If anybody had called illegally downloading a copyrighted song theft, Slashdot posters would be up in arms. There would be a dozen posts about how copyright infringement isn't theft and it's not at all the same as, oh I don't know... stealing a car.
But saying that getting a law changed to extend copyright is theft of the public domain, that's +5 Insightful. Equating it to them depriving you of your car... yeah, +5 Insightful.
You know, I even agree with your point. What they're doing is not right. I'm just completely disgusted with the constant double standards around here. This sort of thing is exactly the reason why this site has become such a joke to so many people. When some groups can do nothing wrong and some can do nothing right--even when they are doing the same things--then we have a problem with intellectual honesty.
Okay, mods. Since it is inevitable that calling/. hypocrisy out results in being modded down, I guess I'll help you out: The one you're looking for is "Offtopic." That way not only do you get to mod me down, you'd even be technically right about it.
It's in Germany's culture to prefer stability of a strong leader to the uncertainty that can be found in the absence thereof. If they truly want Hitler to rule them, let him.
I realize you're not serious, but I agree. If the Germans wanted Hitler to rule them, they were free to grant him that power. (And they did.) We should not intervene, definitely not militarily, in that respect.
When he starts invading his neighbors, however, it's no longer an issue of the will of the people of that country to elect whom they choose. That is a pretty clear case where other powers in the world can stop him. Slaughtering the Jews (and Pols and others) is slightly less clear cut. I would like to say that most people believe that stopping that sort of thing is a moral responsibility, but then again we have ethnic cleansing going on right now and most people don't seem all that interested in it.
In other words -- elect whomever you wish. It's your business. When he starts affecting the lives of people outside of his country--war and genocide being two awfully clear ways a ruler can do that--other countries will make their decisions about intervention.
(like letting me post on slashdot or look at porn)
Interesting choice of words there--"letting [you]."
That's really what it's about. It doesn't "let you," you tell it to do it and it does it. That's control. Of course you don't invite your friends over to show you have control over your computer; you take that control for granted. It's not important to you because it's there. Let it go missing and you can be pretty certain it would become the most important part of a computer for you, as you struggle to find a way to get that control back.
What happens when there comes a day that it says "no?" No more slashdot--too anti-Microsoft. No more porn--bad for the children. What happens if we really do come to a point in our DRM escalation where you really do need to ask your computer's permission to use it for what you want to use it for?
We're stepping in that direction. Somebody else's interests are dictating my abilities. I can only burn iTunes tracks so many times. I can't legally make a copy of my DVDs because I have to break a DRM scheme to do it. These may seem like reasonable restrictions, but they are restrictions nonetheless. Can't burn my tracks as often as I want? Step. Can't back up my DVDs? Step. Can't buy a DVD from a different region and use it without bypassing (potentially illegally) their restrictions? Step.
Vista will, under conditions that I don't remember off the top of my head, downsample my videos. And we take another step. It's more and more a move to trusted computing, where the weak link in the trust chain is you.
It may seem like we're ages away from that point. Maybe we are, but how many bad things do you know of that were implemented with the message - "boy, this is really going to suck for you consumers!" Of course they're small steps. They're acclimating you to a new climate so they can take another small step, and another. Before you know it you look back and go "whoa, how the hell did I get here?" By which point it's often too late to do anything about it.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any means. I'm also not, despite what this post may sound like, a Microsoft hater. XP runs happily on my laptop, linux runs happily on my desktop, they play together as nicely as I need them to. I am worried, however, about these small steps we're taking and where they are leading us. Not just Microsoft/Vista. Not just CDs and DVDs. All over.
If my tools are no longer MY tools, there's a problem. Wouldn't you agree?
Then MS attacks the herd, suing the rest of the Linux distributors for patent infringement, including infringement of the Novell patents MS licenses under their Novell deal.
The first half -- okay. Microsoft can obviously sue people for violating their patents, if that is what they think is going on.
The second half... not so much. Licensing a patent does not give you standing to sue for infringement of that patent. Only the holder of the patent has that legal standing.
Sex offenders were less likely than non-sex offenders to be rearrested for any offense -- 43 percent of sex offenders versus 68 percent of non-sex offenders.
Sex offenders were about four times more likely than non-sex offenders to be arrested for another sex crime after their discharge from prison -- 5.3 percent of sex offenders versus 1.3 percent of non-sex offenders.
I don't know about the rest of you, but 5.3% recidivism doesn't sound awfully high to me. Am I reading that wrong?
Or, perhaps more likely, do the scare tactics about sex offenders simply have no basis in reality?
I'm perfectly content with punishment, but come on:
Yes , rehabilitation is where its at as the triumpant success of this liberal policy over the last few decades has shown... oh wait....
The United States has the most people in prison of any country in the world--including China, Russia, and the third-world countries we like to lambaste as having no respect for law.
The rate of people in US prisons--737 per 100,000--is the highest in the world. It is roughly seven times the average rate in other western countries of the world.
I'm fairly certain our numbers with regard to some countries (China, etc) are not wholly accurate, but there's obviously an issue here, particularly as we compare our rates to other western nations.
In the face of numbers like that, it's incredibly hard to support your contention that we've had some "liberal policy" of justice for "decades." (Article here with these facts; you can find it from any number of other sources as well. I'm pretty sure I read it on Yahoo News from the AP a few days ago.)
The US has always been conservative on the issue of justice. Punishments are getting harsher, not more lenient. We still execute people--and I'm not interested in debating whether that is right or wrong, merely pointing it out as a difference between us and most other western countries, and it's hard to deny that executions are the harshest form of justice short of torture, which isn't really justice at all.
Why is it Microsoft's job to simplify a process so it can be better implemented by their competitors?
