I don't buy your claim that you're not a wikipedian.
is asking where he should post evidence. You should probably respond to him. That is, if you're serious at all and your "please provide evidence" wasn't just wikitrolling.
"I'm not an anti-semite, I'm just anti-Israel" ranks up with "I'm not a racist, some of my best friends are (black, hispanic, asian, etc)" on the bullshit-o-meter, buddy.
As for the rest - really, why is Wikipedia so worried about people trying to improve their articles with sourced information? Why are they so worried that systemic bias in the Israel-related articles might be (gasp!) removed?
For that matter, why is "Electronic Intifada" a source to be trusted in this regard? It's just as likely that there are already organized Muslim/anti-semitic groups on wikipedia messing with these pages; they used to operate openly (Wikiproject Islam: The Muslim Guild/The Sunni Guild/The Shia Guild/etc) until they decided they'd work better hiding their affiliation, and there are users to this day running around with pro-Hezbollah buttons prominent on their pages.
In fact, one of the users with a pro-Hezbollah button (User Tiamut) is one of the ones who was working so hard to get the complainant above banned from wikipedia. Think about it; since under real application of wikipedia policy their bias-pushing edits wouldn't hold, the next best thing is to try to get the opposition banned from wikipedia.
What's your wikipedia username? This looks an awful lot like the usual wikitroll canned response.
Of course, I'm not saying you're a wikipedian, but the evidence certainly points that way.
Of course, if you look at the history of the abuser in question's talk page (warning: he's a serial "archiver" to make it harder to trace things) you get a pretty good sense: constant pushing to have the complainer removed by POV-pushers Tiamut and Jd2718, who have a long history of pretty biased edits and who were edit-warring to try to remove Hebrew language references and Israeli culture references from food articles along with a string of nasty and abusive sockpuppets at their disposal.
AGK goes along with it, continually verbally abusing the poor person who was trying to keep the articles neutral under the barrage of anti-semitic editing and sockpuppetry attacks (which wikipedia claims to be against, except when it's to push a point of view supported by a certain admin...), and eventually bans the user entirely for exposing the sockpuppets and insisting wikipedia's procedures be followed.
I don't doubt that AGK sent the gloat email. Part of the underlying joke of wikipedia is the number of blatantly biased, aggressive, asshole-ish people who've been made admins just to POV push with authority to ban. In the Register article Slashdot links above, they now claim people were trying to be "stealth" admins to push pro-Israeli POV - and yet there have been dozens of admins coined over and over again for all sorts of POV-pushing reasons, usually because they "helped against vandals" (read: drove away newcomers and bit the newbies fast enough to prevent a consensus change) on topics that certain admins wanted to keep slanted a certain way.
I've dealt with AGK and other admins, they're classically anti-semitic as well as usually friends with a bunch of anti-semitic people. It's no surprise any article involving Israel or the middle east has such a problem, they have people for whom the whole purpose of editing is to make "the Jews" look as evil/bad as possible.
I have no surprise this was the response parent poster got from their arbitration committee, either. Corruption on wikipedia flows from the top down, not the other way around. And the last thing they want to do is investigate malfeasance on the part of an admin, because that would set precedent to investigate their own behavior as well.
Indeed, but what's that saying again - "anything too good to be true..."?
Hold companies liable for dealing in bad deals, absolutely. Please, please apply this to the companies that deal with spammers; if companies know it's illegal to contract with the spam companies (because the spam companies break the law in countless ways, what with the botnets and packet/header fraud any everything else), spam will finally start drying up.
"License" is synonymous with "way you fuck the consumer."
I purchased a physical item with data on it. Doesn't matter whether it's a book, clay tablet, audiotape, videotape, cd, dvd, blu-ray disc, floppy diskette, vinyl album, whatever. I deserve the right to protect my investment from the breakage of the KNOWN defective storage medium that degrades over time and is damaged by heat, light, chemical processes, etc.
I can stick it in a microwave if I so choose, I can use it to make nifty light patterns from the window... yet when I try to protect my investment by making a copy, in the event of a fire or other destructive act of god, or merely my 2-year-old or puppy dog getting their teeth on it, you think I shouldn't have that right?
The question here seems to be whether or not is is legal to backup the backup.
Don't tell that to the inventor of the RAID array. Or to anyone who's made a photocopy of any personal documents twice, one for at home and one for their safety deposit box.
The right to backup ought to be unquestionable. The right to store a backup OFF-SITE ought to likewise be unquestionable.
This is no different from any other online backup service that will copy the file contents of your hard drive (or flash drive, DVD-rom, pretty much whatever you point it at) for retrieval later. And they're all 100% legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Better idea - why not just install Windows 2000 on the machine? It'll run great!
