Not to say the RIAA is always right, but if music pirating wasn't making the record companies lose money, why would they be so against it?
Are you sure you read the article? In it, George Zeimann, says:
"the record labels began to reduce the number of releases BEFORE the Napster hearings. When they went in front of Congress to complain about downloading, Hilary Rosen could confidently state that sales were going to suffer."
Maybe it's just me, but that sounds a lot shooting yourself in the foot, then handing the gun to your opponent so that when the police arrive, you can point to him and say "He did it! Lock him up!"
According to George Zeimann, they're losing money because they deliberately sabotaged their own sales....
Your situation is different - as the middle man, so to speak, you can't afford to go chopping out whole bands of frequencies, and I sincerely hope nobody expects you to.
On the other hand, most of the folks using MP3s don't have the same quality of equipment as a sound editing studio ought to have, and the difference in quality is near enough inaudible to the great majority of those folks. I mean, hardly anyone using MP3's is doing it in a quiet, acoustically neutral environment. They're doing it in offices and cars, with enough background noise to mask the artifacts generated by the compression.
And it's a fact that a large percentage of folks listening to MP3's are doing it with tinny little speakers or tinny little earbuds, not 100's of $$ of hifi equipment. The difference between an MP3 and a regular CD is negligible for that kind of setup.
Yes, the original CD is technically better. Yes, the MP3 is lossy. No, it doesn't matter when the equipment used to make either one audible costs $19.95 in WalMart...
You don't even need computer access to keep in contact with others covertly. For example, it was said recently that Saddam never appeared wearing big heavy-framed eyeglasses before, yet right at the beginning of the War in Iraq, there he was on TV, and the analyst/commentator suggested that this might be a signal to various troops to take specific actions.
Back home, it would be trivial to pass messages by placing ads in papers - walk into the office and pay cash. Or even <gasp!> by mailing letters to each other... A picture postcard could designate the target, with the number of written words specifying date and time.
Or how about posting random comments in Slashdot? Maybe not all the trolls are actually trolls, maybe some of them are terrorists passing messages... OK, so that one needs computer access... Never mind. But seriously, computers are easy to acquire cheaply, and online access is even easier, particularly if you use the free coasters that AOL shovels out.
Just curious here - what if one of your fellow employees was an FBI agent placed specifically to gather the information? Bet you couldn't distinguish an FBI librarian from a regular librarian...
More to the point, what if the dude running the shredder is the FBI plant??
Up to the point where it becomes obvious to the judge that the RIAA are using SLAPP tactics to support their own bloated, outdated, monopolistic hold on the music industry, instead of innovating some digital-music-download service for themselves. Until then, I just hope that everyone they hit fights back with libel, slander, defamation of character, or whatever similar kind of lawsuits.
Yeah, but in this case, they'd be going after Princeton, who not only have the student who just kicked the shit out of their lawsuit, but also has Prof Felten, who kicked the shit out of the audio watermarking technology. Plus who-knows-how-many fledgling lawyers just itching to take a swing at the RIAA.
I'd bet that the same analysis of the Wake system would equally apply to the network - i.e. the admins might suspect infringing uses, but are absolutely certain of substantial non-infringing uses, such as shared printers, email between students and professors, access to class material and research material, etc. And that, in the end, is what will save many network admins across the country.
On the other hand, if the RIAA is slapped down hard by the court for wasting the court's time, that'll help to power a whole new wave of sharing.
I only hope that when the student wins, the judge awards his costs to the RIAA, making them pay for harassing him. Can that happen in the US? It sure does happen in the UK, which may be part of the reason that frivilous lawsuits are less common over there.
I wonder if the student can counter-sue for libel, slander, defamation of character, mental anguish, loss of grades, etc??
If the RIAA are truly trying to make LANs illegal, they'd better be prepared for a big, BIG fight. I don't see Microsoft and their $40Bn war chest giving up Windows File Sharing any time soon.
As usual, though, the lawyers will win, and everyone else gets fucked in the process. It's about time someone came up with a conspiracy theory that the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc, are all actually nice people, but they've each got a pack of lawyers behind them that are egging them on to ever greater idiocies such as this.
It's not the airlines, necessarily, that are interested. It's the reservations systems that lump it all together.
Here's how it works: you go to a travel agent, or get online, and book a vacation. The travel agent (person or web server) handling it queries you for: 1) where you want to go; 2) when you want to go; 3) what kind of hotel you want to stay in; 4) what kind of car you want to rent; 5) how many (and what age) people are travelling with you, etc.