If you have evidence that they are demanding companies test against Windows exclusively, maybe you have a legitimate gripe. Short of that, they aren't doing anything wrong (by not forcing to a spec) that I can see. Besides which, it sounds like the companies are making a choice that testing against Windows and ignoring other markets is a cost-effective tradeoff.
Each sale by a pirate probably does represent a lost legitimate sale [. ..] t ignored fact that part of the reason that it represents a lost sale is that the official CD is so overpriced people don't consider it worth purchasing.
The latter half is correct. It's the same reason a music download doesn't equate to a lost sale. The term is "market clearing price." Simplified a little bit, it is basically the price at which suppler equals demand; in other words, every single unit produced is sold, and no more units are desired.
The RIAA's implication of lost sales pretends they price at the market clearing price. "You bought it from a pirate so you would have bought it from us" is only true if the price from the pirate and from them is equal. Since it is certainly not, the ratio falls.
I saw a study (here if you want it, don't know how long it will be up though) which concludes, among other things, that the net effect of music downloading on music sales is "statistically indistinguishable from zero." Why? Because the prices are too high. People who are downloading the music are not very likely, in most cases, to buy the CD. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the jist of it. You can read the article if you want to see the methodology and full conclusions.
As far as artist royalties being lowered, I'm fine with that so long as it is a precursor to downloadable media prices being lowered. The RIAA seems to want a percentage system; that seems fair to me, and it permits them to price where they think it would sell best. (You can't price a song at 30 cents if the artists are guaranteed 40 cents, can you? And yes, I know those numbers are high!)
The government granted monopolies to the phone company, the electric company, the gas company for good reason. We really didn't want 17 sets of electric wires on the pole out back, did we?
That's only half true. The examples you provided are what economists refer to as "natural monopolies," the definition of which is when one firm can provide a service cheaper than many competing firms can. It's not so much that we would mind 17 different sets of wires on our poles (I'm sure that carries it's own problems, though); it's that it costs an ungodly sum of money to run all these wires, gas pipes, telephone cables, etc. If we somehow tried to fragment the audience 17 different ways, the nearly sure bet is that most if not all of these companies would fail to make enough money to make back the money they spent laying those wires, or they would be forced to charge absolutely obscene rates to do so. Knowing that, we did subsidize these industries.
That's not to say that you're not allowed to compete with them if you wanted -- that's exactly what CLECS did, by concentrating on big urban areas and installing then-new fiber optic lines in those densely-populated areas to handle telephone traffic -- just that we recognize competition in these areas was, at the time, fairly limited. The FCC was created to manage the nonsense, and they have been struggling with ways to do it ever since. For example:
"We had to build new wires here, we built a central office there, it cost this much."
Was one of their original attempts at the matter, but that encourages gold plating--buying the most obscenely expensive equipment regardless of whether or not it was needed, because the government would use those costs to increase your profits. Obviously that was not desirable, so they went from scheme to scheme trying to find one that works.
Not much, since they have put most of their competitors out of business by overcharging them to use the copper wires that go out to your house and the space in the CO to where they were losing money.
I'm fairly certain that the costs of these UNE (Unbundled Network Elements) are still regulated by the FCC and state agencies for copper lines. Fiber, however, was recently determined by FCC decision to not fall under the same rules. That's why you saw telephone companies suddenly burst onto the scene with plans to lay a gazillion miles of fiber. They aren't obligated to lease it to competitors.
You're pretty much on about the net neutrality stuff, and they obviously have a bullshit case. The public owns the majority of their wires; whether we use them as our ISP or not should not affect our service. Carrying traffic indiscriminately was part of the deal they signed up for all those years ago.
I don't believe this settlement would preclude the individuals who got their information pretexted from filing their own individual lawsuits. And, as stated before, many of the people involved in the scheme still face criminal charges. I think that would cover the punishment aspect of justice.
I'm not really sure what the big deal here is. I'm all for routing out corruption and all that jazz, but this is an issue of civil law. They settled the case. This happens dozens, maybe hundreds of times per day in civil cases; 90% of civil cases never reach a verdict.
The fact that the article submitter chose to spin it as a "payoff" doesn't magically make it a bribe. Call me when they pay $14.5 million and get the criminal charges dropped and then I'll hoot and holler about corruption and greed in America with you. Until then, this is a total non-issue for me. The settlement may be a little bit on the low end, but then again I'm not too terribly disappointed that they didn't waste taxpayer money to pursue both a civil and criminal trial over basically the same charges/complaints.
there are countless examples on their dirty tactics and how they instantly label people as guilty before due process
Dirty tactics -- okay.
But you're complaining that they label people guilty ("liable") before due process? That's their job. It's the job of the respondent's attorneys to come out equally strong to say "of course she's not!" and the judge (and jury, if applicable) to determine who is right. Neither side should be expected to equivocate on whether or not their position is the right one--and one of those sides (or both) will be wrong. That's the way our adversarial justice system works.
Do you know of many prosecutors whose opening statements go, "we intend to prove that it's quite possible that the defendant might have committed this crime?" Of course not. They come out and say "this SOB did such-and-such." The jury decides if they're right.
I would be exceptionally careful about authoring ANY document about legal rights if you are not an attorney who is extremely well-versed in the law in question. If you're not, even your disclaimers (which I assume you would include!) may not be enough to keep you out of trouble if somebody takes your advice and gets themselves sued. And if you are, well, I expect the document would be so steeped in disclaimers and caveats as to be essentially meaningless.
The law is neither simple nor clear-cut. I wish it were.
Why are these people even out of jail if they are still a threat to soceity?
I don't have statistics handy, but I saw some expert on sex crimes on TV once who said that the rate of recidivism among sex offenders is actually not that high. Most of them are NOT a threat to society.
