Music company: "Yeah, whatever. You're still not selling our product. If you think you can do better, go on then."
Tech Company: "Wow. You guys always did have all the best drugs."
"No, we're not asking to sell your stuff. You get to sell your stuff. We're letting you know we're about to sell our stuff. We're creating a new market, and we wondered if you wanted to get in on it. It would certainly help us ramp up quicker if you did.
"But it's clear you don't, at least not yet, so we'll proceed as previously planned. Like I said, we don't need to make any kind of big deal about this. Again, thanks for the lunch..."
Music company: "Well, you can just wait as long as you like. We've got your competitor contacting us and they're willing to toe our line. You can take your principles to the poor house when you go, because your competitors are going to beat you in the marketplace by getting their first. They'll have such a head start that you won't even be able to see their arses with a telescope..."
Tech Company: "ConGlomCo's gadget? Yeah, we saw their press release. Nice industrial design. But, see, here's the thing. We started about six months before them. But even if we had started at the same time, and even if they were as good as us, we would still be at the finish line at least a year before them.
"See, I'm not telling you you're going to do it our way simply to amuse myself, or to piss you off and watch the veins pop out on your neck. I'm not even saying it because it's the ethical thing or the right thing. I'm telling you you're going to do it our way because your way is impossible. We're not making this shit up; we actually do know what we're talking about. We've got almost 100 years of math and science telling us what you want is not possible.
"And let's ignore the fact that I'm not willing to sell a piece of shit I know doesn't work, and concentrate instead on the engineering aspects. You can put the best, most productive minds in all of history on a problem, and every last one of them will get exactly nowhere if the problem is proven to be impossible. You can put Stephen Hawking, Einstein, Edison, James Watt, and Isaac Newton into a room for years, but they're never going to come back out with a perpetual motion machine. Never. Because it's impossible. But those guys, unlike the guy at ConGlomCo, will tell you up-front that it's impossible. They'll tell you before you even offer them a single dime that it ain't gonna happen. And that's why I'm telling you: It ain't gonna happen.
"Now, the guy at ConGlomCo? I know him, we've met a few times at CES. Nice guy, very driven, very smart. I'll let you in on a little secret: He knows it's impossible, too. But he wants to make a sale. He wants to make some bank for himself and his people, and you know? Good luck to him, I wish him well. He's gonna sell a few widgets out of this, put a kid or two through college. But then I start thinking, ConGlomCo's a big enough company, the numbers we've been talking about, they can handle that level of production.
"And so I have to ask myself, if ConGlomCo's got it handled, why am I here at all? Why am I being treated to this sumptuous meal and offered this amazing ground-floor opportunity? And I'm thinking the reason we're having this pleasant little conversation at all is because ConGlomCo has been slipping the schedule. He hasn't got it handled. And I think, that little requirement of yours, the one that's impossible? It's slowing him down. He's scrambling to come up with a facade that's good enough to fool you, and he's gonna miss Christmas, and all the marketing ramp-up you've been showing me will stall out and have to wait another year. Now maybe you can wait another year, and maybe you can't. But while ConGlomCo's consuming their engineering resources trying to do the impossible, my guys are adding features and weeding out bugs. No more fundamental engineering, just pure polish, pure shine. After that, it's all in the noise. I can go to Taiwan just like they can, I can go to the same factories as them. And what it comes down to is I have them beat on NRE, I have them beat on BOM, and I have them beat on media costs, because I don't need to build Fort Meade to mint 'secure' discs. So when their gadget hits BestBuy, I'll be a year ahead of him on features alone, and mine won't crash.
"Now Bill Gates would be the first to tell you, none of that matters -- that it doesn't matter who has the better mousetrap, or even the cheaper mousetrap. Linux is better and free; ain't slowing down Microsoft none.
I can explain this to you. Your problem is that you are a rational human being. You must understand first of all that the music industry is irrational. Imagine the following conversation, which illustrates the problem:
Tech company: We'd love to sell your music in non-DRMed format.
Music company: We're not interested in selling it without DRM.
Tech company: We're not going to sell it with DRM!
Music company: Fine. Don't sell it. Get nothing. We can live without online sales. If you want a piece of the pie, you have to sell it with DRM. No negotiations. No exceptions. That's how it will be done. Take it or leave it.
Then the tech industry needs to grow some balls. Here's how you finish that conversation:
Music company: "Fine. Don't sell it. Get nothing. We can live without online sales. If you want a piece of the pie, you have to sell it with DRM. No negotiations. No exceptions. That's how it will be done. Take it or leave it."