In the case of Sabre (and probably the others quoted in the article), the flights, hotels and cars are all available in the one res system. So, the agent queries Sabre for flight information, finds something appropriate, marks it in the PNR. Then (s)he checks out hotels, finds something appropriate, marks it in the PNR. Etc, etc, etc. The airline isn't recording the info, the travel agent is...
What you can do to avoid such link-ups is to book everything separately - a big PITA, but possible.
BTW, Sabre doesn't record the PNR forever - once your trip is over, the PNR space is recycled. Some information is forwarded to the billing systems and from there is aggregated into trending data that's held online for two years. The trending data allows the data users to determine on a daily basis what's happening in the travel industry - where planes are needed, where they're flying half-empty, etc.
I don't suppose you'd count them as murders, as such, but drunk drivers cause a certain amount of carnage every year - not just deaths, but also significant property damage. May or may not be as much as firearm-related deaths, but statistically significant enough to prompt the don't-drink-and-drive ads on TV.
So, the Norwegian government unilaterally decided to prosecute Jon, without any prompting whatsoever from any non-Norwegian interested parties? Somehow I don't think that's quite how it happened...
And if firearms manufacturers are in fact liable every time their products are used to commit crimes, why aren't there a bazillion lawsuits sucking them dry?
Mr.Shourie, the Minister for IT, said, "Do not expect a general decision from government on this," and said that each branch of the government would make a case-by-case decision on which software to use.
Sounds to me like he's saying Mr Gates will have to make a courtesy call on each and every different Ministry and/or Gov Dept in order to prevent the insidious spread of Open Source. A rather interesting twist on the "divide and conquer" strategy - "we've divided, so it'll take you longer to conquer us"...
If the MPAA can keep on pursuing Jon, regardless of his acquittal, on the grounds that his product enables "movie piracy", then surely there's a lot of other folks that should be seriously worried right now.
1) Smith&Wesson, Colt, Heckler&Koch all have products that enable, for example, car-jacking, armed robbery and murder.
2) GM, Ford have products that enable many people to commit actual crimes and subsequently escape into other jurisdictions.
3) Numerous beer, wine and liquor manufacturers have products that cause many deaths, often when combined with items 1 & 2 listed above.
Call it flamebait, or troll if you like, I don't care. No, the above don't relate to the DMCA - so what? They're just as ridiculous as retrying someone who was acquitted, and that's all my examples are intended to show.
Jon was acquitted - what on earth could the MPAA produce as evidence that wasn't produced last time around? Not much, I suspect. If a firearms manufacturer can say "we just produce guns, we don't kill people with them" and get away with it, why can't Jon say "I'm legally watching DVDs I already own" and be safe from this modern Inquisition? I sincerely hope that the Norwegian courts are able to hand off Jon's defence expenses to the MPAA. If not, he should be considering suing the MPAA for libel, slander, defamation of character, loss of earnings, etc.
This post is a comment on the stupidity of the DMCA and the MPAA and has nothing to do the Gulf War or gun control. (In case you're interested, I firmly believe that gun control means hitting your intended target first time, not squeezing off a few rounds and calling whatever you hit the target...)
Check out "The Robot Book" by Richard Pawson (around 1985). About half the book covers various projects made from Lego and Fischertechnik (aluminium extrusions). Among other things, there's an XY plotter, a 3-axis robot arm, several walking (on 2 or 4 legs) robots, and a card dealer.
One of the coolest things was a controller called the Beasty that would control up to 8 R/C servos, allowing fine control of various devices. I even wrote a Z80 assembler program on a Sinclair Spectrum to drive the Beasty via a parallel port, though a R/C transmitter/receiver would have worked too.
I spent a lot of money on Lego back then, but the Fischertechnik extrusions were more difficult to get hold of...
The way it works is: your ISP would be happy to let you have multiple computers provided you pay a minimal fee for 2nd, 3rd, etc. By not declaring the extras, you've deprived them of income, thereby causing "harm" to them.
Now, if you have multiple computers, but only connect one at a time, you might be OK.
I agree with you, by the way - I support computers for a living, and the only time I'll call my ISP is when their service is broken. I'm sure the same goes for many of those who run home networks.
BTW, what about the folks that get one of those instant firewalls from BestBuy or CircuitCity, and still only have one computer connected? The firewall is probably doing NAT anyway, so that'd be illegal if NAT becomes illegal...
No, this is just as likely some harebrained "antiterrorism" measure designed to render all networks wide-open to government surveillance.
Wouldn't it be nice if all company networks were wide open?? I mean, obviously any company that uses a firewall to conceal their servers must be doing something illegal...
