They still don't know who those people are. They are suing "the owner of an IP address". That still doesn't identify the alledged copyright infringer, as is evidenced by the fact that they sued people who had never used file sharing software. It was someone else on their computer. So now is there going to be a law for "accessory to copyright infringement"?
They've got to start somewhere. Police start investigations for people and they don't know who they're looking for; often they'll question a few suspects but then change their mind and let them go. A court order recently said the RIAA can't just ask the ISPs for the name, so they have to pursue a case against "John Doe" until a court requires the ISP to reveal a name. What's their alternative?
I haven't seen any court papers, but I assume they don't tie themselves down by simply accusing "the owner of an IP address", but rather whomever was using the IP address at the time they were sharing the copyrighted files, or whoever put them there and left them to be uploaded. There'll be no accessory law, they'll just eventually find the person they're looking for, as in any civil investigation.
Covers court costs and lawyers' fees. IANAL, but is that up front or if you win. Without debating the merits of this case, I would hate to think my taxes could possibly go to random lawsuits to pay random wacko's costs and fees whenever they want to accuse anyone of being a racketeer.
When you win, but most lawyers don't collect their fee until the case is over. (That's one of the reasons lawyers take suge a big cut of the award - they put up their firm's own capital to fund the case).
Do people in the USA honestly flee to Mexico when they are bankrupt? Do people in the USA go to jail when they fail to pay money they own?
No. Georgia (the US state) used to be a debtor's colony/prison, partially to shield the other states from spanish-controlled Florida. But that was befroe the revolutionary war in 1776:-)
Today, if you find yourself with more debt than you could possibly pay off, you can declare bankruptcy and be protected under bankruptcy laws.
Most people do know that there may be something wrong if people are getting for free what they'd otherwise have to purchase from a store. So it is perceived as a crime, but not a particularly heinous one, and you'd be hard pressed to ge the public agree that one song, or even one entire CD being obtained for free could be worth anywhere near the penalties the DMCA applies. The penalties are potentially many thousands of dollars per song/violation. The public would expect the penalties to be closer to the actual losses incurred from the one user's direct actions, and more related to the cost of the number of lost CD sales that the user single-handedly caused.
Settling out of court is a completely viable option for two parties, and a preferred one often because it means not tying up the courts.
Plus, it avoids those pesky "judges" and "trials by a jury of ones peers" that always tie up the courts, and prevent the mega-rich corporations from having their way with relatively poor individual citizens...
Well they know they're suing people behind IP addresses that were allegedly offering over 1,000 copyrighted songs on Kazaa. The problem is that the law's penalties are way too high, so if you ever got to court and lost, you're bankrupt for life. Even paying a lawyer would cost a few grand over time, so it's cheaper just paying off the RIAA. It's not a racket, but it's a cruel and unusual punishment for a petty copyright violations.
Sunset provisions have their goods and bads... It's good to force a review of a laws, witht he hopes of undoing a particularly bad one, such as the Patriot Act.
But it also creates uncertainty, in that every time the administration changes, or power in the senate or house shifts parties, all the work done by the previous congress could be reversed through a "review".
They're saying "Pay this small fine of several thousand dollars, or when we take you to court we'll ensure that you and all of your immediate family are destitute for the next 3 generations"
You're absolutely right.
The core problem is that the law allows for ridiculously high monetary penalties for violating a copyright. It seems to have been written to deter those who would make millions off bootlegged distribution. But it's being applied to people who violated copyright for no financial gain, and typically they weren't even aware they were sharing files (they only thought they were downloading for themselves).
I mean, imagine that a law was passed to penalize big businesses from dumping garbage in rivers, and it would cost them $100,000 per incident. But since "incident" was so vaguely defined, even dropping a gum wrapper off a canoe would mean you violated the law. So the gov't could sue you for $100,000, but they offer to settle for $3,000. A lawyer would cost you $3,000 anyway, so what the hell do you do? You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
I think the best that could come out of this is that the law will be declared unconstitutional on the basis of "penalty doesn't fit the crime" (via cruel/unusual punishment). If the RIAA successfully prosecuted everyone they've contacted for one song each (over 2000 by my count so far?) and got the maximum penalty of $30,000, they would have been awarded $60,000,000 dollars! WTF? Were they really damaged $60,000,000 by the sharing of 2000 songs? Those 2,000 people could have been sharing the same single song to at least 10 people, so even if the RIAA lost $20 worth of missed-album purchases, they'd still be only be $40,000 in the hole. And that's not even considering that the record companies pocket just a percentage of each album's sticker price.
I wish one of our legislators would read this and realize how ridiculous it is:
What the Law Says:
The distribution of copyrighted materials over the Internet for which the distributor (any server - including your computer) does not have permission can be a violation of federal criminal law, a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). Most of the music, games or videos downloaded through file-sharing programs like Morpheus or KaZaA lack permission of the copyright owner. And, those very programs that you use to download material, automatically open file-sharing services from your computer. So, without your knowing it explicitly, by downloading the program and the files your computer is programmed to share files back out into the international Internet community. You are therefore liable to be in violation of the DMCA, even if all you did was download a single song. Each criminal offense carries with it a minimum fine of $30,000 and a potential jail sentence.
