Y'know, what's really frightening is that we feel we need to see ads for a scene to be "real." That just goes to show you how many ads we're subjected to each day.
True, to a point. But there's also value in the "associative" effect. For instance, it's long been a hallmark of a certain stripe of commercial fiction to drop product names left, right and center. Try browsing a Danielle Steele or Jackie Collins novel - you drown in references to Bulgarvi diamond pendants, Lamborghini's, and Chanel. Characters don't drink mere champagne, they bathe in Veuve Clicquot. This isn't product placement, but it uses name-brand recognition as short-hand for establishing character and atmosphere. A similar kind of short-hand can work in games. Real products have this effect because we're so subjected to advertising, but that affords designers the opportunity to borrow an established identity or atmosphere to bolster their own creation. I don't think it's necessarily there just to make it look real.
btw, why are you so anal about the word "stupid" anyway. Do you prefer a more P.C. term which basically says the same thing?
I don't have a problem with the word "stupid" - I use it all the time. For example:
'N Sync makes stupid music Exempting SUVs from auto fuel-emission standards was stupid President Bush is stupid
Stupid is a great word; it's a value judgement. It has no applicability to the issue of population growth except as a value judgement. Neither of the reports you cited supports your contention that "stupid people breed more," which simply conveys your elitist and condescending attitude. The World Bank report notes that population growth is tied to economic development, health issues (from Chapter 3: "Parents choose to have smaller families when health conditions improve so that they no longer have to fear that many of their babies might die, and when they do not have to rely on their children to work on the family farm or business or to take care of them in their old age."), and educational opportunities, particularly for women. As the excerpt you included says, higher education provide people with more opportunity. This doesn't mean the populace is any more or less "stupid" than it ever was. It means people have more options.
There's no "PC" equivalent for "stupid." It conveys exactly the meaning and attitude you intend toward issues, ideas, or persons. Use it accordingly. What others regard as politically correct or incorrect is immaterial - you should alway use language to communicate your thoughts as precisely as you use code to create your application.
Paid placement doesn't really work, because frankly, most people don't care what the actor is drinking, or what the writing on the wall says.
In an ordinary, everyday kind-of way, I'd agree. But it works beyond an advertiser's wildest dreams when the product is placed in the right scene at the right time in the right movie. The Reeces Pieces/E.T. magic has been cited. Another classic example from the dawn of product placement is Tom Cruise wearing those Ray-Bans in Risky Business - suddenly, everybody was wearing Ray Bans. But in both of those cases, the placement didn't really come off as "product placement, read: advertising." They seemed integral to the story or character, and they were memorable moments in their own right.
But still, people care and notice. My favorite example from movies is a kind-of product anti-placement. In the 1934 comedy It Happened One Night, there's a scene in which Clark Gable takes off his shirt in a motel room, and he wasn't wearing an undershirt. The typical American male of the mid-1930s always wore an undershirt. In the months following the (very successful) movie's release, undershirt sales plummeted. Hanes or Jockey could've saved a ton of money had they only paid the film's producers to get Gable to wear an undershirt, any undershirt.
I hate to point it out to you, but evolution is an elitist, classist tendency of the universe - Ask the Neaderthal, oops, too late.
The Neanderthal lived in trailers? I hope you've reported your discovery through the proper channels. That's a major breakthrough!
No one knows for sure just what happened to the Neanderthal nor why, nor whether or how much interbreeding ocurred between Neanderthal and homo sapien. If you're suggesting that evolution as a process works in a "classist" manner, you're wrong. The effects of the evolutionary process can include eliminating entire species, but there's nothing classist about the process itself. "Survival of the fittest" is a local phenomenon; who or what is "fittest" today may not be "fittest" tomorrow. Cockroaches can survive a nuclear fallout. Does that make them the elite?
Your "argument," such as it is, was that intelligence was more important to humans than brawn. That's completely unsupportable. You have no clue what will happen tomorrow, no idea what challenges humans will have to face in the coming years. Therefore, you can have no idea what qualities or characteristics will constitute "survival of the fittest." None of us do.