Tech company: "No, let me tell you how it will be done. Because in the end, you're going to do it our way. And the reason you're going to do it our way is because we're not going to give you another way. I don't see a clot of experienced VLSI engineers in your corner, so I'm willing to bet you don't have any gadgets we don't know about cooking in the oven. And despite the flash and glamor and fast-moving image you've seen, we're very patient people. We have to be; you should see some of the junk we have to make work. We are going to make amazing technology. We are going to make amazing demos with that technology -- hell, we could fund a handful of artists ourselves, just to bootstrap things. You've seen American Idol, you know people will work cheap, you rely on it. People are going to want our stuff. Your shareholders are going to want it, and publicly wonder why you're not jumping on it. And we will wait, patiently, until one of you sees the light and does it our way. Once that happens, you will all do it our way. You'll fall all over yourselves to do it our way, because you can't afford to be seen not doing it, and because you can't stand the idea of 'leaving money on the table.'
"...And before you puff up your chest and pontificate about morality and higher principles being at stake, let's do each other the courtesy of being honest here, because you and I both know that you have no principles. Everything in your history tells us this -- the way you treat artists, the way you treat the public, the way you treat each other. We can afford to wait and maintain our principles, because we know you're going to sell out yours. Hell, you'll even sell out on principles other people are paying you to maintain. There's only one stimulus you've ever consistently responded to: Money. And once it becomes clear to you that you're losing money, you'll cast aside your "principles" as easily as you'll have accounting make up a floating break-even for Lord of The Rings, and you'll come around. And when you do -- not if, when -- you'll receive the adulation of our publications and the public for taking a "principled" stand, and have the luxury of imagining yourself a forward thinker and a defining icon of digital media.
"And don't get all fight-or-flight on me, because this isn't a threat. We don't need to do that. We don't need to threaten, we don't need to cajole, we don't need to bribe. We don't need to make any kind of big deal about it. All we need to do is wait. Because, you see, you're on a path. We know this path because we've walked it ourselves, we found it, we charted it. It's the path to the future. There were parts of it we didn't like, either, but we followed it anyway and now we're confronted with so many money-making opportunities, we could never do them all. And that path -- the one with all the money, the one with all the possibilities, the one you're on -- leads, inexorably... here.
"You'll do it our way. The Right Way. When you're ready, we'll be waiting."
If they are smart (and if the MPAA even give them another chance), the powerdvd/windvd authors will reimplement their AACS decryption code to never store the keys in memory. Without double-checking, I believe the keys are only 128 bits, they could be loaded into the SSE registers in encrypted form and then decrypted on chip. The authors will still need to take measures to prevent an OS context switch from storing the registers in kernel-private memory [... ]
You've never heard of an In-Circuit Emulator, have you?
Don't blame ATI or NVIDIA, blame Microsoft for this one.
While I blame Micros~1 for foisting this on the computing populace, a very large measure of blame rests upon you guys (ATI/AMD, NVidia) for going along with it.
When Microsoft presented their protected video path/DRM/copy protection suite and asked you to sign on to it, your correct response should have been, "Fuck off." (An ideal subsequent response would have been to get cracking on Linux and/or Mac support, since it was clear Microsoft was going to cause you more trouble than it could possibly be worth, and raise your engineering and support costs to ridiculous levels.)
You knew it was The Wrong Thing to do, and you did it, anyway. Please explain yourselves.
The only way a "return" on a digital artifact could work is if it was verifiably deleted. It is, of course, impossible to do this, but the only framework within which you can even pretend it's possible is a draconian copy protection ("DRM") regime.
Personally, I think this is kinda fair-ish. If you're going to pretend that digital files are scarce objects, then you have to accept all the responsibilities of selling scarce objects in a retail marketplace, and that means accepting returns.
If, however, they were to do away with copy protection entirely, thereby dropping the scarce object fiction, then they could provably make the argument to a technically unsophisticated crowd (politicians) that "returns" are impossible. Under such circumstances, I think we could let music vendors slide on returns.
So: If you sell with copy protection, you have to accept returns. If you sell without copy protection, then you don't have to accept returns. Seem fair? Fair-ish?
One side-effect of this might be that you couldn't return music CDs, since they can be freely copied.
Fact: The unit cost of a single CD, silkscreened, in a jewel case, with six-page four-color liner notes, quantity 5,000: USD$0.91.
Quantity 10,000: USD$0.79.
Explain to me again why these fsckers cost $16.00?
Now then, what was the per-unit pressing cost, quantity 10,000, of a CD in 1980? If we calculate MSRP as a percentage multiplier of the raw pressing cost, what should music CDs cost today?
The Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA leaves ISPs and server operators little choice.
Yes, but it's still better than the alternative, namely making ISPs and server operators legally responsible, which was the situation before the DMCA.
Actually, no it wasn't. Although there were a few guideposts, the question was uncharted legal territory.
The question was: Can an ISP be held liable for the material posted to it by its users? Well before media cartels started trying to ruin the Internet, the question had originally been posed in the context of libel/slander. Even though the ISP (or, more likely in those days, BBS) is hosting the material, it was through no direct action on their part that the questionable material appeared there. Most often, the question was posed as: Is an ISP/BBS a newspaper or a phone company?
If they were a newspaper, that meant they assumed editorial control -- and therefore responsibility -- for everything on the site. But this was manifestly untrue -- ISP management made no pretense of editorial control. Moreover, such control was impossible due to the sheer amount of new material being added.
Okay, so if it's not a newspaper, then an ISP is a phone company and, under the rules of Common Carriage, can't be held responsible for anything moving through it. Indeed, Common Carriers are prohibited from discriminating between the material passing through it. Well, not so fast. Common Carrier status was bestowed on the telcos by Congress. ISPs fell outside the definition. So even though an ISP looks and smells and quacks just like a Common Carrier, they aren't official enshrined as such.
Which brings us to the pre-DMCA days. Copyrighted material starts showing up on ISPs without the copyright holder's sanction (horrors! Doom! The fall of the Republic!). The copyright holder stamps their feet and says, "Make it go away!" The ISP says, "We didn't do it. One of our subscribers did." The copyright holder demands, "Which user?" The ISP responds, "Get a subpoena." So. On the one side, you have the copyright holders forming an argument around the notion of contributory infringement. On the other, the ISPs are correctly convinced they have done nothing wrong, and are relying on an interpretation of Common Carriage.
No one wanted to be the first to take this case to court. If the ISPs were declared even indirectly reesponsible for the actions of their users, general access to the Internet would have ended right there. On the other hand, giving ISPs a wholesale pass on the actions of their users would have required copyright holders to file suit and initiate discovery against every offending copy out there, which was deemed too expensive. And any decision lying somewhere between these two "extremes" would have been fought over in the courts for decades, with the legal landscape remaining completely uncertain in the meantime.
So the copyright holders side-stepped the whole issue by buying a few Senators and getting the DMCA passed. Poof! Now the copyright holder doesn't have to prove anything to anyone, and can get anything taken down. And as long as the ISPs go along with the scam, they're let off the hook. A win-win combination! In fact, the only loser in the whole deal is...
You.
So, no. Although there was a lot of sabre-rattling, ISPs were not in any immediate danger of being sued out of existence. Détente was working relatively well.
Apparently, you can't take apart an MP3 in a deterministic way. That is, if you hand a compressed block to the MP3 decoder, you could get back an uncompressed block of any size, and it's not possible to determine this size ahead of time. You can partially decode blocks ("Decompress in to this buffer up to a maximum of N bytes,"), but then you can't restart the decoder from exactly where you left off. This means you have to either re-decode the entire block and throw away what you've already used, or blindly move on to the next block and hope no one notices the pop. This sort of sloppiness is generally frowned upon in game programming circles.
Vorbis apparently doesn't suffer from these shortcomings. And it sounds better.
This imparted to me by an experienced console game programmer, as relayed through my highly imperfect memory.
This isn't even a blip on the radar of problems the DMCA has caused, and it's got an easy fix.
I dissent.
This sort of problem is exactly one of the primary reasons the DMCA should never have happened in the first place, and should be repealed.
Any individual claiming to be a copyright holder can have anything removed from a server based on nothing more than mere assertion. The Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA leaves ISPs and server operators little choice. Once the takedown notice is presented, the ISP either deletes the material or responds that it believes in good faith that the takedown notice is in error. If they do neither, they risk criminal liability.
Note that nowhere is anyone required to verify the validity of the claimant's copyright, that the named material is at all related to the claimed copyright, or that the named material falls within the scope of Fair Use or not. It's either take it down or risk getting sued. The law requires that takedown notices be served in good faith, but there are no penalties prescribed for willful or negligent sending of erroneous notices (and lotsa luck finding a D.A. willing to prosecute).
This kind of unaccountable censorship was intended by the DMCA's authors. You should not have to provide papers that you are "allowed" to speak, and that's a principal reason why the DMCA needs to go away yesterday.
