The result really isn't the same in the absence of legislation. Without an SSSCA, sure, the predominant corporate platform and the stuff you can get at Best Buy will be crippled with DRM cruft. But you and I would still be able to legally purchase machines that weren't, and software developers would be able to continue developing for them.
What would happen, I concede though, would be that it would be the end of getting *nix workstations for commodity PC prices, since the commodity PCs would be the crippled ones.
One ray of hope: I note that Apple does not appear to be part of this--which could mean that they don't buy into mandatory DRM in personal computers. Unfortunately, it could also mean that they back the SSSCA.
Thanks. BTW, I should mention that I had the wrong Pope and encyclical in my post. Paul VI did write Humanae Vitae, but it was about contraception. John XXIII wrote the encyclical I was thinking of, Evangelium Vitae, which said
But no word has the power to change the reality of things: procured abortion is
the deliberate and direct killing, by whatever means it is carried out, of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence, extending from conception to birth.
We give the industry their SSSCA, lock up all the hardware, and outlaw all operating systems except DRM-OS.
Since this will now result in the total demise of copyright infringement, the movie, recording, and video game industries then immediately pay taxes on the hojillionsofdollars they claim to be losing per year, at the prevailing highest corporate tax rate, with no writeoffs on this amount. These additional taxes should be a small price for industry to pay for the increased profits that would result from all that sudden demand now that their material isn't available for copying in digital form, now that general purpose computers would be outlawed.
Oh--you mean they aren't going to sell all that, because the people they claimed as having been costing them money wouldn't have bought the product anyway? That's OK--we can just sell the assets of the companies benefiting from the SSSCA to take care of the taxes, then.
A French musician couple recently aborted their child due to a completely non- life threatening finger disability, because he could never be a musician like mommy and daddy. His worth as a child was dependent on his physical perfection.
That is pure evil. When I was younger, I thought the Paul VI was off his rocker with Humanae Vitae and life beginning at conception. Now, as a lapsed Catholic, I'm beginnning to reconsider the idea that Popes may well be infallible when speaking ex cathedra, after all. Look where the slippery slope has taken us already.
We give the industry their SSSCA, lock up all the hardware, and outlaw all operating systems except DRM-OS.
Since this will now result in the total demise of copyright infringement, the movie, recording, and video game industries then immediately pay taxes on the hojillionsofdollars they claim to be losing per year, at the prevailing highest corporate tax rate.
Oh--you mean they aren't going to sell all that, because the people they claimed as having been costing them money wouldn't have bought the product anyway? Guess we can just sell the industries to pay the taxes, then.
Yes, it does matter when and how. After all, we can say that copyrights just have to be for a limited time. It doesn't say in the Constitution "when and how" they have to expire. (Which is the reasoning behind the Sonny Bono Public Domain Destruction Act.)
By the same reasoning, I can close up a GPLd app I modified, lock up the source, and release it "sometime," (after the market has dried up) since it doesn't matter when or how.
And as cable modem operators start trying to say things like "you can't run servers," "you can't run a VPN," and "you can't criticize us on your website," they stop being common carriers.
The telephone companies might have some hope of making that argument, possibly preserving DSL for awhile longer as a non-MPAA compliant way to access the Internet.
You're right. I think the Chinese should pay a fee for each machine they dump in the river. Even if The People's Republic of Santa Monica (aka California) passes a fee, what's going to stop those machines from ending up in China anyway, if their government environmental controls are so weak that it's cheaper for the disposal contractors that will crop up to make money from this fee can make phat bucks sending them there? It's illegal? Ha.
If having MS install copy-protection at the OS level means the media companies will finally make this available, then I can stomach it.
And do you feel the same way about copy-protection on your hardware? A.K.A. the end of the "general purpose" computer? If the next gee-whiz Pentium V/Athlon YQ machine will only be available with some kind of MPAA-Approved BIOS and encryption, then I guess I've bought my last computer.
The good news? I've got a bunch of old Pentium machines with CDRW's. Hopefully, I'll be able to make big dollars marketing them on auction sites as "R@R3 PR3-B@N PCs."