Futhermore, you imply that both "intelligence" and "stupidity" are genetically determined by claiming that the "problem" is that "educated and intelligent" people don't have enough kids and "stupid" people have too many. Can you point me to a studies that demonstrate low I.Q.'s are inextricably linked to a propensity for procreation? Or the reverse? Can you point to studies that demonstrate that intellectual capacity is genetically determined in the manner you imply, once social and economic factors are removed from the equation?
For every 16-year-old piece of "trailer trash," as you so eloquently (and predicatably) put it, who has to get a job to help pay the rent, I can show you a 26-year-old spoiled brat who can't keep a job because they spent their expensive prep-school years and even more expensive private college years partying so much they haven't a clue what working actually means. Big deal. The point is your "argument" is shot-through with elitist, classist notions of what constitutes intelligence and stupidity, and has no bearing at all on the course of human evolution.
That's because it was never presented properly. The 2600 team screwed up.
How could you possibly "properly" present an arguement that computer code is subject to the highest level of First Amendment scrutiny? Trying to make that claim at all is a screw-up because it's patently false.
Being fit to survive is not as important these days as being smart. Our next big steps in advancement will require intelligence, not brawn.
So when your house catches fire, you're going to call your local MENSA chapter to come fight it, rather than the local fire department? I suggest you to come to New York City and check out the physical conditioning of the majority of people engaged in the WTC clean-up - 98# weakling geeks they ain't.
Educated and intelligent people have few children. Stupid people breed like mad.
I take you have many offspring? That's got to be the most elitist, idiotic, unfounded, illogical statement on/. this week, and you sure have a lot of competition. What did you do, see "The Royal Tennenbaums" and mistake it for a documentary? I can think of no environment more abject than slavery, yet look at all the children of slaves who've made invaluable contributions to humankind, and not just in the U.S. - all over the world and throughout history.
In any case, formal education and intelligence have little in common with each other, as people around here prove time and time again.
What's the big deal about proving that it is speech? There's a big difference between "speech" and "protected speech." The argument that computer code is automatically protected speech was already shot full of holes in the 2600 DMCA violation case. If this is the reason, it's a waste of time.
The part of I-L-L-E-G-A-L I don't understand is the part that people imagine to be real when it has no basis in fact.
Read the decision in the Napster case. Nothing in that ruling specifies that file-sharing is illegal. What was illegal was copyright infringement. To prove copyright infringement, the copyright holder has to demonstrate an instance in which his copyright was violated. An instance of pirated software is illegal regardless of whether it is shared over a network. As previously mentioned, MP3 files are not inherently illegal.
Child pornography is illegal regardless of whether you share it over a network. You can email child pornography. For that matter, you can email a copyrighted image or copyrighted text, thus creating an infringing copy of the material. Does that make email illegal?
I realize you're just trolling, but given the opportunity I'm always happy to try to educate or persuade people who may not quite grasp the intricasies of these matters. I can easily gloss over flame bait originating from cowardly pipsqueaks if it gives me the opportunity to do so, or just laugh it off if it doesn't.
Regarding this article from BBC News Sci/Tech on Saturday, February 2, 2002: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 798000/1798095.stm
I wish to register my disappointment with the BBC for running unsubstantiated claims about a vaguely defined security risk associated with using the file-sharing application Morpheus. Does the BBC make a habit of publicising the claims of "security experts" who take it upon themselves to contact you without actually investigating whether those claims have any merit, particularly when those "security experts" refuse to be identified? I would like to believe that is not the case, but this article indicates you have lowered your journalistic standards in pursuit of sensationalism.