Gates has been whining about people "stealing" his software since the late 1970's. For him to come to the defense of an accused copyright infringer, even if that person was an innocent victim of counterfeiting, is simply politically impossible. To do so would sharply undermine Microsoft's poster-child status as the world's biggest "victim" of unsanctioned copying, and would make the intolerable suggestion that the position he's staunchly maintained for the last thirty years as a clear-cut black-and-white issue is, in fact, considerably more nuanced than he's claimed.
This is an essay I wrote over ten years ago on the subject of shrinkwrap "licenses". Were I writing the essay today, I'd probably spend some time drawing a distinction between end-user "licenses" and the GPL. But my opinion remains essentially unchanged.
I never thought I was alone in my wholesale rejection of such "contracts," but it's nice to see validation from industry luminaries from time to time.
Why stop there? Why not put a big sign on all the Vista retail end-caps reading, "We Will Make You Hate Us and Our Products?"
Honestly, I didn't know this much hubris existed at all, much less in a single location. Where on Earth does such an enormous, unmerited sense of entitlement come from?
Microsoft has always been Linux's biggest and best marketing arm, but I never thought they'd willingly push it quite so hard.
Any and all numbers on software "piracy" are completely made up. All of them.
This is exacerbated by the following points:
Microsoft has no incentive to truthfully report rates of unsanctioned copying, and every incentive to report inflated or just plain made-up numbers,
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that WGA has a high false-negative rate (reports sanctioned copies as unsanctioned),
The reported figures are taken from people allegedly running WGA voluntarily. This is a self-selected sample, with all the attendant hazards (just ask any statistics major),
The reported figures make no attempt to break down which allegedly unsanctioned copies came from casual copying, and which came from people who unwittingly bought a counterfeit copy,
Even if we accept the rate of 22% as valid, Microsoft continues to report profits. What exactly is the problem, again?
There may be some real data here, but no one with an ounce of ethics, much less a statistics or economics background, will be allowed anywhere near it. File under "FUD," "bullshit," or similar.
Schwab
Nice Nostalgia
on
AmigaOS 4
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
A quick Google will reveal that I was very deep into the Amiga at one time, and a lot of the platform architecture still holds a lot of appeal for me. I wrote a eulogy for the platform about 12 years ago. Even to this day, I still judge a platform's value by how it stacks up against the Amiga's design and philosophy.
If I could find an affordable Ethernet card, my Amiga 3000 would still be in active use today, mostly as an archive server for all my old stuff. Sadly, the only Ethernet cards I can find are $150 or so, and the TCP/IP stack is (usually) not included.
The way things are now, though, the only way Amiga will have a future is if A) a dedicated investor with very deep pockets and a lot of patience funds a company to look after it; or B) they Open Source the entire OS and support utilities. The latter is likely very easy from a contractual aspect, since the only "borrowed" code was from TRIPOS, and much of that was re-written in C for the OS 2.04 release years ago.
I could go on and on about what made Amiga great, but every time I even mention it, people immediately place me in the slot marked, "crazy." I'd like to see more Amiga philosophy in modern software design, but even I have to admit that light of Amiga may be irretrievably fading. Really, you people have no idea what you missed...
Schwab
Re:Switching XP - Amiga
on
AmigaOS 4
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Dude, buy more RAM. RAM is cheap.
Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?
One of the things that's holding them back, is that the movie and especially the games industries are putting pressure on the music one not to drop DRM because they fear the domino effect.
Oh, please, it's because of the games industry that we have copy protection at all. They invented this boogeyman back in the 1970's and have been fighting this losing battle ever since. The only effect it's had is to make Macromedia rich selling the same defective merchandise over and over again.
The "mainstream" software market swallowed the Kool-Aid and, for a while during the 1980's, productivity apps -- paint programs, word processors, databases, etc. -- had copy-protected media. The methods were myriad: Intentionally defective floppies, look up a word in the accompanying manual, stick a "dongle" in a port somewhere, et al. Eventually, the marketplace told them to grow the fsck up and get rid of the artificial defects. Mainstream vendors heeded this advice, but the games executives stuck their fingers in their ears, shouted "LA LA LA LA LA!" and kept shipping defective media.
Since the clearly stated opinion of the marketplace didn't matter to them, I hardly think it will matter if the music and/or movie industry decides to see reason. The games industry will still use copy protection, it still won't improve their revenue, and it still will accomplish nothing except to annoy lawful owners.
The RIAA should tell them to go lump it (they're good at telling people that).
I thought Apple had partnered with Cingular, not Verizon.