A centralized place to hold corporations accountable for their negative actions against members of the community is something that's been needed.
The legal analysis is a bonus.
Now, I wonder how long it will be before chillingeffects.org itself receives a C&D demanding that it remove someone's "confidential" C&D letter they sent, after realizing the whole world will see what their legal thugs have done.
Re:The characterization of abandonware seekers
on
The Abandonware Question
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Heh. Back in my day, we had to translate vinyl to SID files. By hand. And we did it on a Commodore 64, with a cassette drive (or a 1541 disk drive, which transferred data about as fast as a cassette drive, but with random access). And we had to do our file transfers at 300 baud (and we were damned glad to have it) with Punter protocol or XMODEM, in 128 byte blocks over phone lines that we would swear were switched through barbed wire at the CO. And we didn't have no fancy In-ter-net. No siree, Bob. We had to direct dial long distance and pull the RJ-10 jack from the handset for our Vicmodem. And if that wasn't enough, we had to find codes for long distance. We were too poor to afford a Blue box. (This was before the days of Tone Loc.)
Apple has to differentiate DVD Studio Pro from their free software.
When one removes a feature to "differentiate" one substantially identical piece of software from another, those in the industry call that crippling.
The characterization of abandonware seekers
on
The Abandonware Question
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
as merely cheap bastards is apparently self-abscription of game makers' own money-grubbing, greedy motives. They can't imagine that former customers might actually feel nostalgic for their old stuff--only that they must be too parsimonious to pay a few bucks for newer games.
Fortunately, it is physically impossible to enforce copyrights on everything in the same jackbooted manner that IDSA, BSA, et all do on current software--they just don't have the resources. So, while they succeed in shuttering abandonware sites from time to time, thus winning battles, with p2p, Freenet, individual trading of CDRs, the war is lost.
By fighting those hosting abandonware, they have, in fact, made many more people aware of it than would have been had they left it alone. This is the same thing that has happened with music and movie trading: just a few people were doing it, until corporations cracked down, causing publicity that made the awareness that it could be done trickle down.
Go look up the word monopoly in a dictionary. The MacOS is a commodity for personal computers, and the Mac platform is a commodity computer (albeit in a proprietary package with a force-bundled OS (hmm... just like Microsoft...)). They're the only one that sells this commodity.
SGI, Sun, et al, also hold monopolies in their space. But both Microsoft and Apple hold monopolies where the government actually has a right to be concerned--in the consumer market.
Apple's licensing of Amazon's one-click service doesn't do anything other than make Apple's online store easier to use for their customers. Amazon has a patent on that technology whether Apple licenses that technology or not, so it really makes no difference.
While it's true that Amazon has the patent, it didn't really have much to go on in enforcing it. Now, a smaller company being threatened by Amazon for using an obvious business technique of storing credit card information can be further intimidated by the fact that Amazon can point to Apple as having thought the patent legitimate enough to license it. While the details are secret, I'd bet that Apple had to pay a minimal sum to Amazon, if anything at all--Amazon was probably so glad to have this precedent to point to that they gave the license to Apple for free.
Slashdot Mirror
What would happen, I concede though, would be that it would be the end of getting *nix workstations for commodity PC prices, since the commodity PCs would be the crippled ones.
One ray of hope: I note that Apple does not appear to be part of this--which could mean that they don't buy into mandatory DRM in personal computers. Unfortunately, it could also mean that they back the SSSCA.
Since this will now result in the total demise of copyright infringement, the movie, recording, and video game industries then immediately pay taxes on the hojillions of dollars they claim to be losing per year, at the prevailing highest corporate tax rate, with no writeoffs on this amount. These additional taxes should be a small price for industry to pay for the increased profits that would result from all that sudden demand now that their material isn't available for copying in digital form, now that general purpose computers would be outlawed.
Oh--you mean they aren't going to sell all that, because the people they claimed as having been costing them money wouldn't have bought the product anyway? That's OK--we can just sell the assets of the companies benefiting from the SSSCA to take care of the taxes, then.