A responsible piece of reportage would have pointed out that numerous such claims have been made in the past and all have proven unfounded. It would have specified whether, indeed, the entire contents of a user's hard drive was at risk for exposure, or whether (as in past incidences of these type of claims) all that is being "exposed" are the files the user has already designated as shared. Some people seem to think that it constitutes a "security risk" if they are able to find an alternate means of accessing the files a user is sharing. This is merely being clever. Your article gives your readers no way of making an informed decision about whether this is another such false alarm, because it is woefully short on information. It should have, at the very least, provided some reasonable explanation of how you estimated of the number of Morpheus users who are at risk of this "exposure." At one point, your article claims "up to two million" people are exposed. Morpheus has been downloaded by tens of millions of people. Your opening paragraph ("...allows anyone to gain private information about its millions of users.") suggest all Morpheus users are exposed. Which is it? You quote an unnamed "security expert" claiming this problem could "potentially" make every users' computer vulnerable to exposure. Then where did the estimate of two million users come from?
Beyond the confusing and irresponsible allegations you blithely repeat, you get the major details of what is widely known to be factual incorrect, which calls into question the validity of the entire article. "Morpheus is at present legal because there is no server storing the digital files." No, Morpheus is legal in the U.S.A. because the lawsuit challenging its legality has not yet been heard in the courts. The fact that there is no server storing the digital files is immaterial. Napster did not have a server storing the files, it had servers that indexed the files that users stored on their computers. Morpheus's servers have no such index, but they do have an index of users who are logged into the network. Whether the courts will see this as a key difference between the two services is an open question.
Furthermore, "music fans swapping MP3 files are put in direct contact with each other." Nonsense. They contact each other over the network, just like with Napster, just like with the Internet. How can I be said to be in "direct contact" with the BBC if this email to you will bounce half-way around the globe in bits and pieces until it reaches your email server? There is no difference between a Morpheus user's contact with another Morpheus user and my contact with the BBC.
Lastly, RIAA is "reportedly looking at ways it can tackle these new methods of file-sharing." Yes, it's called a lawsuit, a fact that your article makes no mention of. If you were trying to allude to other ways RIAA "reportedly" might be tackling peer-to-peer networks, why not specify them? Frankly, this leads me to wonder if the unsubstantiated allegations made in your article is, in fact, one of the ways RIAA might be attempting to tackle Morpheus. I'm disappointed in the BBC for seeming to participate in their efforts in such an irresponsible manner.
Yours,
Michael Moore
New York, NY USA
mcubed@mindspring.com
Perhaps the greater risk is that most file sharing is illegal.
Could you please point me to the legal code that specifies file sharing is illegal? Has anyone been convicted of the crime of "file-sharing"? What was the penalty?
...if you get busted with illegal MP3's or movies.
Could you define what constitutes an "illegal" MP3 or movie? The courts already ruled that there is nothing illegal about the *.mp3 file format, in RIAA's failed attempt to stop the Rio player. MP3s contain no copy protection schemes that need to be circumvented in order to play them, so there is no conceivable way an MP3 file could violate the tenants of the DMCA.
Plenty of people do it, but that doesn't make it legal.
You saying it's illegal doesn't make it illegal either, unless you're a judge rendering a decision in a trial of someone charged with "file-sharing." Problem is, there's no law against it, so no such case could be brought.
Could someone more familiar with how/. works please explain to me how the above post gets a "2" when it is nothing but misconceived received opinion?
Indeed. One of the best American writers of the 20th Century, I think. Had she not been a woman and a complete nutter, she'd have gotten the respect she deserves.
The rest of the sentence is: "even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."
Honestly, no. I've bought a few CDs by artists I'd never heard of before downloading MP3s of their songs, mainly indie-label CDs (which is all I've allowed myself to buy since last July). But even if I wasn't trying to adhere to my own major-label boycott, I doubt I'd buy the commercial releases once I had the MP3s. The reason is that most commercial releases aren't worth the money. The late-60s/early-70s advent of album rock resulted from some brilliant bands making some brilliant albums that people couldn't live without - The Beatles, Led Zepplin, The Who, etc. When the labels realized how much more money they make selling albums than selling singles, they pushed the albums. The advent of CDs only made this easier. Trouble is, most bands aren't The Beatles, Led Zepplin, The Who, etc., and most albums aren't brilliant.