People use cars to drive faster than the speed limit on roads. Does that mean we need to ban cars or roads? Have fun walking to work.
Oh, that's right - you don't work, you just sit in your parents' basement all day drinking mountain dew and jerking off to badly photoshopped Seven of Nine porn.
Playing games on a LAN, and setting up a ladder system that will equitably work for months of play? Two entirely different things. We enjoyed having a ladder system, thanks.
We used Bnetd to try to set up a local ladder for play with my friends, without a whole bunch of other people's handles getting in the way. Nothing serious, and the cry about authorized CD keys... I really don't give a shit about that.
Because of bnetd, there was no incentive for people to buy Warcraft III because they could just pirate the game and still enjoy internet mutliplayer at it's fullest.
If you really think that was the reasoning, you're certifiable.
They could have also potentially lost significant revenue to people who bought the game but still played on bnetd servers because they used Battle.net to advertise.
Which maybe, perhaps maybe, they should have realized there are some people who don't want to have to play on "their" network. Bnetd was awesome for the potential of setting up a local ladder and even the possibility to do that at a LAN party.
That's a lot like finding some of these things now.
Find a Divx disc with a movie on it? You're out of luck even if you have a player.
There's also MovieCD, good luck getting those to work.
Certain MMORPG's were shut down - imagine if they'd let their server source loose? Might be room for some interesting single-player implementations or even local-player setups.
Then there's Blizzard, who actively fucked over people making local-type servers for games like Warcraft and Starcraft.
DRM alone doesn't cause this either - a lot of earlier (Directx 4-5-6ish) games have a TON of problems getting set up on modern systems, or glitch horribly when you try to run them. There are also a few titles you can't even install because they try to access the hard drive directly and don't understand the FAT32 and NTFS formats.
And consider the following ironic thought: what are the chances that, 10 years from now on your (10th? 15th? 25th?) anniversary, you'll be able to find a working VHS player to watch your wedding video?
Ah, but how profitable is an artist's tour going to be if nobody knows who they are?
But since the MafiAA doesn't try out new acts any more, that's not a risk. And all of the "promotional" work done by the label is charged back to the band, again. The MafiAA don't actually pay for shit.
Mind you, one of my all-time favorite bands was pretty much snuffed out by Capitol - had their album produced and recorded and then just sat on it for a couple years without releasing it, until finally the band called it quits.
Many bands have this happen, usually because the label's holding them slave/hostage trying to force them to re-up for an even longer/worse contract.
They also backed the production of that album, taking the risk that it wouldn't sell. They need to recover those costs.
That's what the sales price is for, not duplicitously using FRAUDULENT ACCOUNTING to hide the profits and try to charge the costs to the band AS WELL.
The goal of the MafiAA companies is simple: milk for every penny. It's slave labor, unless you hit it super-big (metallica/etc). They don't ever take a real risk - the times someone didn't hit it ultra-big, the labels "made money" off of them anyways, then forced them through bankruptcy with all the charge-backs. This happens even to the big names.
You want to know why there are so many so-called "singer/songwriter" acts these days? Because it's one of the few ways out - get one song you "wrote" onto the album, and they have to pay you writers' royalties. You want to know why half or more of the album is shit? Because desperately trying to save their own asses financially, every bandmember wrote at least one track on the album. And it doesn't matter, because the MafiAA's dirty accounting always comes out a rape-job anyways.
The CD cost has to support not just the artist but also the promotion and distribution of that album ...which they will charge to the artist in their corrupt and insane fraudulent contract schemes, ensuring that actual profit on the artist's part will only come about from tour/merchandise/product endorsement sales (and the MafiAA will even try to get most of THAT money too)...
...which they don't do any more, instead we get mass-pushed crap of the latest Britney "boobjob" Spears/Hannah Nopantsa/K-Fed/Snoop Crapping Dogg/Cop Killa Ni**a Wannabe Poser/etc etc, courtesy of the payola system ensuring there's no decent music on the radio without shelling out $50/month for satellite radio (wonder how much stake the MafiAA had in THAT plan)...
...nope, they don't gamble or give new acts a chance any more, they wait until someone gets youtube/net buzz for free and THEN try to enslave them...
plus there has to be enough revenue left over to support the label's business of representing new acts in the hope that one of them will be successful
to find that one act that people will really like they have to gamble
I think it's a fair bet their business model will have to adjust
Most of the ARTISTS are even saying this - in other words, the SLAVERY of the crappy contracts, of the constant accounting FRAUD by the MafiAA companies, needs to end.
but to say that the cost of that $20 CD is limited just to the per-copy production cost of the disc itself is not at all realistic.