We've just decided to make sex offenders (particularly child sex offenders) the boogeymen of our generation. Nobody ever lost their seat in the government for being mean to sex offenders, after all.
So back on topic; this man deserves to have his children put on trial, his personal computer confiscated, his name smeared in the mud and his reputation shot to pieces because that is what he supports the RIAA doing in the same situation with consumers.
And if the RIAA decides to sue him, they are free to do exactly that. They're not going to do so, and we both know it. It's not that he has some sort of legal immunity. This isn't an issue of legal equality. It's an issue of a private entity choosing which battles they want to fight. It's hypocrisy, but little else. (Aside: I wonder if the RIAA can sue him? The RIAA is supposed to be essentially a group working for the record labels; would this be akin to suing yourself?)
So out of curiosity, what would you do? Constrained by the reality of the real world, I mean; so your "have the RIAA sue him or he has to change his ways!" idea is straight out the window--unless of course you can offer a compelling argument why they would do that. You can't force people to file lawsuits if they don't want to, and you really can't force them to file every single lawsuit they might possibly have a legal standing to file. It is utterly impractical.
So, seriously: You're Congress. You're ready to stem this sort of hypocrisy, but this is the only issue we're going to pretend you have the magical willingness to change (ie, the solution can't be to discard the copyright system or rewrite civil tort law or anything like that; it may be a valid discussion to have, but it's overreaching the point). What law do you pass? How do you word it such that it permits action, is fair, but does not force impractical burdens on the petitioners? How do you phrase it such that you don't get it struck down as illegally discriminating against any groups or their legal rights? How do you do all this without causing unintended negative economic effects?
It may seem like a troll. Maybe it is, in part, because I can't think of a good solution myself, but I actually want to know if there is a good answer out there that doesn't involve some major overhaul of a system most people outside of slashdot aren't particularly interested in overhauling. Any reasonable solutions out there? And if not, perhaps the original poster way on up the line was right that this isn't something to be kicking up dust about.
Now, if I were someone who was being sued for downloading music, then I would have my lawyer get me off the hook on the technicality of the CEO's kids.
What now? You do realize that the CEO's kids is not some legal technicality right? If you're arrested for drunk driving, you can argue that there are thousands of people who do it and never get charged all you want--it's true, but it's also not going to get you off the hook.
Since we're specifically talking about a civil matter, and copyright infringement, that introduces even less of a burden for the RIAA to be fair about it. Copyrights aren't patents. You don't have to enforce them. You don't have to enforce them equally (except as precedent may constrain you), or every single time. You're perfectly free to decide, for example, that pursuing a particular case, while you would be right to do so*, is not worth the time and money. Whether or not you feel that some music CEO's kids doing the same thing and getting away with a scolding is unfair or not, it's not a legal argument that's going to matter to a judge. It's going to be struck down as irrelevant the minute you raise it, and rightly so.
I suppose if you were TRULY insane you could try to make some 14th amendment argument, but I give you my not-a-lawyer guarantee (and take that as you will) that it will not get you anywhere. More likely, the judge will tell you to shut the hell up and pay the fine.
You're right about the distinction between uploading and downloading, but it has nothing to do with the CEO's kids. It has to do with the wording of the laws in question.
* As right as you are in any other circumstances, anyway.
Erm... I didn't RTFA--is it substantially different from the summary? Because the summary says:
However, a few days ago the U.S. Attorney quietly dropped the case. The reason: apparently Google was unwilling to cooperate with prosecutors. Why the odd behavior?
Google called the cops, let them build a case, then refused to cooperate with the prosecution. They did NOT do their part by cooperating, and the prosecutor only dropped the case because of that.
I usually like your posts, and I agree with you even right now -- but my god, why did you have to be such an asshole about it? You used 62 words to make your point (and hell, that's including the 17 words in your semi-insult opening sentence) and 162 words to berate the poster, the moderators and fellow slashdotters. Something is very wrong with that picture.
You're right about one thing: If I had mod points, you would absolutely have gotten a flamebait mod--and it would have had nothing to do with saying that not all security flaws can be prevented. If you're upset about how many flamebait mods you get, perhaps you should try not coming off as a smug prick when you post. If 3/4ths of your post is a flame you deserve a flame mod. It doesn't matter what the hell the other quarter is.
I think the main reason we haven't seen any substantial use of the new formats is because it's just too soon. We've just recently reached the point where DVDs are ubiquitous. Everybody has a player, the price of the media is fairly reasonable, and the average person has a fairly substantial DVD collection going.
Even if the difference were substantial, I wouldn't buy them right now. I'm too far invested in DVDs and that investment has been over too short of a time, in my opinion, to essentially scrap the project. I could run both, of course, but that's irritating in a lot of ways (taking up space, some movies in hypothetically substantially different qualities, etc).
The fact that the difference isn't that substantial only adds to the inertia.
As for the DRM, let's face it: Few people outside of sites like this know or care about it.
I do not agree that the formats are "stillborn." I think they will be picked up, but anybody expecting a huge and immediate uptake was being delusional.
1) When politicians aren't pandering to corporate lobbyists and special interest groups, they're busy worrying about getting reelected rather than doing what needs to be done
I suppose this point is really about how you see politics. Are politicians supposed to represent their constituents, or are they supposed to lead them? If the former, then politicians are doing roughly what they should be doing. Not being re-elected is a sign of voter displeasure. Doing what it takes to get re-elected could easily be seen as representing the majority opinion of your constituents on an issue. If the latter, than you're absolutely right.
As I understood it, the artists never earned a penny from sales through this site, so it might be great for the consumers, but why on earth would you expect the music industry to embrace this?