Late last year my apartment was broken into and about 80 CDs were stolen (out of 500 or so). I've since replaced about 25 of them. The other 55 - it really came as a surprise to me to realize this - weren't particularly worth replacing. I downloaded what I remember liking - made my own 'artist favorites' compilations that reduced between two to four of any given bands commercial CDs to one kick-ass CDR. No filler.
If the labels gave me the option of picking and choosing like this, then I'd pay. It'd save a lot of time and I could be sure of finding what I want. But they don't. Pressplay & MusicNet aren't cutting it and neither will the "legit" Napster. The recording industry's ambition regarding internet delivery is to make it an additional revenue stream, not one that will cut into CD sales. The absurdly restrictive offer structures of their services only make sense when you look at them that way. I don't think most consumers are going to buy into that notion. I'm sure not. Sales of pre-recorded commercial CDs are bound to shrink as people get more and more music from other sources. Labels can scream "piracy" at the top of their lungs, but the fact remains that they're trying to peddle a product who's inefficiencies and deficiencies are becoming more apparent to consumers. It's becoming outmoded as the single mass-merchandised medium for music delivery. The usual sort of reaction to that problem is to come up with a better product, but the record industry in it's infinite wisdom seems bent on unleashing a degraded product.
The reason you can't is that copyright law prevents you from doing so. If the creator of a piece of proprietary software has abandoned development, he can still prevent anyone else from continuing commercial development if he chooses to do so. Whether that is good or bad for capitalism or society or culture is immaterial - the person who holds the copyright calls the shots. Of course, anyone with the know-how can crack and modify the software to his heart's content (just like anyone who wants to can go to the library to dig up a story the author of which no longer allows reprints of), but copyright law would prevent you from selling it or even giving it away if the copyright owner doesn't want you to.
Which of course means that, in a real-world capitalist society, the lawyers win and everyone else loses.
The whole point is that IP laws exist solely for the benefit of society as a whole, not for the benefit of inventors or artists.
I still think you've got it wrong there, with regard to copyright. I mean as a philosophical or jurisprudential matter more than as a practical matter. As a practical matter, it's obviously incorrect, or Mickey Mouse would be in the public domain where he belongs and Houghton Mifflin would not have had to defend in court its right to publish Alice Randall's book. There is no court in the U.S. - and I'd venture to guess very few courts in the world - that would require an author to make available material he chooses not to, at the risk of losing his copyright on that material. Where is the public benefit in that? The benefit is to the creator in giving him control over how, when, where, and why he chooses to distribute his work. You could argue that that sort of control is part of the overall "incentive to create" that copyrights are supposed to foster, but that strikes me as tenuous at best. Inherent in the copyright privilege is the privilege to pervert the public benefit of ensuring a viable, thriving marketplace for creative work by removing one's own work from that marketplace at will (provided one hasn't entered into any contracts that prevent one from doing so.)
Salinger came to mind because a year or two ago on Yahoo! Auctions an enterprising midwesterner was selling home-made booklets of early Salinger stories, none of which were in print (by Salinger's choosing). He explained how he'd copied all the stories from their original magazine appearances and reformatted them using his desktop publishing software into an attractive little package he was selling for enough to cover his expenses. I had the impression he was genuinely unaware that he was breaking the law, though I'm sure Salinger's lawyers clarified that for him soon enough. Maybe I'm just a sucker, but I believed that this guy was naive enough to think he was doing a public service by making the stories readily available as best he could. If copyright law existed solely for the benefit of society as a whole, as you purport, then he would have been correct or he wouldn't have needed to undertake his venture in the first place because those stories would already be widely circulated.
This whole "intellectual property" issue has been turned around and distorted by the software and entertainment industries. The limited privilege governments give to companies and people to sell their intellectual creations does not, in any way, reflect any intrinsic "right" on that "property". That limited privilege is granted as an incentive to further intellectual creation. When it ceases to have that effect, the privilege should be revoked.