Your milage may vary, but where I work I have to use a proxy server to get to the Internet - which effectively conceals the IP of my PC because outbound requests look like they come from the proxy. This is NAT, pure and simple, and is required by the powers-that-be of the Internet, because our network uses the class A 10.x.x.x IP range extensively. IIRC, the 10 address range (and the open class B & C as well) is required not to be routed to the Internet. In order to comply with removing NAT-style proxies, we'd be requesting IP's for one of the biggest privately owned Intranets on the planet...
In fact, if NAT becomes illegal across the US, wouldn't every PC and server have to be visible to the whole world?? If this is supposed to be an anti-terrorism measure, it really sucks... Anyone care to guess how many wide-open boxes would be connected to the Internet?
Yeah, release the code - except that if there's still other security holes, they're likely to be exploited after hackers review the code. Saying that folks will release patches is all very well, but someone still needs to control the code to make sure trojans are not introduced. Maybe M$ could do that, out of the goodness of their hearts...
Besides which, the folks that haven't upgraded to something else are still not likely to upgrade, for the same reasons. They'll just be more vulnerable.
BTW, does anyone know if the US Navy is still using NT servers?
Ahhhh, now there's something that makes sense - M$ is trying to stampede folks like your clients into upgrading, rather than hanging on to their old (but still working) NT4.0. I wouldn't be at all surprised if M$ has a folder full of deliberately introduced security problems, to be "discovered" whenever they want to either encourage upgrades or to get other stuff out into the marketplace.
And if you don't think that's likely, just consider how many folks would voluntarily download DRM-enabling patches. But if those DRM (or whatever else) patches are a hidden payload in a security patch, who's to know? The sheeple that automatically click on "Windows Update" will install a patch to "stop Chinese hackers stealing your bank account", but maybe not a patch to "stop you playing MP3s"...
Or it may be that the bits and pieces that make up M$'s "extended" RPC are scattered through a bunch of DLLs and nobody now knows where they are... Just as bits of I.E. are scattered through unrelated DLLs to make it next to impossible to remove safely.
Does anyone know if this would apply retrospectively (eg. Shakespeare or as someone pointed out, the bible) or simply as copyright expires in future. Both would be wrong but the former would be worse.
Maybe I'm just being hopelessly naive, but surely Mexico (or any other country) can't go around assigning royalties to themselves for public domain works that were produced in other countries? Last I heard, Shakespeare was British - it might or might not be fair for the UK to charge royalties on his works, but it's definitely out of line for anyone else to try it.
As for the Bible, that's a whole different sackful of ferrets - first you'd have to decide what nationality the various authors are before you could decide who owned the "public domain royalty rights". Oh wait, first you have to determine who the various authors are, because there's some doubt as to who wrote which bits...
Yes, that's just two well-known examples, but you can see where it would go from there. Before long, you'd see Italy, France and Spain fighting over the public domain royalty rights on the English language. I wonder which side the US would back on that one? Then, of course, Greece would own the alphabet, and one or more Arabic nations would own all numbers, since the Roman number system didn't really catch on in a big way...
Overclocking lets people buy cheaper CPU's & OC them to the level of higher CPU's cutting into Intel's profits. So bloacking OC = Increase in profits.
That's pretty much the same argument the RIAA uses, isn't it?
"People are overclocking, so if we defeat the OC people are bound to buy the faster CPU's." "People are downloading music, so if we defeat the downloads, people will buy more CDs."
I imagine that's going to have about the same effect too - either people will circumvent the OC defeat mechanism, or switch to AMD, just as new p2p sharing networks grow up whenever one is torn down. And in the meantime, both Intel and the RIAA are alienating their own customers...
Why would prior art stop this particular patent? The USPTO doesn't seem to have given prior art much consideration in a number of other recent trivial patent applications...
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure you read the article? In it, George Zeimann, says:
Maybe it's just me, but that sounds a lot shooting yourself in the foot, then handing the gun to your opponent so that when the police arrive, you can point to him and say "He did it! Lock him up!"
According to George Zeimann, they're losing money because they deliberately sabotaged their own sales....
On the other hand, most of the folks using MP3s don't have the same quality of equipment as a sound editing studio ought to have, and the difference in quality is near enough inaudible to the great majority of those folks. I mean, hardly anyone using MP3's is doing it in a quiet, acoustically neutral environment. They're doing it in offices and cars, with enough background noise to mask the artifacts generated by the compression.
Yes, the original CD is technically better.
Yes, the MP3 is lossy.