Well if that is true, that's a shame. But he doesn't expect the RIAA to embrace the website; he expects them to embrace what the website offered: Choice of formats without DRM restrictions. Allofmp3, even at 320kbps MP3, was only like 20-30 cents per song and the grandparent rightly supposes that people would pay more for those same choices, even the $0.99 an iTunes track costs. I can vouch for this myself. I do not purchase from iTunes because of the DRM issues (the lack of choice too, but to a lesser extent) but would be happy to pay $0.99 for that 320 kbps MP3 if that is what I want a particular song in.
I doubt Allofmp3 was a charity operation, so they were making money even with the low prices. That means that if the RIAA were to set up an identical system, and increase the prices such that the highest bitrate MP3* was $0.99, they would have roughly 60 cents per download of guaranteed profit on top of whatever the production/distribution costs of the files are that they can split amongst the artists. Does the artist get 60% right now? Heck, even if the RIAA pocketed half I think the artists would still end up making more under this scheme than they do for the current incarnation of iTunes.
I think cinema tickets are too expensive, so I dont go, but you can bet that the number of people who *do* go outweigh the small loses by losing me as a customer.
That is a different issue. Cinema tickets are a limited resource. Once all the tickets for a show are sold out, they can't sell more. In that sense, losing you as a customer only matters if demand is less than the number of seats available. Otherwise, they simply won't even notice you did not come. If supply is great, they either need to add more show dates (which is not always feasible) or expand the theater size and hope that the next show that comes through has similar demand. If not, they're losing money.
Online music distribution is different. The costs to distribute another copy of a given song are miniscule, nearly negligible. The fact that you only produce that extra cost when somebody purchases the song means you ALWAYS make a profit on expansion. It would be like if every time somebody new wanted a ticket to that cinema show, a new seat--equally as good as every other seat in the place--would spring magically into existence. In this case, if you refused to buy a song because of the cost it would be a direct impact to them. Even if there are five buyers for every non-buyer, they'll still feel it because it's essentially free money to them. They had five sales where they could have had six, instead of having a sell-out where they could have had... a sell-out.
Allofmp3 obviously made this system work at less than $0.99 a song, so it's doable. The only explanation I can think of as to why the RIAA doesn't give it a shot is because they're control freaks who are desperately trying to prove to the world that they were somehow still needed when they really are not.
I'm sure piracy is a problem for them, although I'm also sure it's not nearly as big a problem monetarily as they would have us believe. The don't seem to realize that they can eliminate a large segment of that piracy by offering low-cost products. Pirating a $17 CD might be worth it. Pirating a $0.99 song becomes significantly less so. If I care enough about the song that I would want it at a high bitrate, such as this hypothetical new RIAA service would offer me, it would be even harder to find and less worth pirating.
But meh. Logic doesn't seem to be high atop the RIAA's list of traits.
* I keep mentioning 320kbps MP3 because that's what I got when I wanted a high-quality version. I could do OGG I suppose, but I don't; and honestly, I could personally hear no difference between the 320 MP3 and the FLAC when I compared once.
Why is this surprising? That the law was blatantly unconstitutional was clear
That, unfortunately, is often no bar to laws being upheld by the judiciary. Retroactive copyright extensions are an obvious example.
Well I'm sure to get some troll mods for this, but what the hell. There's a certain amount of zealotry in your statement usually only reserved for religion.
The fact that I do not agree that retroactive copyright extensions are unconstitutional should speak to the fact that it is not "blatantly unconstitutional," but if you were arguing with me about it I wouldn't be too put out if you were just sure you were right.
The problem I have is you're arguing with the people whose job it is to decide these matters. (If you want to get REALLY technical, the power to declare laws unconstitutional, which you seem to support, is nowhere to be found in the Constitution.) The case of retroactive extensions was heard and the extensions upheld. Until such time as they review the decision and overturn it, not only are retroactive copyright extensions not blatantly unconstitutional, they are not unconstituional at all. While I know nothing about you specifically,/.'ers often like to make these sort of assertions about Constitutionality without even any legal education which just makes it twice as annoying to me. We'll complain about managers who aren't technical making technical decisions, but in the very next breath we'll argue the law with judges. It really floors me.
Look, if these issues were as simple as you make them out to be, there wouldn't be a judiciary. At the very least, could we not pretend Constitutional issues are so cut and dry? Very little about the law is blatantly anything. Often including intelligible.
There's no specific reason to believe that if you smoke a joint, you're going to get lung cancer
It seems to me that is only half true. Smoking ANYTHING is going to greatly increase your risks of cancer. It's not a guarantee, of course, but your argument seems somewhat akin to me to saying that if you play Russian Roulette there's no specific reason to believe you're going to blow your brains out. After all, five out of six chambers are empty, and that's probably better odds.
Smoking one joint, or very infrequently, you're probably going to be fine. Then again, if you're fine where is the discussion to be had about whether or not the taxpayers need to pay for your infirmities and losses?
I suspect you picked pot for your argument because it seems as though it is one of the more innocuous drugs. That's fine, so long as you realize that the issue of these sorts of drugs (and yes, I include legal ones such as cigarettes and alcohol) is wider than that.
Those are possible effects, but uncommon ones, just like breaking a leg on the slopes or getting hit by a car while you cross the street.
I think we can throw away the "hit by a car while crossing the street" example straight away. Even if I can't convince you that there's a difference between choosing to ski and getting hurt and choosing to shoot heroin and getting addicted (and all the stuff that entails), I think you will agree that there is a difference between something you do that causes your harm and something somebody else does that causes you harm. If you cross the street in a stupid way (dart out into traffic, don't look both ways, that sort of thing) then it's absolutely your fault. If you do it safely, it's a perfectly safe thing--barring the idiocy of other drivers. You can't control the actions of other people and in this example, crossing the street is likely something that you can not avoid in the way that drug use or even the skiing would be avoidable.