That is pure evil. When I was younger, I thought the Paul VI was off his rocker with Humanae Vitae and life beginning at conception. Now, as a lapsed Catholic, I'm beginnning to reconsider the idea that Popes may well be infallible when speaking ex cathedra, after all. Look where the slippery slope has taken us already.
You just pegged the movement on my troll meter. Now I have to reset the blasted thing.
Since this will now result in the total demise of copyright infringement, the movie, recording, and video game industries then immediately pay taxes on the hojillions of dollars they claim to be losing per year, at the prevailing highest corporate tax rate.
Oh--you mean they aren't going to sell all that, because the people they claimed as having been costing them money wouldn't have bought the product anyway? Guess we can just sell the industries to pay the taxes, then.
Does no one remember that Bill Clinton had the opportunity to veto the DMCA, but chose to sign it? And, IIRC, he was a Democrat?
OK, so now that they already have the ability to record, do you think it'll be easy for the industry to convince them to go back?
Do you think a significant number of people would have bought such devices?
By the same reasoning, I can close up a GPLd app I modified, lock up the source, and release it "sometime," (after the market has dried up) since it doesn't matter when or how.
The telephone companies might have some hope of making that argument, possibly preserving DSL for awhile longer as a non-MPAA compliant way to access the Internet.
You're right. I think the Chinese should pay a fee for each machine they dump in the river. Even if The People's Republic of Santa Monica (aka California) passes a fee, what's going to stop those machines from ending up in China anyway, if their government environmental controls are so weak that it's cheaper for the disposal contractors that will crop up to make money from this fee can make phat bucks sending them there? It's illegal? Ha.
And do you feel the same way about copy-protection on your hardware? A.K.A. the end of the "general purpose" computer? If the next gee-whiz Pentium V/Athlon YQ machine will only be available with some kind of MPAA-Approved BIOS and encryption, then I guess I've bought my last computer.
The good news? I've got a bunch of old Pentium machines with CDRW's. Hopefully, I'll be able to make big dollars marketing them on auction sites as "R@R3 PR3-B@N PCs."
We've all been labeled as eee-vil content appropriators because we like to get our Debian fix with apt-get.
Fortunately, at least now, they can't keep the news of their actions localized. Now let's just hope people pay some attention.
And with that name, they're easily confused with a laxative company--Bran Dimensions. Of course, now I'll probably be named in a lawsuit.
The legal analysis is a bonus.
Now, I wonder how long it will be before chillingeffects.org itself receives a C&D demanding that it remove someone's "confidential" C&D letter they sent, after realizing the whole world will see what their legal thugs have done.
Kids have it so easy today.
Hey, Scott's the one that said "you have no privacy, get over it." What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, no?
That's like saying it's speculation to say O.J. Simpson murdered his wife.
That would make:
Step 3. The world transitions to the .net CLR.
I don't think Sun is that dumb.
When one removes a feature to "differentiate" one substantially identical piece of software from another, those in the industry call that crippling.
Fortunately, it is physically impossible to enforce copyrights on everything in the same jackbooted manner that IDSA, BSA, et all do on current software--they just don't have the resources. So, while they succeed in shuttering abandonware sites from time to time, thus winning battles, with p2p, Freenet, individual trading of CDRs, the war is lost.
By fighting those hosting abandonware, they have, in fact, made many more people aware of it than would have been had they left it alone. This is the same thing that has happened with music and movie trading: just a few people were doing it, until corporations cracked down, causing publicity that made the awareness that it could be done trickle down.
~~~
SGI, Sun, et al, also hold monopolies in their space. But both Microsoft and Apple hold monopolies where the government actually has a right to be concerned--in the consumer market.
While it's true that Amazon has the patent, it didn't really have much to go on in enforcing it. Now, a smaller company being threatened by Amazon for using an obvious business technique of storing credit card information can be further intimidated by the fact that Amazon can point to Apple as having thought the patent legitimate enough to license it. While the details are secret, I'd bet that Apple had to pay a minimal sum to Amazon, if anything at all--Amazon was probably so glad to have this precedent to point to that they gave the license to Apple for free.