Nickel and diming for stuff that should already be there. It seems that dancing with a US cell network provider did more damage to Apple's worldview than initially suspected:-).
Tempest probably didn't copyright it. Therefore it is in the public domain.
Bzzzt! Thanks for playing.
By the tenets of the Berne Convention, an international copyright treaty, the registration requirement was done away with, and works become copyrighted the moment they become "fixed" in a tangible form. Your ability to defend the right of course improves if you register it.
"Tempest" has a legitimate copyright in the work... For all the good it will do him.
WTF is up with that body design? It looks like Ark-II.
Is Detroit trying to make electric/hybrids as ugly as possible? What happened to all those sleek, jet-age futuristic designs dating back as far as the 1940's? You could grab just about any one of those designs, stick a hybrid engine in it, and have a winner.
It is a deliberately-introduced capacity for failure. If the copy protection were not there, the corresponding failures would not exist.
It is, to varying degrees depending on circumstance, unethical to manufacture and distribute merchandise you know to be defective.
It also complicates your QA process. How do you know the failure you've encountered is the result of a genuine defect, or one of the fake ones you've incorporated?
You also can't make the case that, in order to ensure an artisan's livelihood, you, as the buyer of that artisan's work, must accept defective merchandise. There is no way to semantically spin a deliberate defect as a fair trade. The "tradeoff", such as it is, is unbalanced and unfair.
So, copy protection is intrinsically unethical, and should be rejected wherever and whenever possible.
Which would require the date to be locked on the machines so I cannot defeat it by simply moving the date ahead 100 years.
Um, that's exactly what they're doing.
It's called, in that lovely NewSpeak way, a "secure clock," and it runs independently of the time-of-day clock that you're allowed to set. The "secure clock" is updated only by (more NewSpeak) "trusted" system components, and is used by defective (nee "protected") media to enforce expiration dates.
You really don't want to look deeper into this Sausage Factory -- it's revolting on more levels than you can possibly imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
Tech Company: "Wow. You guys always did have all the best drugs."
"No, we're not asking to sell your stuff. You get to sell your stuff. We're letting you know we're about to sell our stuff. We're creating a new market, and we wondered if you wanted to get in on it. It would certainly help us ramp up quicker if you did.
"But it's clear you don't, at least not yet, so we'll proceed as previously planned. Like I said, we don't need to make any kind of big deal about this. Again, thanks for the lunch..."
Schwab
Tech Company: "ConGlomCo's gadget? Yeah, we saw their press release. Nice industrial design. But, see, here's the thing. We started about six months before them. But even if we had started at the same time, and even if they were as good as us, we would still be at the finish line at least a year before them.
"See, I'm not telling you you're going to do it our way simply to amuse myself, or to piss you off and watch the veins pop out on your neck. I'm not even saying it because it's the ethical thing or the right thing. I'm telling you you're going to do it our way because your way is impossible. We're not making this shit up; we actually do know what we're talking about. We've got almost 100 years of math and science telling us what you want is not possible.
"And let's ignore the fact that I'm not willing to sell a piece of shit I know doesn't work, and concentrate instead on the engineering aspects. You can put the best, most productive minds in all of history on a problem, and every last one of them will get exactly nowhere if the problem is proven to be impossible. You can put Stephen Hawking, Einstein, Edison, James Watt, and Isaac Newton into a room for years, but they're never going to come back out with a perpetual motion machine. Never. Because it's impossible. But those guys, unlike the guy at ConGlomCo, will tell you up-front that it's impossible. They'll tell you before you even offer them a single dime that it ain't gonna happen. And that's why I'm telling you: It ain't gonna happen.
"Now, the guy at ConGlomCo? I know him, we've met a few times at CES. Nice guy, very driven, very smart. I'll let you in on a little secret: He knows it's impossible, too. But he wants to make a sale. He wants to make some bank for himself and his people, and you know? Good luck to him, I wish him well. He's gonna sell a few widgets out of this, put a kid or two through college. But then I start thinking, ConGlomCo's a big enough company, the numbers we've been talking about, they can handle that level of production.