I hope you also believe your fellow taxpayers shouldn't be forced to pay for the possible negative consequences of skiing, driving, etc.
For the most part, I don't believe taxpayers should be forced to pay for negative consequences of those actions either, no. The only exception I draw is medical: I don't think it is right to let anybody die or suffer for lack of ability to pay, including drug users. However, other effects should be yours to deal with. It should be your responsibility to sober up. It should be your responsibility if whatever happens to you causes you to lose your job, or go to jail, or lose your house. If you spent your life savings on that ski trip or drug addiction, that's your problem. I'm not unsympathetic, and I would wholly support your fellow citizens or church groups or whatever CHOOSING to help you out; I simply don't support the forced charity that it would become to divert taxes.
Anything beyond medical issues would require an in-depth examination of circumstances, though my general reaction is "pay for it yourself." Slipping while skiing and never being able to work again is going to draw less sympathy from me than somebody ramming into you while doing the same. Causing an accident will draw less sympathy from me than being the innocent victim of one. That said, the more sympathetic situations generally have other recourses available.
Incidentally, thanks for not being a dick in your reply. Some other reply really rubbed me the wrong way. I don't understand why people need to be so snooty and insulting in order to disagree. *shakes head*
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't used it myself, but would this do the trick? https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/956/
If anybody had called illegally downloading a copyrighted song theft, Slashdot posters would be up in arms. There would be a dozen posts about how copyright infringement isn't theft and it's not at all the same as, oh I don't know... stealing a car.
But saying that getting a law changed to extend copyright is theft of the public domain, that's +5 Insightful. Equating it to them depriving you of your car... yeah, +5 Insightful.
You know, I even agree with your point. What they're doing is not right. I'm just completely disgusted with the constant double standards around here. This sort of thing is exactly the reason why this site has become such a joke to so many people. When some groups can do nothing wrong and some can do nothing right--even when they are doing the same things--then we have a problem with intellectual honesty.
Okay, mods. Since it is inevitable that calling /. hypocrisy out results in being modded down, I guess I'll help you out: The one you're looking for is "Offtopic." That way not only do you get to mod me down, you'd even be technically right about it.
I realize you're not serious, but I agree. If the Germans wanted Hitler to rule them, they were free to grant him that power. (And they did.) We should not intervene, definitely not militarily, in that respect.
When he starts invading his neighbors, however, it's no longer an issue of the will of the people of that country to elect whom they choose. That is a pretty clear case where other powers in the world can stop him. Slaughtering the Jews (and Pols and others) is slightly less clear cut. I would like to say that most people believe that stopping that sort of thing is a moral responsibility, but then again we have ethnic cleansing going on right now and most people don't seem all that interested in it.
In other words -- elect whomever you wish. It's your business. When he starts affecting the lives of people outside of his country--war and genocide being two awfully clear ways a ruler can do that--other countries will make their decisions about intervention.
Interesting choice of words there--"letting [you]."
That's really what it's about. It doesn't "let you," you tell it to do it and it does it. That's control. Of course you don't invite your friends over to show you have control over your computer; you take that control for granted. It's not important to you because it's there. Let it go missing and you can be pretty certain it would become the most important part of a computer for you, as you struggle to find a way to get that control back.
What happens when there comes a day that it says "no?" No more slashdot--too anti-Microsoft. No more porn--bad for the children. What happens if we really do come to a point in our DRM escalation where you really do need to ask your computer's permission to use it for what you want to use it for?
We're stepping in that direction. Somebody else's interests are dictating my abilities. I can only burn iTunes tracks so many times. I can't legally make a copy of my DVDs because I have to break a DRM scheme to do it. These may seem like reasonable restrictions, but they are restrictions nonetheless. Can't burn my tracks as often as I want? Step. Can't back up my DVDs? Step. Can't buy a DVD from a different region and use it without bypassing (potentially illegally) their restrictions? Step.
Vista will, under conditions that I don't remember off the top of my head, downsample my videos. And we take another step. It's more and more a move to trusted computing, where the weak link in the trust chain is you.
It may seem like we're ages away from that point. Maybe we are, but how many bad things do you know of that were implemented with the message - "boy, this is really going to suck for you consumers!" Of course they're small steps. They're acclimating you to a new climate so they can take another small step, and another. Before you know it you look back and go "whoa, how the hell did I get here?" By which point it's often too late to do anything about it.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any means. I'm also not, despite what this post may sound like, a Microsoft hater. XP runs happily on my laptop, linux runs happily on my desktop, they play together as nicely as I need them to. I am worried, however, about these small steps we're taking and where they are leading us. Not just Microsoft/Vista. Not just CDs and DVDs. All over.
If my tools are no longer MY tools, there's a problem. Wouldn't you agree?
The first half -- okay. Microsoft can obviously sue people for violating their patents, if that is what they think is going on.
The second half... not so much. Licensing a patent does not give you standing to sue for infringement of that patent. Only the holder of the patent has that legal standing.
Does it? From the Bureau of Justice Statistics:
I don't know about the rest of you, but 5.3% recidivism doesn't sound awfully high to me. Am I reading that wrong?
Or, perhaps more likely, do the scare tactics about sex offenders simply have no basis in reality?
I'm perfectly content with punishment, but come on:
The United States has the most people in prison of any country in the world--including China, Russia, and the third-world countries we like to lambaste as having no respect for law.
The rate of people in US prisons--737 per 100,000--is the highest in the world. It is roughly seven times the average rate in other western countries of the world.
I'm fairly certain our numbers with regard to some countries (China, etc) are not wholly accurate, but there's obviously an issue here, particularly as we compare our rates to other western nations.