In other words, if it's easy to steal, then it's not really theft?
I think the term "intellectual property" ought to be tossed on the Harry Potter bonfires fundies everywhere are lighting, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "when it ceases to have that effect." Are you saying that if the incentive is so easily negated by widespread piracy, then in these instances we may as well forget copyrights instead of trying to restore the incentive by controlling the piracy? In a case like Ambrosia's, where the question seems to be whether enough people are willing to pay for their products if there's no readily available alternative to doing so, the circumstances sort themselves out. I don't really see the problem with Ambrosia making whatever attempts it can to control piracy. Time will tell if in doing so it's just shooting itself in the foot. And I wouldn't equate using pirated software to knocking over CompUSA when it's so easy to obtain the free stuff in question - indeed, when there are whole networks of users who facilitate spreading the pirated versions, so that it becomes something of a community activity (akin to file-sharing). It's more like smoking pot - yeah, it's not exactly legal in many places, but how many people feel like criminals when they do it?
But I think you ignore a key component of copyright privilege as it has developed: the right to restrict the uses of one's work. This isn't a new development foisted on us by media and software corporations. There are any number of publishing companies who'd pay handsomely to publish the complete works of J.D. Salinger if he'd allow it. His ability to keep material out-of-print is a privilege bestowed upon him by copyright law, and he's hardly the only creator who's availed himself of this or similarly restrictive privileges. The public benefit of copyrights is to incent creative output, but copyrights mean more than than to those who hold them.
Slashdot Mirror
True, to a point. But there's also value in the "associative" effect. For instance, it's long been a hallmark of a certain stripe of commercial fiction to drop product names left, right and center. Try browsing a Danielle Steele or Jackie Collins novel - you drown in references to Bulgarvi diamond pendants, Lamborghini's, and Chanel. Characters don't drink mere champagne, they bathe in Veuve Clicquot. This isn't product placement, but it uses name-brand recognition as short-hand for establishing character and atmosphere. A similar kind of short-hand can work in games. Real products have this effect because we're so subjected to advertising, but that affords designers the opportunity to borrow an established identity or atmosphere to bolster their own creation. I don't think it's necessarily there just to make it look real.
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I don't have a problem with the word "stupid" - I use it all the time. For example:
'N Sync makes stupid music
Exempting SUVs from auto fuel-emission standards was stupid
President Bush is stupid
Stupid is a great word; it's a value judgement. It has no applicability to the issue of population growth except as a value judgement. Neither of the reports you cited supports your contention that "stupid people breed more," which simply conveys your elitist and condescending attitude. The World Bank report notes that population growth is tied to economic development, health issues (from Chapter 3: "Parents choose to have smaller families when health conditions improve so that they no longer have to fear that many of their babies might die, and when they do not have to rely on their children to work on the family farm or business or to take care of them in their old age."), and educational opportunities, particularly for women. As the excerpt you included says, higher education provide people with more opportunity. This doesn't mean the populace is any more or less "stupid" than it ever was. It means people have more options.
There's no "PC" equivalent for "stupid." It conveys exactly the meaning and attitude you intend toward issues, ideas, or persons. Use it accordingly. What others regard as politically correct or incorrect is immaterial - you should alway use language to communicate your thoughts as precisely as you use code to create your application.
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In an ordinary, everyday kind-of way, I'd agree. But it works beyond an advertiser's wildest dreams when the product is placed in the right scene at the right time in the right movie. The Reeces Pieces/E.T. magic has been cited. Another classic example from the dawn of product placement is Tom Cruise wearing those Ray-Bans in Risky Business - suddenly, everybody was wearing Ray Bans. But in both of those cases, the placement didn't really come off as "product placement, read: advertising." They seemed integral to the story or character, and they were memorable moments in their own right.