"And so I have to ask myself, if ConGlomCo's got it handled, why am I here at all? Why am I being treated to this sumptuous meal and offered this amazing ground-floor opportunity? And I'm thinking the reason we're having this pleasant little conversation at all is because ConGlomCo has been slipping the schedule. He hasn't got it handled. And I think, that little requirement of yours, the one that's impossible? It's slowing him down. He's scrambling to come up with a facade that's good enough to fool you, and he's gonna miss Christmas, and all the marketing ramp-up you've been showing me will stall out and have to wait another year. Now maybe you can wait another year, and maybe you can't. But while ConGlomCo's consuming their engineering resources trying to do the impossible, my guys are adding features and weeding out bugs. No more fundamental engineering, just pure polish, pure shine. After that, it's all in the noise. I can go to Taiwan just like they can, I can go to the same factories as them. And what it comes down to is I have them beat on NRE, I have them beat on BOM, and I have them beat on media costs, because I don't need to build Fort Meade to mint 'secure' discs. So when their gadget hits BestBuy, I'll be a year ahead of him on features alone, and mine won't crash.
"Now Bill Gates would be the first to tell you, none of that matters -- that it doesn't matter who has the better mousetrap, or even the cheaper mousetrap. Linux is better and free; ain't slowing down Microsoft none.
Then the tech industry needs to grow some balls. Here's how you finish that conversation:
Music company: "Fine. Don't sell it. Get nothing. We can live without online sales. If you want a piece of the pie, you have to sell it with DRM. No negotiations. No exceptions. That's how it will be done. Take it or leave it."
Tech company: "No, let me tell you how it will be done. Because in the end, you're going to do it our way. And the reason you're going to do it our way is because we're not going to give you another way. I don't see a clot of experienced VLSI engineers in your corner, so I'm willing to bet you don't have any gadgets we don't know about cooking in the oven. And despite the flash and glamor and fast-moving image you've seen, we're very patient people. We have to be; you should see some of the junk we have to make work. We are going to make amazing technology. We are going to make amazing demos with that technology -- hell, we could fund a handful of artists ourselves, just to bootstrap things. You've seen American Idol, you know people will work cheap, you rely on it. People are going to want our stuff. Your shareholders are going to want it, and publicly wonder why you're not jumping on it. And we will wait, patiently, until one of you sees the light and does it our way. Once that happens, you will all do it our way. You'll fall all over yourselves to do it our way, because you can't afford to be seen not doing it, and because you can't stand the idea of 'leaving money on the table.'
"...And before you puff up your chest and pontificate about morality and higher principles being at stake, let's do each other the courtesy of being honest here, because you and I both know that you have no principles. Everything in your history tells us this -- the way you treat artists, the way you treat the public, the way you treat each other. We can afford to wait and maintain our principles, because we know you're going to sell out yours. Hell, you'll even sell out on principles other people are paying you to maintain. There's only one stimulus you've ever consistently responded to: Money. And once it becomes clear to you that you're losing money, you'll cast aside your "principles" as easily as you'll have accounting make up a floating break-even for Lord of The Rings, and you'll come around. And when you do -- not if, when -- you'll receive the adulation of our publications and the public for taking a "principled" stand, and have the luxury of imagining yourself a forward thinker and a defining icon of digital media.
"And don't get all fight-or-flight on me, because this isn't a threat. We don't need to do that. We don't need to threaten, we don't need to cajole, we don't need to bribe. We don't need to make any kind of big deal about it. All we need to do is wait. Because, you see, you're on a path. We know this path because we've walked it ourselves, we found it, we charted it. It's the path to the future. There were parts of it we didn't like, either, but we followed it anyway and now we're confronted with so many money-making opportunities, we could never do them all. And that path -- the one with all the money, the one with all the possibilities, the one you're on -- leads, inexorably... here.
"You'll do it our way. The Right Way. When you're ready, we'll be waiting."
Schwab
You've never heard of an In-Circuit Emulator, have you?
Schwab
While I blame Micros~1 for foisting this on the computing populace, a very large measure of blame rests upon you guys (ATI/AMD, NVidia) for going along with it.
When Microsoft presented their protected video path/DRM/copy protection suite and asked you to sign on to it, your correct response should have been, "Fuck off." (An ideal subsequent response would have been to get cracking on Linux and/or Mac support, since it was clear Microsoft was going to cause you more trouble than it could possibly be worth, and raise your engineering and support costs to ridiculous levels.)
You knew it was The Wrong Thing to do, and you did it, anyway. Please explain yourselves.
Schwab
Personally, I think this is kinda fair-ish. If you're going to pretend that digital files are scarce objects, then you have to accept all the responsibilities of selling scarce objects in a retail marketplace, and that means accepting returns.
If, however, they were to do away with copy protection entirely, thereby dropping the scarce object fiction, then they could provably make the argument to a technically unsophisticated crowd (politicians) that "returns" are impossible. Under such circumstances, I think we could let music vendors slide on returns.
So: If you sell with copy protection, you have to accept returns. If you sell without copy protection, then you don't have to accept returns. Seem fair? Fair-ish?