No, it doesn't matter when the equipment used to make either one audible costs $19.95 in WalMart...
Back home, it would be trivial to pass messages by placing ads in papers - walk into the office and pay cash. Or even <gasp!> by mailing letters to each other... A picture postcard could designate the target, with the number of written words specifying date and time.
Or how about posting random comments in Slashdot? Maybe not all the trolls are actually trolls, maybe some of them are terrorists passing messages... OK, so that one needs computer access... Never mind. But seriously, computers are easy to acquire cheaply, and online access is even easier, particularly if you use the free coasters that AOL shovels out.
More to the point, what if the dude running the shredder is the FBI plant??
Up to the point where it becomes obvious to the judge that the RIAA are using SLAPP tactics to support their own bloated, outdated, monopolistic hold on the music industry, instead of innovating some digital-music-download service for themselves. Until then, I just hope that everyone they hit fights back with libel, slander, defamation of character, or whatever similar kind of lawsuits.
I'd bet that the same analysis of the Wake system would equally apply to the network - i.e. the admins might suspect infringing uses, but are absolutely certain of substantial non-infringing uses, such as shared printers, email between students and professors, access to class material and research material, etc. And that, in the end, is what will save many network admins across the country.
I only hope that when the student wins, the judge awards his costs to the RIAA, making them pay for harassing him. Can that happen in the US? It sure does happen in the UK, which may be part of the reason that frivilous lawsuits are less common over there.
I wonder if the student can counter-sue for libel, slander, defamation of character, mental anguish, loss of grades, etc??
2) Does Moore actually have to prove the connection between Francis' web page and the sudden flood of magazines, etc, or what?
Day 5: Profit!!!!
Sorry, just getting it out of my system... :)
If the RIAA are truly trying to make LANs illegal, they'd better be prepared for a big, BIG fight. I don't see Microsoft and their $40Bn war chest giving up Windows File Sharing any time soon.
As usual, though, the lawyers will win, and everyone else gets fucked in the process. It's about time someone came up with a conspiracy theory that the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc, are all actually nice people, but they've each got a pack of lawyers behind them that are egging them on to ever greater idiocies such as this.
Here's how it works: you go to a travel agent, or get online, and book a vacation. The travel agent (person or web server) handling it queries you for: 1) where you want to go; 2) when you want to go; 3) what kind of hotel you want to stay in; 4) what kind of car you want to rent; 5) how many (and what age) people are travelling with you, etc.
In the case of Sabre (and probably the others quoted in the article), the flights, hotels and cars are all available in the one res system. So, the agent queries Sabre for flight information, finds something appropriate, marks it in the PNR. Then (s)he checks out hotels, finds something appropriate, marks it in the PNR. Etc, etc, etc. The airline isn't recording the info, the travel agent is...
What you can do to avoid such link-ups is to book everything separately - a big PITA, but possible.
BTW, Sabre doesn't record the PNR forever - once your trip is over, the PNR space is recycled. Some information is forwarded to the billing systems and from there is aggregated into trending data that's held online for two years. The trending data allows the data users to determine on a daily basis what's happening in the travel industry - where planes are needed, where they're flying half-empty, etc.
I don't suppose you'd count them as murders, as such, but drunk drivers cause a certain amount of carnage every year - not just deaths, but also significant property damage. May or may not be as much as firearm-related deaths, but statistically significant enough to prompt the don't-drink-and-drive ads on TV.
And if firearms manufacturers are in fact liable every time their products are used to commit crimes, why aren't there a bazillion lawsuits sucking them dry?
Sounds to me like he's saying Mr Gates will have to make a courtesy call on each and every different Ministry and/or Gov Dept in order to prevent the insidious spread of Open Source. A rather interesting twist on the "divide and conquer" strategy - "we've divided, so it'll take you longer to conquer us"...
1) Smith&Wesson, Colt, Heckler&Koch all have products that enable, for example, car-jacking, armed robbery and murder.
2) GM, Ford have products that enable many people to commit actual crimes and subsequently escape into other jurisdictions.
3) Numerous beer, wine and liquor manufacturers have products that cause many deaths, often when combined with items 1 & 2 listed above.
Call it flamebait, or troll if you like, I don't care. No, the above don't relate to the DMCA - so what? They're just as ridiculous as retrying someone who was acquitted, and that's all my examples are intended to show.