But still, people care and notice. My favorite example from movies is a kind-of product anti-placement. In the 1934 comedy It Happened One Night, there's a scene in which Clark Gable takes off his shirt in a motel room, and he wasn't wearing an undershirt. The typical American male of the mid-1930s always wore an undershirt. In the months following the (very successful) movie's release, undershirt sales plummeted. Hanes or Jockey could've saved a ton of money had they only paid the film's producers to get Gable to wear an undershirt, any undershirt.
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The Neanderthal lived in trailers? I hope you've reported your discovery through the proper channels. That's a major breakthrough!
No one knows for sure just what happened to the Neanderthal nor why, nor whether or how much interbreeding ocurred between Neanderthal and homo sapien. If you're suggesting that evolution as a process works in a "classist" manner, you're wrong. The effects of the evolutionary process can include eliminating entire species, but there's nothing classist about the process itself. "Survival of the fittest" is a local phenomenon; who or what is "fittest" today may not be "fittest" tomorrow. Cockroaches can survive a nuclear fallout. Does that make them the elite?
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Futhermore, you imply that both "intelligence" and "stupidity" are genetically determined by claiming that the "problem" is that "educated and intelligent" people don't have enough kids and "stupid" people have too many. Can you point me to a studies that demonstrate low I.Q.'s are inextricably linked to a propensity for procreation? Or the reverse? Can you point to studies that demonstrate that intellectual capacity is genetically determined in the manner you imply, once social and economic factors are removed from the equation?
For every 16-year-old piece of "trailer trash," as you so eloquently (and predicatably) put it, who has to get a job to help pay the rent, I can show you a 26-year-old spoiled brat who can't keep a job because they spent their expensive prep-school years and even more expensive private college years partying so much they haven't a clue what working actually means. Big deal. The point is your "argument" is shot-through with elitist, classist notions of what constitutes intelligence and stupidity, and has no bearing at all on the course of human evolution.
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How could you possibly "properly" present an arguement that computer code is subject to the highest level of First Amendment scrutiny? Trying to make that claim at all is a screw-up because it's patently false.
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That's because it was never presented properly. The 2600 team screwed up.
So when your house catches fire, you're going to call your local MENSA chapter to come fight it, rather than the local fire department? I suggest you to come to New York City and check out the physical conditioning of the majority of people engaged in the WTC clean-up - 98# weakling geeks they ain't.
Educated and intelligent people have few children. Stupid people breed like mad.
I take you have many offspring? That's got to be the most elitist, idiotic, unfounded, illogical statement on /. this week, and you sure have a lot of competition. What did you do, see "The Royal Tennenbaums" and mistake it for a documentary? I can think of no environment more abject than slavery, yet look at all the children of slaves who've made invaluable contributions to humankind, and not just in the U.S. - all over the world and throughout history.
In any case, formal education and intelligence have little in common with each other, as people around here prove time and time again.
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Read the decision in the Napster case. Nothing in that ruling specifies that file-sharing is illegal. What was illegal was copyright infringement. To prove copyright infringement, the copyright holder has to demonstrate an instance in which his copyright was violated. An instance of pirated software is illegal regardless of whether it is shared over a network. As previously mentioned, MP3 files are not inherently illegal.
Child pornography is illegal regardless of whether you share it over a network. You can email child pornography. For that matter, you can email a copyrighted image or copyrighted text, thus creating an infringing copy of the material. Does that make email illegal?
I realize you're just trolling, but given the opportunity I'm always happy to try to educate or persuade people who may not quite grasp the intricasies of these matters. I can easily gloss over flame bait originating from cowardly pipsqueaks if it gives me the opportunity to do so, or just laugh it off if it doesn't.
So what else ya got??
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I wish to register my disappointment with the BBC for running unsubstantiated claims about a vaguely defined security risk associated with using the file-sharing application Morpheus. Does the BBC make a habit of publicising the claims of "security experts" who take it upon themselves to contact you without actually investigating whether those claims have any merit, particularly when those "security experts" refuse to be identified? I would like to believe that is not the case, but this article indicates you have lowered your journalistic standards in pursuit of sensationalism.