One side-effect of this might be that you couldn't return music CDs, since they can be freely copied.
Schwab
Quantity 10,000: USD$0.79.
Explain to me again why these fsckers cost $16.00?
Now then, what was the per-unit pressing cost, quantity 10,000, of a CD in 1980? If we calculate MSRP as a percentage multiplier of the raw pressing cost, what should music CDs cost today?
Schwab
Actually, no it wasn't. Although there were a few guideposts, the question was uncharted legal territory.
The question was: Can an ISP be held liable for the material posted to it by its users? Well before media cartels started trying to ruin the Internet, the question had originally been posed in the context of libel/slander. Even though the ISP (or, more likely in those days, BBS) is hosting the material, it was through no direct action on their part that the questionable material appeared there. Most often, the question was posed as: Is an ISP/BBS a newspaper or a phone company?
If they were a newspaper, that meant they assumed editorial control -- and therefore responsibility -- for everything on the site. But this was manifestly untrue -- ISP management made no pretense of editorial control. Moreover, such control was impossible due to the sheer amount of new material being added.
Okay, so if it's not a newspaper, then an ISP is a phone company and, under the rules of Common Carriage, can't be held responsible for anything moving through it. Indeed, Common Carriers are prohibited from discriminating between the material passing through it. Well, not so fast. Common Carrier status was bestowed on the telcos by Congress. ISPs fell outside the definition. So even though an ISP looks and smells and quacks just like a Common Carrier, they aren't official enshrined as such.
Which brings us to the pre-DMCA days. Copyrighted material starts showing up on ISPs without the copyright holder's sanction (horrors! Doom! The fall of the Republic!). The copyright holder stamps their feet and says, "Make it go away!" The ISP says, "We didn't do it. One of our subscribers did." The copyright holder demands, "Which user?" The ISP responds, "Get a subpoena." So. On the one side, you have the copyright holders forming an argument around the notion of contributory infringement. On the other, the ISPs are correctly convinced they have done nothing wrong, and are relying on an interpretation of Common Carriage.
No one wanted to be the first to take this case to court. If the ISPs were declared even indirectly reesponsible for the actions of their users, general access to the Internet would have ended right there. On the other hand, giving ISPs a wholesale pass on the actions of their users would have required copyright holders to file suit and initiate discovery against every offending copy out there, which was deemed too expensive. And any decision lying somewhere between these two "extremes" would have been fought over in the courts for decades, with the legal landscape remaining completely uncertain in the meantime.
So the copyright holders side-stepped the whole issue by buying a few Senators and getting the DMCA passed. Poof! Now the copyright holder doesn't have to prove anything to anyone, and can get anything taken down. And as long as the ISPs go along with the scam, they're let off the hook. A win-win combination! In fact, the only loser in the whole deal is...
You.
So, no. Although there was a lot of sabre-rattling, ISPs were not in any immediate danger of being sued out of existence. Détente was working relatively well.
Schwab
Apparently, you can't take apart an MP3 in a deterministic way. That is, if you hand a compressed block to the MP3 decoder, you could get back an uncompressed block of any size, and it's not possible to determine this size ahead of time. You can partially decode blocks ("Decompress in to this buffer up to a maximum of N bytes,"), but then you can't restart the decoder from exactly where you left off. This means you have to either re-decode the entire block and throw away what you've already used, or blindly move on to the next block and hope no one notices the pop. This sort of sloppiness is generally frowned upon in game programming circles.
Vorbis apparently doesn't suffer from these shortcomings. And it sounds better.
This imparted to me by an experienced console game programmer, as relayed through my highly imperfect memory.
Schwab
I dissent.
This sort of problem is exactly one of the primary reasons the DMCA should never have happened in the first place, and should be repealed.
Any individual claiming to be a copyright holder can have anything removed from a server based on nothing more than mere assertion. The Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA leaves ISPs and server operators little choice. Once the takedown notice is presented, the ISP either deletes the material or responds that it believes in good faith that the takedown notice is in error. If they do neither, they risk criminal liability.
Note that nowhere is anyone required to verify the validity of the claimant's copyright, that the named material is at all related to the claimed copyright, or that the named material falls within the scope of Fair Use or not. It's either take it down or risk getting sued. The law requires that takedown notices be served in good faith, but there are no penalties prescribed for willful or negligent sending of erroneous notices (and lotsa luck finding a D.A. willing to prosecute).
This kind of unaccountable censorship was intended by the DMCA's authors. You should not have to provide papers that you are "allowed" to speak, and that's a principal reason why the DMCA needs to go away yesterday.