In the face of numbers like that, it's incredibly hard to support your contention that we've had some "liberal policy" of justice for "decades." (Article here with these facts; you can find it from any number of other sources as well. I'm pretty sure I read it on Yahoo News from the AP a few days ago.)
The US has always been conservative on the issue of justice. Punishments are getting harsher, not more lenient. We still execute people--and I'm not interested in debating whether that is right or wrong, merely pointing it out as a difference between us and most other western countries, and it's hard to deny that executions are the harshest form of justice short of torture, which isn't really justice at all.
Why is it Microsoft's job to simplify a process so it can be better implemented by their competitors?
If you have evidence that they are demanding companies test against Windows exclusively, maybe you have a legitimate gripe. Short of that, they aren't doing anything wrong (by not forcing to a spec) that I can see. Besides which, it sounds like the companies are making a choice that testing against Windows and ignoring other markets is a cost-effective tradeoff.
You kind of contradict yourself.
The latter half is correct. It's the same reason a music download doesn't equate to a lost sale. The term is "market clearing price." Simplified a little bit, it is basically the price at which suppler equals demand; in other words, every single unit produced is sold, and no more units are desired.
The RIAA's implication of lost sales pretends they price at the market clearing price. "You bought it from a pirate so you would have bought it from us" is only true if the price from the pirate and from them is equal. Since it is certainly not, the ratio falls.
I saw a study (here if you want it, don't know how long it will be up though) which concludes, among other things, that the net effect of music downloading on music sales is "statistically indistinguishable from zero." Why? Because the prices are too high. People who are downloading the music are not very likely, in most cases, to buy the CD. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the jist of it. You can read the article if you want to see the methodology and full conclusions.
As far as artist royalties being lowered, I'm fine with that so long as it is a precursor to downloadable media prices being lowered. The RIAA seems to want a percentage system; that seems fair to me, and it permits them to price where they think it would sell best. (You can't price a song at 30 cents if the artists are guaranteed 40 cents, can you? And yes, I know those numbers are high!)
That's only half true. The examples you provided are what economists refer to as "natural monopolies," the definition of which is when one firm can provide a service cheaper than many competing firms can. It's not so much that we would mind 17 different sets of wires on our poles (I'm sure that carries it's own problems, though); it's that it costs an ungodly sum of money to run all these wires, gas pipes, telephone cables, etc. If we somehow tried to fragment the audience 17 different ways, the nearly sure bet is that most if not all of these companies would fail to make enough money to make back the money they spent laying those wires, or they would be forced to charge absolutely obscene rates to do so. Knowing that, we did subsidize these industries.
That's not to say that you're not allowed to compete with them if you wanted -- that's exactly what CLECS did, by concentrating on big urban areas and installing then-new fiber optic lines in those densely-populated areas to handle telephone traffic -- just that we recognize competition in these areas was, at the time, fairly limited. The FCC was created to manage the nonsense, and they have been struggling with ways to do it ever since. For example:
Was one of their original attempts at the matter, but that encourages gold plating--buying the most obscenely expensive equipment regardless of whether or not it was needed, because the government would use those costs to increase your profits. Obviously that was not desirable, so they went from scheme to scheme trying to find one that works.
I'm fairly certain that the costs of these UNE (Unbundled Network Elements) are still regulated by the FCC and state agencies for copper lines. Fiber, however, was recently determined by FCC decision to not fall under the same rules. That's why you saw telephone companies suddenly burst onto the scene with plans to lay a gazillion miles of fiber. They aren't obligated to lease it to competitors.
You're pretty much on about the net neutrality stuff, and they obviously have a bullshit case. The public owns the majority of their wires; whether we use them as our ISP or not should not affect our service. Carrying traffic indiscriminately was part of the deal they signed up for all those years ago.
No argument there.
I don't believe this settlement would preclude the individuals who got their information pretexted from filing their own individual lawsuits. And, as stated before, many of the people involved in the scheme still face criminal charges. I think that would cover the punishment aspect of justice.
I'm not really sure what the big deal here is. I'm all for routing out corruption and all that jazz, but this is an issue of civil law. They settled the case. This happens dozens, maybe hundreds of times per day in civil cases; 90% of civil cases never reach a verdict.
The fact that the article submitter chose to spin it as a "payoff" doesn't magically make it a bribe. Call me when they pay $14.5 million and get the criminal charges dropped and then I'll hoot and holler about corruption and greed in America with you. Until then, this is a total non-issue for me. The settlement may be a little bit on the low end, but then again I'm not too terribly disappointed that they didn't waste taxpayer money to pursue both a civil and criminal trial over basically the same charges/complaints.
Dirty tactics -- okay.
But you're complaining that they label people guilty ("liable") before due process? That's their job. It's the job of the respondent's attorneys to come out equally strong to say "of course she's not!" and the judge (and jury, if applicable) to determine who is right. Neither side should be expected to equivocate on whether or not their position is the right one--and one of those sides (or both) will be wrong. That's the way our adversarial justice system works.
Do you know of many prosecutors whose opening statements go, "we intend to prove that it's quite possible that the defendant might have committed this crime?" Of course not. They come out and say "this SOB did such-and-such." The jury decides if they're right.
I would be exceptionally careful about authoring ANY document about legal rights if you are not an attorney who is extremely well-versed in the law in question. If you're not, even your disclaimers (which I assume you would include!) may not be enough to keep you out of trouble if somebody takes your advice and gets themselves sued. And if you are, well, I expect the document would be so steeped in disclaimers and caveats as to be essentially meaningless.
The law is neither simple nor clear-cut. I wish it were.
I don't have statistics handy, but I saw some expert on sex crimes on TV once who said that the rate of recidivism among sex offenders is actually not that high. Most of them are NOT a threat to society.
We've just decided to make sex offenders (particularly child sex offenders) the boogeymen of our generation. Nobody ever lost their seat in the government for being mean to sex offenders, after all.