Actually as far as the labels are concerned, it is. If the artist were actually getting the money, and I was satisfied I was buying a good product, great. The problem is, the MafiAA pays the artists what amounts to less than minimum wage after all the chargebacks and accounting fraud, and THEN piles it on by locking the artists into contracts for years with no way out to seek a better deal, AND then holds them hostage when they've got 1 CD to go by refusing to accept the last offered CD unless the band/artist signs their soul on for another series under the gun. End result? The artist is getting less than 1 cent of the money from that $20 CD, and any other actual services involved (studio time, mixer, etc) are getting likewise hosed.
Artists I like who've put stuff up to purchase/download themselves? GREAT. Love it, have purchased on a regular basis.
Check out the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/Jamiechef2
Of course, you'll notice wiki-admins have been trying to clean out evidence of tiamut and jd2718's involvement here too, par for the wikiadmin abuse course really.
We have a serial sockpuppetteer, working in conjunction with some pretty vitriolic and biased posters who want to remove all mention of Hebrew language and Israeli cultural involvement in certain dishes and push a "they stole the food" POV; instead of taking it seriously, the admins protect the two POV pushers and run the guy who's caught their sockpuppets off of wikipedia.
And of course to be thorough, AGK and his cronies do the usual abuse tactic: blank, alter, and lock the user's talk page to prevent an honest investigation to their abuse: check the history.
I have no doubt the email is genuinely AGK gloating, I also have no doubt the behavior of the wikipedia arbcom and the other administrators is to protect AGK and prevent an honest investigation into why he abused his power, either expecting him to do the same for them in the future or because he did it for them in the past. "One hand washes the other... but they remain dirty."
This user M1rth was also involved in exposing blatantly bad behavior by multiple admins, including an abusive set of boobs who banned a user under false accusations of sockpuppetry and left him blocked even when Alison, a Checkuser-authorized admin, said Checkuser had come back negative.
This is typical abusive wikiadmin judge-dredd type stuff. Wikipedia should be ashamed these boobs were ever let have the admin bit.
Gee, someone who equates judaism with scientology. And you call me a retard?
got the wrong episode.
According to their description, it's a memory cell that retains information without needing power. In other words, non-volatile RAM. It actually (according to their description) looks pretty darn similar to FeRAM.
Of course, to "Read" this stuff, you have to pass current through it to measure its resistance... so then you have to refresh it back to state... not sure how serious the power savings can be compared to simply improving the power required for other memory devices there.
In fact, the whole article is a bit misleading. They've come up with a new "memory element", just like how FeRAM and MRAM and now PRAM are new memory elements jockeying for position, and each of those comes with the same pie-in-the-sky pronouncements: computers that retain state when turned off without needing to cache to disk, lower power consumption/resiliency, neural networks, blabbity blah blah blah.
Some of the real jokes come later - pattern recognition, facial recognition, etc. Those come from either improving your software, or actually making a non-binary machine so that it's easier to express multiple states, not from just having a new way to store the same data set.
In a way, the stuff in this article reminds me a lot of people eating with their butts.
No, the truth is, I know you're lying because I actually have studied the faith rather than following blind, bigoted nonsense.
I'll be sure to tell my sister-in-law. Too bad you didn't say anything about this last week; it was a lovely pesach seder.
Seriously, this needs a mod-up.
having worked in businesses full of young Jews as in the religion
I really doubt you have, I've never met any more Jews who felt that way than I've met any others who insisted that they marry a fellow Catholic, or Buddhist, or anything else.
this is a core part of their religion, a systematic thing..."
I call bullshit. It may be a part of certain extreme ultra-conservative (and ultra-minority) sects, but it's not true for the vast majority. It sounds more like you're an ignorant fellow who's been told a lot of bullshit about the Jewish faith.
Actually, being a Catholic son of a Catholic and a Methodist, and having family members who are Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Shinto (yes really)... I'll let you puzzle it out.
Surest sign of a wikitroll - Ahabswhale signed out to swear and troll, so he wouldn't lose karma by being modded for the troll he is.
Let's see... "hearsay" is telling a court of law something that you overheard. In this case, the person has direct written correspondence that can be transmitted.
YOU, meanwhile, are trolling trying to discredit it. Based on that and based on your ignoring their request for an acceptable method by which to send the info, I don't buy your claim that you're not a wikipedian.
is asking where he should post evidence. You should probably respond to him. That is, if you're serious at all and your "please provide evidence" wasn't just wikitrolling.