Jon was acquitted - what on earth could the MPAA produce as evidence that wasn't produced last time around? Not much, I suspect. If a firearms manufacturer can say "we just produce guns, we don't kill people with them" and get away with it, why can't Jon say "I'm legally watching DVDs I already own" and be safe from this modern Inquisition? I sincerely hope that the Norwegian courts are able to hand off Jon's defence expenses to the MPAA. If not, he should be considering suing the MPAA for libel, slander, defamation of character, loss of earnings, etc.
This post is a comment on the stupidity of the DMCA and the MPAA and has nothing to do the Gulf War or gun control. (In case you're interested, I firmly believe that gun control means hitting your intended target first time, not squeezing off a few rounds and calling whatever you hit the target...)
One of the coolest things was a controller called the Beasty that would control up to 8 R/C servos, allowing fine control of various devices. I even wrote a Z80 assembler program on a Sinclair Spectrum to drive the Beasty via a parallel port, though a R/C transmitter/receiver would have worked too.
I spent a lot of money on Lego back then, but the Fischertechnik extrusions were more difficult to get hold of...
The way it works is: your ISP would be happy to let you have multiple computers provided you pay a minimal fee for 2nd, 3rd, etc. By not declaring the extras, you've deprived them of income, thereby causing "harm" to them.
Now, if you have multiple computers, but only connect one at a time, you might be OK.
I agree with you, by the way - I support computers for a living, and the only time I'll call my ISP is when their service is broken. I'm sure the same goes for many of those who run home networks.
BTW, what about the folks that get one of those instant firewalls from BestBuy or CircuitCity, and still only have one computer connected? The firewall is probably doing NAT anyway, so that'd be illegal if NAT becomes illegal...
Wouldn't it be nice if all company networks were wide open?? I mean, obviously any company that uses a firewall to conceal their servers must be doing something illegal...
Your milage may vary, but where I work I have to use a proxy server to get to the Internet - which effectively conceals the IP of my PC because outbound requests look like they come from the proxy. This is NAT, pure and simple, and is required by the powers-that-be of the Internet, because our network uses the class A 10.x.x.x IP range extensively. IIRC, the 10 address range (and the open class B & C as well) is required not to be routed to the Internet . In order to comply with removing NAT-style proxies, we'd be requesting IP's for one of the biggest privately owned Intranets on the planet...
In fact, if NAT becomes illegal across the US, wouldn't every PC and server have to be visible to the whole world?? If this is supposed to be an anti-terrorism measure, it really sucks... Anyone care to guess how many wide-open boxes would be connected to the Internet?
Besides which, the folks that haven't upgraded to something else are still not likely to upgrade, for the same reasons. They'll just be more vulnerable.
BTW, does anyone know if the US Navy is still using NT servers?
And if you don't think that's likely, just consider how many folks would voluntarily download DRM-enabling patches. But if those DRM (or whatever else) patches are a hidden payload in a security patch, who's to know? The sheeple that automatically click on "Windows Update" will install a patch to "stop Chinese hackers stealing your bank account", but maybe not a patch to "stop you playing MP3s"...
Or it may be that the bits and pieces that make up M$'s "extended" RPC are scattered through a bunch of DLLs and nobody now knows where they are... Just as bits of I.E. are scattered through unrelated DLLs to make it next to impossible to remove safely.
Maybe I'm just being hopelessly naive, but surely Mexico (or any other country) can't go around assigning royalties to themselves for public domain works that were produced in other countries? Last I heard, Shakespeare was British - it might or might not be fair for the UK to charge royalties on his works, but it's definitely out of line for anyone else to try it.
As for the Bible, that's a whole different sackful of ferrets - first you'd have to decide what nationality the various authors are before you could decide who owned the "public domain royalty rights". Oh wait, first you have to determine who the various authors are , because there's some doubt as to who wrote which bits...
Yes, that's just two well-known examples, but you can see where it would go from there. Before long, you'd see Italy, France and Spain fighting over the public domain royalty rights on the English language. I wonder which side the US would back on that one? Then, of course, Greece would own the alphabet, and one or more Arabic nations would own all numbers, since the Roman number system didn't really catch on in a big way...
That's pretty much the same argument the RIAA uses, isn't it?
"People are overclocking, so if we defeat the OC people are bound to buy the faster CPU's."
"People are downloading music, so if we defeat the downloads, people will buy more CDs."
I imagine that's going to have about the same effect too - either people will circumvent the OC defeat mechanism, or switch to AMD, just as new p2p sharing networks grow up whenever one is torn down. And in the meantime, both Intel and the RIAA are alienating their own customers...
Why would prior art stop this particular patent? The USPTO doesn't seem to have given prior art much consideration in a number of other recent trivial patent applications...