I saw this too. It implies that there is a threshold for legality: once a certain number of people do something, it should be legalized. Clearly this is not true - there are certain things that should never be legal, no matter how many people do them. The argument for compulsory licensing is just a way for music pirates to get what they want at the expense of those in the business of making and selling music. Some of these people may deserve it, but many of them don't.
Certainly the music industry would prefer a compulsory license to nothing, but they would prefer the ability to set their own prices to a compulsory license. As the article suggests, this whole thing is a slipper slope. I suspect there is a tar pit at the bottom.
Re:Shielding RFID against security
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 2, Funny
That's why I drive with tin foil around my Michelin RFID tagged tires. I go through a lot of tin foil...
You are playing a semantics game. The point is (repeat after me):
"Copyright infringement is NOT legal" "Copyright infringement is NOT legal"
If you break the law, you should be prepared to accept the consequences. I don't know why anyone is surprised about this move since the slashdot masses have been saying that the RIAA should go after the law breakers (as opposed to the technologies) since day one.
Being indistinguishable is not the point. If you flip my example, say that you had the DVD and wanted a VHS copy. You could make a VHS copy of your DVD yourself, or you could shoplift a copy from the store. The results might be the same and the tapes indistinguishable. That does not give you the right to take the tape from the store.
Fair use protects you if you do things (within copyright law) with content that you've purchased.
Your mistake is that you assume downloading an MP3 file of a CD you already have is legal. In fact, this is also a copyright violation. Imagine that you have purchased a VHS copy of a movie. This does not give you the right to go shoplift a DVD of the same movie from BestBuy.
But you are. The only time you would be caught is if you are putting your files into a shared folder. Unauthorized distribution IS a copyright violation. A file that comes from your computer is being distributed by you.
Borrowing is not what you are enabling. Borrowing means giving up access while someone else has your book or CD. What is being discussed here is copying.
Finally, it is not legal to download an MP3, even if you own the CD. Suppose you purchased a VHS tape of a movie. This does not give you the right to go shoplift the DVD of that movie from BestBuy.
Do you think it's ok to xerox your books and hand out copies for free to your friends? Do you think it's ok to copy your (non-open source;-) software or DVDs and hand out copies to your friends? Both cases are clearly copyright violations (even Lessig would not defend you). What they are doing makes total sense.
Really? Which ones? 99.9% of the CDs that people think are copy protected are really enhanced-CDs that PCs just don't like for some reason. There literally are fewer than 10 protected CDs released in the US.
Come on people! This is such a stupid argument. Does anyone here think that hooking yourself up to the cable without having a subscription or buying a DirecTV pirate card so that you can watch the pay TV channels is not stealing? Yet it passes your "nobody loses any physical property" test.
I agree. I work for a company that lives and dies based on copyrighted material, and I think this is a great idea. There will be a cost associated with tracking copyrighted material so the true price to maintain a work is more than $1. The part I like is that it allows copyright owners to relinquish control of works that cost more to maintain then they generate in revenue, without risking everything else.
Laws controlling devices are nothing new. There are laws about automobile safety that requires cars to meet certain standards and this allows the government to control technology. There are laws about FCC compliance and this allows the FCC to control devices. Etc. etc.
I personally think this is a mistake. Grokster KNOWS that their application is primarily used for pirated content. Whether or not they know the details about each and every specific instance of piracy seems irrelevant if they are aware of the fact that an overwhelming majority of the users of their application are pirating content.
It's not like these services are occasionally used for piracy (just like bricks are occasionally used to break into houses). It's that the vast majority of uses involve copyright infringement.
I can't think of anything else that is used to break the law 99% of the time and only used legitimately 1% of the time, yet not subjected to some kind of control or restrictions. And the reason I think this ruling is a mistake is because I'd like to keep it that way!
Wait - you are telling us that it makes sense for a company struggling to hold onto 3-4% of the PC market to spend $6 billion on a company in a totally different industry that has been losing 10% of it's sales per year for the last few years and this trend has no end in sight? Don't you think there are better ways for Apple to spend it's $6 billion? I sure do.
If you look at Steve Jobs, he has a history of doing really smart things and really stupid things at the same time. My career has been tied to them so I can say this from experience (my first computer was an Apple, I was a Mac tech support engineer in college, my first job was as a NeXT SysAdmin). Sometimes, Steve is his own worst enemy.