A responsible piece of reportage would have pointed out that numerous such claims have been made in the past and all have proven unfounded. It would have specified whether, indeed, the entire contents of a user's hard drive was at risk for exposure, or whether (as in past incidences of these type of claims) all that is being "exposed" are the files the user has already designated as shared. Some people seem to think that it constitutes a "security risk" if they are able to find an alternate means of accessing the files a user is sharing. This is merely being clever. Your article gives your readers no way of making an informed decision about whether this is another such false alarm, because it is woefully short on information. It should have, at the very least, provided some reasonable explanation of how you estimated of the number of Morpheus users who are at risk of this "exposure." At one point, your article claims "up to two million" people are exposed. Morpheus has been downloaded by tens of millions of people. Your opening paragraph ("...allows anyone to gain private information about its millions of users.") suggest all Morpheus users are exposed. Which is it? You quote an unnamed "security expert" claiming this problem could "potentially" make every users' computer vulnerable to exposure. Then where did the estimate of two million users come from?
Beyond the confusing and irresponsible allegations you blithely repeat, you get the major details of what is widely known to be factual incorrect, which calls into question the validity of the entire article. "Morpheus is at present legal because there is no server storing the digital files." No, Morpheus is legal in the U.S.A. because the lawsuit challenging its legality has not yet been heard in the courts. The fact that there is no server storing the digital files is immaterial. Napster did not have a server storing the files, it had servers that indexed the files that users stored on their computers. Morpheus's servers have no such index, but they do have an index of users who are logged into the network. Whether the courts will see this as a key difference between the two services is an open question.
Furthermore, "music fans swapping MP3 files are put in direct contact with each other." Nonsense. They contact each other over the network, just like with Napster, just like with the Internet. How can I be said to be in "direct contact" with the BBC if this email to you will bounce half-way around the globe in bits and pieces until it reaches your email server? There is no difference between a Morpheus user's contact with another Morpheus user and my contact with the BBC.
Lastly, RIAA is "reportedly looking at ways it can tackle these new methods of file-sharing." Yes, it's called a lawsuit, a fact that your article makes no mention of. If you were trying to allude to other ways RIAA "reportedly" might be tackling peer-to-peer networks, why not specify them? Frankly, this leads me to wonder if the unsubstantiated allegations made in your article is, in fact, one of the ways RIAA might be attempting to tackle Morpheus. I'm disappointed in the BBC for seeming to participate in their efforts in such an irresponsible manner.
Yours,
Michael Moore
New York, NY USA
mcubed@mindspring.com
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Could you please point me to the legal code that specifies file sharing is illegal? Has anyone been convicted of the crime of "file-sharing"? What was the penalty?
Could you define what constitutes an "illegal" MP3 or movie? The courts already ruled that there is nothing illegal about the *.mp3 file format, in RIAA's failed attempt to stop the Rio player. MP3s contain no copy protection schemes that need to be circumvented in order to play them, so there is no conceivable way an MP3 file could violate the tenants of the DMCA.
Plenty of people do it, but that doesn't make it legal.
You saying it's illegal doesn't make it illegal either, unless you're a judge rendering a decision in a trial of someone charged with "file-sharing." Problem is, there's no law against it, so no such case could be brought.
Could someone more familiar with how /. works please explain to me how the above post gets a "2" when it is nothing but misconceived received opinion?
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The rest of the sentence is: "even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."
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Late last year my apartment was broken into and about 80 CDs were stolen (out of 500 or so). I've since replaced about 25 of them. The other 55 - it really came as a surprise to me to realize this - weren't particularly worth replacing. I downloaded what I remember liking - made my own 'artist favorites' compilations that reduced between two to four of any given bands commercial CDs to one kick-ass CDR. No filler.