And if the RIAA decides to sue him, they are free to do exactly that. They're not going to do so, and we both know it. It's not that he has some sort of legal immunity. This isn't an issue of legal equality. It's an issue of a private entity choosing which battles they want to fight. It's hypocrisy, but little else. (Aside: I wonder if the RIAA can sue him? The RIAA is supposed to be essentially a group working for the record labels; would this be akin to suing yourself?)
So out of curiosity, what would you do? Constrained by the reality of the real world, I mean; so your "have the RIAA sue him or he has to change his ways!" idea is straight out the window--unless of course you can offer a compelling argument why they would do that. You can't force people to file lawsuits if they don't want to, and you really can't force them to file every single lawsuit they might possibly have a legal standing to file. It is utterly impractical.
So, seriously: You're Congress. You're ready to stem this sort of hypocrisy, but this is the only issue we're going to pretend you have the magical willingness to change (ie, the solution can't be to discard the copyright system or rewrite civil tort law or anything like that; it may be a valid discussion to have, but it's overreaching the point). What law do you pass? How do you word it such that it permits action, is fair, but does not force impractical burdens on the petitioners? How do you phrase it such that you don't get it struck down as illegally discriminating against any groups or their legal rights? How do you do all this without causing unintended negative economic effects?
It may seem like a troll. Maybe it is, in part, because I can't think of a good solution myself, but I actually want to know if there is a good answer out there that doesn't involve some major overhaul of a system most people outside of slashdot aren't particularly interested in overhauling. Any reasonable solutions out there? And if not, perhaps the original poster way on up the line was right that this isn't something to be kicking up dust about.
What now? You do realize that the CEO's kids is not some legal technicality right? If you're arrested for drunk driving, you can argue that there are thousands of people who do it and never get charged all you want--it's true, but it's also not going to get you off the hook.
Since we're specifically talking about a civil matter, and copyright infringement, that introduces even less of a burden for the RIAA to be fair about it. Copyrights aren't patents. You don't have to enforce them. You don't have to enforce them equally (except as precedent may constrain you), or every single time. You're perfectly free to decide, for example, that pursuing a particular case, while you would be right to do so*, is not worth the time and money. Whether or not you feel that some music CEO's kids doing the same thing and getting away with a scolding is unfair or not, it's not a legal argument that's going to matter to a judge. It's going to be struck down as irrelevant the minute you raise it, and rightly so.
I suppose if you were TRULY insane you could try to make some 14th amendment argument, but I give you my not-a-lawyer guarantee (and take that as you will) that it will not get you anywhere. More likely, the judge will tell you to shut the hell up and pay the fine.
You're right about the distinction between uploading and downloading, but it has nothing to do with the CEO's kids. It has to do with the wording of the laws in question.
* As right as you are in any other circumstances, anyway.
Erm... I didn't RTFA--is it substantially different from the summary? Because the summary says:
Google called the cops, let them build a case, then refused to cooperate with the prosecution. They did NOT do their part by cooperating, and the prosecutor only dropped the case because of that.
*sighs* This is becoming my slashdot pet peeve.
I usually like your posts, and I agree with you even right now -- but my god, why did you have to be such an asshole about it? You used 62 words to make your point (and hell, that's including the 17 words in your semi-insult opening sentence) and 162 words to berate the poster, the moderators and fellow slashdotters. Something is very wrong with that picture.
You're right about one thing: If I had mod points, you would absolutely have gotten a flamebait mod--and it would have had nothing to do with saying that not all security flaws can be prevented. If you're upset about how many flamebait mods you get, perhaps you should try not coming off as a smug prick when you post. If 3/4ths of your post is a flame you deserve a flame mod. It doesn't matter what the hell the other quarter is.
I'm pretty sure "you couldn't pay most people to wear one of them" was a joke about the suits and completely unrelated to the RFID tags.
I think the main reason we haven't seen any substantial use of the new formats is because it's just too soon. We've just recently reached the point where DVDs are ubiquitous. Everybody has a player, the price of the media is fairly reasonable, and the average person has a fairly substantial DVD collection going.
Even if the difference were substantial, I wouldn't buy them right now. I'm too far invested in DVDs and that investment has been over too short of a time, in my opinion, to essentially scrap the project. I could run both, of course, but that's irritating in a lot of ways (taking up space, some movies in hypothetically substantially different qualities, etc).
The fact that the difference isn't that substantial only adds to the inertia.
As for the DRM, let's face it: Few people outside of sites like this know or care about it.
I do not agree that the formats are "stillborn." I think they will be picked up, but anybody expecting a huge and immediate uptake was being delusional.
I suppose this point is really about how you see politics. Are politicians supposed to represent their constituents, or are they supposed to lead them? If the former, then politicians are doing roughly what they should be doing. Not being re-elected is a sign of voter displeasure. Doing what it takes to get re-elected could easily be seen as representing the majority opinion of your constituents on an issue. If the latter, than you're absolutely right.
Well if that is true, that's a shame. But he doesn't expect the RIAA to embrace the website; he expects them to embrace what the website offered: Choice of formats without DRM restrictions. Allofmp3, even at 320kbps MP3, was only like 20-30 cents per song and the grandparent rightly supposes that people would pay more for those same choices, even the $0.99 an iTunes track costs. I can vouch for this myself. I do not purchase from iTunes because of the DRM issues (the lack of choice too, but to a lesser extent) but would be happy to pay $0.99 for that 320 kbps MP3 if that is what I want a particular song in.