Uhh... you are forgetting the primary costs behind CD production such as paying the artists and publishers, doing marketing, artist development, etc. You won't last long as a music company if you ignore these costs.
Like the fact that Peng's site was lauded in the Princeton newspaper as a great way to get music for free. And like the fact that these guys were making a ton of music available from their own computers.
I'm watching live TV - it's not quite starting yet. They are apparently negotiating with two senior officials in hopes of getting them to surrender, and word is that the intensity of attack will be inversly proportional to how successful the talks go. If they surrender then maybe there will be no shock and awe attack.
The quality of the voice chat you get in these games is directly related to the kind of people you play. After a few nights of playing xbox live, you'll start to see the same gamertags and you'll learn who the "good people" are, where "good people" = skilled AND nice. Playing these people with voice enabled can be amazingly fun. For example, if you want to ratchet the fun level up on Ghost Recon, play with a bunch of people who cover and call out targets to each other.
Communities of "good people" have sprung up around particular types of games such as Not It! in MechAssault, which is a favorite of mine. This makes finding fun opponents much easier.
I personally don't mind the noobs because you can turn them into "good people" if you lead by example. There is a small group of idiots that can ruin any game, but at least in some circles the community has come up with ways of dealing with them, such as "regulating" Not It! offenders in MechAssault.
My god, from reading this thread you'd think this identifier is the work of satan or John Ashcroft (redundant?). People, before posting the standard knee-jerk reaction to something, why not do a little research.
This is a harmless number & metadata scheme that is intended to identify electronically distributed content since the existing identifiers (e.g. UPC and ISRC) have limitations that don't satisfy the needs of content owners, publishers, and retailers. I was involved in the project so I know first hand this has nothing to do with P2P or consumer tracking.
Is the power consumption of this technology low enough that eInk and the other related efforts will be obsolete even before they are commercially released?
I agree - the simple statement professing the existance of god is a religious statement that some of us object to. Note that this type of thing shows up in other places such as the Boy Scout Oath.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw this too. It implies that there is a threshold for legality: once a certain number of people do something, it should be legalized. Clearly this is not true - there are certain things that should never be legal, no matter how many people do them. The argument for compulsory licensing is just a way for music pirates to get what they want at the expense of those in the business of making and selling music. Some of these people may deserve it, but many of them don't.
Certainly the music industry would prefer a compulsory license to nothing, but they would prefer the ability to set their own prices to a compulsory license. As the article suggests, this whole thing is a slipper slope. I suspect there is a tar pit at the bottom.
That's why I drive with tin foil around my Michelin RFID tagged tires. I go through a lot of tin foil...
You are playing a semantics game. The point is (repeat after me):
"Copyright infringement is NOT legal"
"Copyright infringement is NOT legal"
If you break the law, you should be prepared to accept the consequences. I don't know why anyone is surprised about this move since the slashdot masses have been saying that the RIAA should go after the law breakers (as opposed to the technologies) since day one.
Being indistinguishable is not the point. If you flip my example, say that you had the DVD and wanted a VHS copy. You could make a VHS copy of your DVD yourself, or you could shoplift a copy from the store. The results might be the same and the tapes indistinguishable. That does not give you the right to take the tape from the store. Fair use protects you if you do things (within copyright law) with content that you've purchased.
Your mistake is that you assume downloading an MP3 file of a CD you already have is legal. In fact, this is also a copyright violation. Imagine that you have purchased a VHS copy of a movie. This does not give you the right to go shoplift a DVD of the same movie from BestBuy.
But you are. The only time you would be caught is if you are putting your files into a shared folder. Unauthorized distribution IS a copyright violation. A file that comes from your computer is being distributed by you. Borrowing is not what you are enabling. Borrowing means giving up access while someone else has your book or CD. What is being discussed here is copying. Finally, it is not legal to download an MP3, even if you own the CD. Suppose you purchased a VHS tape of a movie. This does not give you the right to go shoplift the DVD of that movie from BestBuy.
You clearly don't understand economics if you think that it only costs $.25 to write, record, produce, manufacture, promote, and distribute a CD.