"I'm not an anti-semite, I'm just anti-Israel" ranks up with "I'm not a racist, some of my best friends are (black, hispanic, asian, etc)" on the bullshit-o-meter, buddy.
As for the rest - really, why is Wikipedia so worried about people trying to improve their articles with sourced information? Why are they so worried that systemic bias in the Israel-related articles might be (gasp!) removed?
For that matter, why is "Electronic Intifada" a source to be trusted in this regard? It's just as likely that there are already organized Muslim/anti-semitic groups on wikipedia messing with these pages; they used to operate openly (Wikiproject Islam: The Muslim Guild/The Sunni Guild/The Shia Guild/etc) until they decided they'd work better hiding their affiliation, and there are users to this day running around with pro-Hezbollah buttons prominent on their pages.
In fact, one of the users with a pro-Hezbollah button (User Tiamut) is one of the ones who was working so hard to get the complainant above banned from wikipedia. Think about it; since under real application of wikipedia policy their bias-pushing edits wouldn't hold, the next best thing is to try to get the opposition banned from wikipedia.
What's your wikipedia username? This looks an awful lot like the usual wikitroll canned response.
Of course, I'm not saying you're a wikipedian, but the evidence certainly points that way.
Of course, if you look at the history of the abuser in question's talk page (warning: he's a serial "archiver" to make it harder to trace things) you get a pretty good sense: constant pushing to have the complainer removed by POV-pushers Tiamut and Jd2718, who have a long history of pretty biased edits and who were edit-warring to try to remove Hebrew language references and Israeli culture references from food articles along with a string of nasty and abusive sockpuppets at their disposal.
AGK goes along with it, continually verbally abusing the poor person who was trying to keep the articles neutral under the barrage of anti-semitic editing and sockpuppetry attacks (which wikipedia claims to be against, except when it's to push a point of view supported by a certain admin...), and eventually bans the user entirely for exposing the sockpuppets and insisting wikipedia's procedures be followed.
Looks a heck of a lot like this typical wikipedian admin-abuse playbook, doesn't it?
I don't doubt that AGK sent the gloat email. Part of the underlying joke of wikipedia is the number of blatantly biased, aggressive, asshole-ish people who've been made admins just to POV push with authority to ban. In the Register article Slashdot links above, they now claim people were trying to be "stealth" admins to push pro-Israeli POV - and yet there have been dozens of admins coined over and over again for all sorts of POV-pushing reasons, usually because they "helped against vandals" (read: drove away newcomers and bit the newbies fast enough to prevent a consensus change) on topics that certain admins wanted to keep slanted a certain way.
This looks like a classic case of "nobody new comes to wikipedia" corrupt behavior on the part of wikipedia's admins.
I've dealt with AGK and other admins, they're classically anti-semitic as well as usually friends with a bunch of anti-semitic people. It's no surprise any article involving Israel or the middle east has such a problem, they have people for whom the whole purpose of editing is to make "the Jews" look as evil/bad as possible.
I have no surprise this was the response parent poster got from their arbitration committee, either. Corruption on wikipedia flows from the top down, not the other way around. And the last thing they want to do is investigate malfeasance on the part of an admin, because that would set precedent to investigate their own behavior as well.
Indeed, but what's that saying again - "anything too good to be true..."?
Hold companies liable for dealing in bad deals, absolutely. Please, please apply this to the companies that deal with spammers; if companies know it's illegal to contract with the spam companies (because the spam companies break the law in countless ways, what with the botnets and packet/header fraud any everything else), spam will finally start drying up.
"License" is synonymous with "way you fuck the consumer."
I purchased a physical item with data on it. Doesn't matter whether it's a book, clay tablet, audiotape, videotape, cd, dvd, blu-ray disc, floppy diskette, vinyl album, whatever. I deserve the right to protect my investment from the breakage of the KNOWN defective storage medium that degrades over time and is damaged by heat, light, chemical processes, etc.
I can stick it in a microwave if I so choose, I can use it to make nifty light patterns from the window... yet when I try to protect my investment by making a copy, in the event of a fire or other destructive act of god, or merely my 2-year-old or puppy dog getting their teeth on it, you think I shouldn't have that right?
Fuck you t-bonehead.
The question here seems to be whether or not is is legal to backup the backup.
Don't tell that to the inventor of the RAID array. Or to anyone who's made a photocopy of any personal documents twice, one for at home and one for their safety deposit box.
The right to backup ought to be unquestionable. The right to store a backup OFF-SITE ought to likewise be unquestionable.
This is no different from any other online backup service that will copy the file contents of your hard drive (or flash drive, DVD-rom, pretty much whatever you point it at) for retrieval later. And they're all 100% legal.