I doubt Allofmp3 was a charity operation, so they were making money even with the low prices. That means that if the RIAA were to set up an identical system, and increase the prices such that the highest bitrate MP3* was $0.99, they would have roughly 60 cents per download of guaranteed profit on top of whatever the production/distribution costs of the files are that they can split amongst the artists. Does the artist get 60% right now? Heck, even if the RIAA pocketed half I think the artists would still end up making more under this scheme than they do for the current incarnation of iTunes.
That is a different issue. Cinema tickets are a limited resource. Once all the tickets for a show are sold out, they can't sell more. In that sense, losing you as a customer only matters if demand is less than the number of seats available. Otherwise, they simply won't even notice you did not come. If supply is great, they either need to add more show dates (which is not always feasible) or expand the theater size and hope that the next show that comes through has similar demand. If not, they're losing money.
Online music distribution is different. The costs to distribute another copy of a given song are miniscule, nearly negligible. The fact that you only produce that extra cost when somebody purchases the song means you ALWAYS make a profit on expansion. It would be like if every time somebody new wanted a ticket to that cinema show, a new seat--equally as good as every other seat in the place--would spring magically into existence. In this case, if you refused to buy a song because of the cost it would be a direct impact to them. Even if there are five buyers for every non-buyer, they'll still feel it because it's essentially free money to them. They had five sales where they could have had six, instead of having a sell-out where they could have had... a sell-out.
Allofmp3 obviously made this system work at less than $0.99 a song, so it's doable. The only explanation I can think of as to why the RIAA doesn't give it a shot is because they're control freaks who are desperately trying to prove to the world that they were somehow still needed when they really are not.
I'm sure piracy is a problem for them, although I'm also sure it's not nearly as big a problem monetarily as they would have us believe. The don't seem to realize that they can eliminate a large segment of that piracy by offering low-cost products. Pirating a $17 CD might be worth it. Pirating a $0.99 song becomes significantly less so. If I care enough about the song that I would want it at a high bitrate, such as this hypothetical new RIAA service would offer me, it would be even harder to find and less worth pirating.
But meh. Logic doesn't seem to be high atop the RIAA's list of traits.
* I keep mentioning 320kbps MP3 because that's what I got when I wanted a high-quality version. I could do OGG I suppose, but I don't; and honestly, I could personally hear no difference between the 320 MP3 and the FLAC when I compared once.
Well I'm sure to get some troll mods for this, but what the hell. There's a certain amount of zealotry in your statement usually only reserved for religion.
The fact that I do not agree that retroactive copyright extensions are unconstitutional should speak to the fact that it is not "blatantly unconstitutional," but if you were arguing with me about it I wouldn't be too put out if you were just sure you were right.
The problem I have is you're arguing with the people whose job it is to decide these matters. (If you want to get REALLY technical, the power to declare laws unconstitutional, which you seem to support, is nowhere to be found in the Constitution.) The case of retroactive extensions was heard and the extensions upheld. Until such time as they review the decision and overturn it, not only are retroactive copyright extensions not blatantly unconstitutional, they are not unconstituional at all. While I know nothing about you specifically, /.'ers often like to make these sort of assertions about Constitutionality without even any legal education which just makes it twice as annoying to me. We'll complain about managers who aren't technical making technical decisions, but in the very next breath we'll argue the law with judges. It really floors me.
Look, if these issues were as simple as you make them out to be, there wouldn't be a judiciary. At the very least, could we not pretend Constitutional issues are so cut and dry? Very little about the law is blatantly anything. Often including intelligible.
It seems to me that is only half true. Smoking ANYTHING is going to greatly increase your risks of cancer. It's not a guarantee, of course, but your argument seems somewhat akin to me to saying that if you play Russian Roulette there's no specific reason to believe you're going to blow your brains out. After all, five out of six chambers are empty, and that's probably better odds.
Smoking one joint, or very infrequently, you're probably going to be fine. Then again, if you're fine where is the discussion to be had about whether or not the taxpayers need to pay for your infirmities and losses?
I suspect you picked pot for your argument because it seems as though it is one of the more innocuous drugs. That's fine, so long as you realize that the issue of these sorts of drugs (and yes, I include legal ones such as cigarettes and alcohol) is wider than that.
I think we can throw away the "hit by a car while crossing the street" example straight away. Even if I can't convince you that there's a difference between choosing to ski and getting hurt and choosing to shoot heroin and getting addicted (and all the stuff that entails), I think you will agree that there is a difference between something you do that causes your harm and something somebody else does that causes you harm. If you cross the street in a stupid way (dart out into traffic, don't look both ways, that sort of thing) then it's absolutely your fault. If you do it safely, it's a perfectly safe thing--barring the idiocy of other drivers. You can't control the actions of other people and in this example, crossing the street is likely something that you can not avoid in the way that drug use or even the skiing would be avoidable.
For the most part, I don't believe taxpayers should be forced to pay for negative consequences of those actions either, no. The only exception I draw is medical: I don't think it is right to let anybody die or suffer for lack of ability to pay, including drug users. However, other effects should be yours to deal with. It should be your responsibility to sober up. It should be your responsibility if whatever happens to you causes you to lose your job, or go to jail, or lose your house. If you spent your life savings on that ski trip or drug addiction, that's your problem. I'm not unsympathetic, and I would wholly support your fellow citizens or church groups or whatever CHOOSING to help you out; I simply don't support the forced charity that it would become to divert taxes.
Anything beyond medical issues would require an in-depth examination of circumstances, though my general reaction is "pay for it yourself." Slipping while skiing and never being able to work again is going to draw less sympathy from me than somebody ramming into you while doing the same. Causing an accident will draw less sympathy from me than being the innocent victim of one. That said, the more sympathetic situations generally have other recourses available.
Incidentally, thanks for not being a dick in your reply. Some other reply really rubbed me the wrong way. I don't understand why people need to be so snooty and insulting in order to disagree. *shakes head*