Do you think it's ok to xerox your books and hand out copies for free to your friends? Do you think it's ok to copy your (non-open source ;-) software or DVDs and hand out copies to your friends? Both cases are clearly copyright violations (even Lessig would not defend you). What they are doing makes total sense.
Really? Which ones? 99.9% of the CDs that people think are copy protected are really enhanced-CDs that PCs just don't like for some reason. There literally are fewer than 10 protected CDs released in the US.
Come on people! This is such a stupid argument. Does anyone here think that hooking yourself up to the cable without having a subscription or buying a DirecTV pirate card so that you can watch the pay TV channels is not stealing? Yet it passes your "nobody loses any physical property" test.
I agree. I work for a company that lives and dies based on copyrighted material, and I think this is a great idea. There will be a cost associated with tracking copyrighted material so the true price to maintain a work is more than $1. The part I like is that it allows copyright owners to relinquish control of works that cost more to maintain then they generate in revenue, without risking everything else.
Laws controlling devices are nothing new. There are laws about automobile safety that requires cars to meet certain standards and this allows the government to control technology. There are laws about FCC compliance and this allows the FCC to control devices. Etc. etc.
I personally think this is a mistake. Grokster KNOWS that their application is primarily used for pirated content. Whether or not they know the details about each and every specific instance of piracy seems irrelevant if they are aware of the fact that an overwhelming majority of the users of their application are pirating content.
It's not like these services are occasionally used for piracy (just like bricks are occasionally used to break into houses). It's that the vast majority of uses involve copyright infringement.
I can't think of anything else that is used to break the law 99% of the time and only used legitimately 1% of the time, yet not subjected to some kind of control or restrictions. And the reason I think this ruling is a mistake is because I'd like to keep it that way!
Wait - you are telling us that it makes sense for a company struggling to hold onto 3-4% of the PC market to spend $6 billion on a company in a totally different industry that has been losing 10% of it's sales per year for the last few years and this trend has no end in sight? Don't you think there are better ways for Apple to spend it's $6 billion? I sure do.
If you look at Steve Jobs, he has a history of doing really smart things and really stupid things at the same time. My career has been tied to them so I can say this from experience (my first computer was an Apple, I was a Mac tech support engineer in college, my first job was as a NeXT SysAdmin). Sometimes, Steve is his own worst enemy.
Uhh... you are forgetting the primary costs behind CD production such as paying the artists and publishers, doing marketing, artist development, etc. You won't last long as a music company if you ignore these costs.
Like the fact that Peng's site was lauded in the Princeton newspaper as a great way to get music for free. And like the fact that these guys were making a ton of music available from their own computers.
*Whoops*
Of course, right as I hit submit, the bombs start dropping...
I'm watching live TV - it's not quite starting yet. They are apparently negotiating with two senior officials in hopes of getting them to surrender, and word is that the intensity of attack will be inversly proportional to how successful the talks go. If they surrender then maybe there will be no shock and awe attack.
The quality of the voice chat you get in these games is directly related to the kind of people you play. After a few nights of playing xbox live, you'll start to see the same gamertags and you'll learn who the "good people" are, where "good people" = skilled AND nice. Playing these people with voice enabled can be amazingly fun. For example, if you want to ratchet the fun level up on Ghost Recon, play with a bunch of people who cover and call out targets to each other.
Communities of "good people" have sprung up around particular types of games such as Not It! in MechAssault, which is a favorite of mine. This makes finding fun opponents much easier.
I personally don't mind the noobs because you can turn them into "good people" if you lead by example. There is a small group of idiots that can ruin any game, but at least in some circles the community has come up with ways of dealing with them, such as "regulating" Not It! offenders in MechAssault.
My god, from reading this thread you'd think this identifier is the work of satan or John Ashcroft (redundant?). People, before posting the standard knee-jerk reaction to something, why not do a little research.
This is a harmless number & metadata scheme that is intended to identify electronically distributed content since the existing identifiers (e.g. UPC and ISRC) have limitations that don't satisfy the needs of content owners, publishers, and retailers. I was involved in the project so I know first hand this has nothing to do with P2P or consumer tracking.
Is the power consumption of this technology low enough that eInk and the other related efforts will be obsolete even before they are commercially released?
I agree - the simple statement professing the existance of god is a religious statement that some of us object to. Note that this type of thing shows up in other places such as the Boy Scout Oath.