Schwab
Schwab
I never thought I was alone in my wholesale rejection of such "contracts," but it's nice to see validation from industry luminaries from time to time.
Schwab
Schwab
Honestly, I didn't know this much hubris existed at all, much less in a single location. Where on Earth does such an enormous, unmerited sense of entitlement come from?
Microsoft has always been Linux's biggest and best marketing arm, but I never thought they'd willingly push it quite so hard.
Schwab
This is exacerbated by the following points:
There may be some real data here, but no one with an ounce of ethics, much less a statistics or economics background, will be allowed anywhere near it. File under "FUD," "bullshit," or similar.
Schwab
If I could find an affordable Ethernet card, my Amiga 3000 would still be in active use today, mostly as an archive server for all my old stuff. Sadly, the only Ethernet cards I can find are $150 or so, and the TCP/IP stack is (usually) not included.
The way things are now, though, the only way Amiga will have a future is if A) a dedicated investor with very deep pockets and a lot of patience funds a company to look after it; or B) they Open Source the entire OS and support utilities. The latter is likely very easy from a contractual aspect, since the only "borrowed" code was from TRIPOS, and much of that was re-written in C for the OS 2.04 release years ago.
I could go on and on about what made Amiga great, but every time I even mention it, people immediately place me in the slot marked, "crazy." I'd like to see more Amiga philosophy in modern software design, but even I have to admit that light of Amiga may be irretrievably fading. Really, you people have no idea what you missed...
Schwab
Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?
Schwab
Crap. I meant Macrovision. My bad...
Schwab
Get real. I know a firm out of Bangalore, India, that will do it for USD$4.49 a month.
Schwab
Oh, please, it's because of the games industry that we have copy protection at all. They invented this boogeyman back in the 1970's and have been fighting this losing battle ever since. The only effect it's had is to make Macromedia rich selling the same defective merchandise over and over again.
The "mainstream" software market swallowed the Kool-Aid and, for a while during the 1980's, productivity apps -- paint programs, word processors, databases, etc. -- had copy-protected media. The methods were myriad: Intentionally defective floppies, look up a word in the accompanying manual, stick a "dongle" in a port somewhere, et al. Eventually, the marketplace told them to grow the fsck up and get rid of the artificial defects. Mainstream vendors heeded this advice, but the games executives stuck their fingers in their ears, shouted "LA LA LA LA LA!" and kept shipping defective media.
Since the clearly stated opinion of the marketplace didn't matter to them, I hardly think it will matter if the music and/or movie industry decides to see reason. The games industry will still use copy protection, it still won't improve their revenue, and it still will accomplish nothing except to annoy lawful owners.
The RIAA should tell them to go lump it (they're good at telling people that).
Schwab
Nickel and diming for stuff that should already be there. It seems that dancing with a US cell network provider did more damage to Apple's worldview than initially suspected :-).
Schwab
Bzzzt! Thanks for playing.
By the tenets of the Berne Convention, an international copyright treaty, the registration requirement was done away with, and works become copyrighted the moment they become "fixed" in a tangible form. Your ability to defend the right of course improves if you register it.
"Tempest" has a legitimate copyright in the work... For all the good it will do him.
Schwab
Is Detroit trying to make electric/hybrids as ugly as possible? What happened to all those sleek, jet-age futuristic designs dating back as far as the 1940's? You could grab just about any one of those designs, stick a hybrid engine in it, and have a winner.
Schwab
It is a deliberately-introduced capacity for failure. If the copy protection were not there, the corresponding failures would not exist.
It is, to varying degrees depending on circumstance, unethical to manufacture and distribute merchandise you know to be defective.
It also complicates your QA process. How do you know the failure you've encountered is the result of a genuine defect, or one of the fake ones you've incorporated?
You also can't make the case that, in order to ensure an artisan's livelihood, you, as the buyer of that artisan's work, must accept defective merchandise. There is no way to semantically spin a deliberate defect as a fair trade. The "tradeoff", such as it is, is unbalanced and unfair.
So, copy protection is intrinsically unethical, and should be rejected wherever and whenever possible.
Schwab
Um, that's exactly what they're doing.
It's called, in that lovely NewSpeak way, a "secure clock," and it runs independently of the time-of-day clock that you're allowed to set. The "secure clock" is updated only by (more NewSpeak) "trusted" system components, and is used by defective (nee "protected") media to enforce expiration dates.
You really don't want to look deeper into this Sausage Factory -- it's revolting on more levels than you can possibly imagine.
Schwab