If the labels gave me the option of picking and choosing like this, then I'd pay. It'd save a lot of time and I could be sure of finding what I want. But they don't. Pressplay & MusicNet aren't cutting it and neither will the "legit" Napster. The recording industry's ambition regarding internet delivery is to make it an additional revenue stream, not one that will cut into CD sales. The absurdly restrictive offer structures of their services only make sense when you look at them that way. I don't think most consumers are going to buy into that notion. I'm sure not. Sales of pre-recorded commercial CDs are bound to shrink as people get more and more music from other sources. Labels can scream "piracy" at the top of their lungs, but the fact remains that they're trying to peddle a product who's inefficiencies and deficiencies are becoming more apparent to consumers. It's becoming outmoded as the single mass-merchandised medium for music delivery. The usual sort of reaction to that problem is to come up with a better product, but the record industry in it's infinite wisdom seems bent on unleashing a degraded product.
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Which of course means that, in a real-world capitalist society, the lawyers win and everyone else loses.
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I still think you've got it wrong there, with regard to copyright. I mean as a philosophical or jurisprudential matter more than as a practical matter. As a practical matter, it's obviously incorrect, or Mickey Mouse would be in the public domain where he belongs and Houghton Mifflin would not have had to defend in court its right to publish Alice Randall's book. There is no court in the U.S. - and I'd venture to guess very few courts in the world - that would require an author to make available material he chooses not to, at the risk of losing his copyright on that material. Where is the public benefit in that? The benefit is to the creator in giving him control over how, when, where, and why he chooses to distribute his work. You could argue that that sort of control is part of the overall "incentive to create" that copyrights are supposed to foster, but that strikes me as tenuous at best. Inherent in the copyright privilege is the privilege to pervert the public benefit of ensuring a viable, thriving marketplace for creative work by removing one's own work from that marketplace at will (provided one hasn't entered into any contracts that prevent one from doing so.)
Salinger came to mind because a year or two ago on Yahoo! Auctions an enterprising midwesterner was selling home-made booklets of early Salinger stories, none of which were in print (by Salinger's choosing). He explained how he'd copied all the stories from their original magazine appearances and reformatted them using his desktop publishing software into an attractive little package he was selling for enough to cover his expenses. I had the impression he was genuinely unaware that he was breaking the law, though I'm sure Salinger's lawyers clarified that for him soon enough. Maybe I'm just a sucker, but I believed that this guy was naive enough to think he was doing a public service by making the stories readily available as best he could. If copyright law existed solely for the benefit of society as a whole, as you purport, then he would have been correct or he wouldn't have needed to undertake his venture in the first place because those stories would already be widely circulated.
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In other words, if it's easy to steal, then it's not really theft?
I think the term "intellectual property" ought to be tossed on the Harry Potter bonfires fundies everywhere are lighting, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "when it ceases to have that effect." Are you saying that if the incentive is so easily negated by widespread piracy, then in these instances we may as well forget copyrights instead of trying to restore the incentive by controlling the piracy? In a case like Ambrosia's, where the question seems to be whether enough people are willing to pay for their products if there's no readily available alternative to doing so, the circumstances sort themselves out. I don't really see the problem with Ambrosia making whatever attempts it can to control piracy. Time will tell if in doing so it's just shooting itself in the foot. And I wouldn't equate using pirated software to knocking over CompUSA when it's so easy to obtain the free stuff in question - indeed, when there are whole networks of users who facilitate spreading the pirated versions, so that it becomes something of a community activity (akin to file-sharing). It's more like smoking pot - yeah, it's not exactly legal in many places, but how many people feel like criminals when they do it?
But I think you ignore a key component of copyright privilege as it has developed: the right to restrict the uses of one's work. This isn't a new development foisted on us by media and software corporations. There are any number of publishing companies who'd pay handsomely to publish the complete works of J.D. Salinger if he'd allow it. His ability to keep material out-of-print is a privilege bestowed upon him by copyright law, and he's hardly the only creator who's availed himself of this or similarly restrictive privileges. The public benefit of copyrights is to incent creative output, but copyrights mean more than than to those who hold them.
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