Growing all that corn also takes a Lot of Water. more water than rain. The High Plains Aquifer is steadily being drained and by some estimates may not last as long as the world's petrolium reserves.
You seem to know about this stuff...
Do you know if anyone has considered using wind or solar energy to power the ethanol producing equipment? Considering corn is farmed on lots of land with lots of wind and sun, it seems like this could help ethanol production become more viable.
OpenOffice.org's presentation software "Impress" can open and save PowerPoint files: From http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html "Of course, you are free to use your old Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, or save your work in PowerPoint format for sending to people who are still locked into Microsoft products. Alternatively, use IMPRESS's built-in ability to create Flash (.swf) versions of your presentations."
I played the demo level in Dark Forces: Jedi Knight dozens of times, and it made me want the full game (which I asked for and got for xmas one year). If I hadn't played that free, short demo, I wouldn't have wanted the full game.
All the benchmarks and reviews in the world can't substitute for actually playing a demo of the game.
And also walking on the tail would be the equivalent of yanking Tony Soprano's tie while he was yelling at you for screwing up a delivery... It's a wonder Jabba didn't kill Han right then and there.
lol! Yeah Han wasn't exactly in a good bargaining position at that moment...
So this enhanced version is "the movie Lucas really wanted to make". What, was the original too good?
Plus, in the starport Jabba's moving around, and has all these expressions, just like a lame-ass cartoon. It contrasts terribly with the stationary, smug, heartless Jabba we know and love from his palace and on his yacht in the Sarlacc Pit scene.
In the first film, they took some cutting-room floor footage of Han talking to Jabba as he's preparing to take off in the Millenium Falcon.
Want to hate that scene even more?
Notice the part where Han circles Jabba while proposing a deal. Originally, that was fine since Jabba was a fat guy who looked like the rancor handler. But now that they were pasting a big slug with a long tail over the guy, Han couldn't really walk around hom anymore. Unadjusted, Han would be walking right through the animation.
Their solution? Make it look like Han is stepping on Jabba's tail by cutting him from the background and moving him up a bit then down a bit as he circles Jabba. They even make Jabba comically cringe when Han "steps" on his tail. This looks about as real as when a kid bounces a doll along the ground to make it "walk".
Peter Jackson's actually been pretty reasonable with his DVD editions of LOTR. One fullscreen, One widescreen, and One Collector's Multi-disc widescreen for each of the three movies. Although he did stagger it, so if you wanted to see it ASAP on DVD you had to buy/rent the single disc version a month or two before the Collector's edition was released.
The thing that annoys me the most is that Intel has guessed wrong badly twice in trying to drive the market deeper into their corner(RAMBUS, Itanium) and AMD has guessed right both times (DDR, X86-64) and all the time Intel cranks out a profit every quarter and AMD come's up for air for a couple of quarters every other year. If Intel were going against an equal-sized adversary they'd be chapter 11 some years ago for making such mistakes.
I wonder if Intel's exclusive, deep discount intel-only deal with Dell will ever come up in an anti-trust hearing. Dell gets to remain ahead of the competition with awesome processor prices, and Intel gets guaranteed market share.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex. Is there a place on the web that panders to my lust for violence? Chack out what George W Bush is doing.
Since when is it legal to completely rip someone's background music and change the vocals?
In which of Weird Al's songs/parodies does he take a copyrighted recording, edit out the vocals, and add his own? The ones I can think of he just replays them using his own band.
Teaching your child how to recognize when they're not paying attention is the first step
Great quote! The first step in any sort of reform, revising national laws, teaching a child, etc, is to teach tehm to step back and recognize the problem from the outside.
Paraphrase from Albert Einstein: "A problem cannot be solved using the same mindset that created it."
However more important to an employer, another employee could punch a friend in, making it appear as if they were there.
My girlfriend worked somewhere where a pair of employees did just that...
One worked from 7am-3pm, the other worked 9-5. The first would punch them both in at 7, then leave at 3 without punching out. The second would punch both out at 5, earning 2 hours overtime each that they didn't actually work.
For a current example, there is currently no such fund for those sued by the RIAA, thus rather than spend 10's of thousands of dollars to beat the RIAA in court, poor individuals have to settle by paying $3000 or so and never even get to see a trial!
If there were a fund, someone who got the RIAA threat would actually take them to court.
500 people cast their vote for say Raplh Nader. Bush seems to have beaten Gore by 300 votes. Among others, those 500 votes for Nader are contested, and those people can come and essnetiall re-vote. Those 500 Nader fans, knowing Nader lost by way more than 500 votes, now switch and vote for the lesser of the two evils, Gore. Gore wins by 200 votes.
So you don't really know the voter's original intent, since they can change it from what they voted the first time.
With Approval voting, you let them express their complete unambiguious intent all at once. You'd still have the same ballot counting issues, but at least you'd get a more accurate view of voter intent.
Think of it this way: Do you thnik you should be required to take a test before getting your driver's license?
The test is designed to make sure the person had at least a very minimal understanding of the rules and how to safely operate a vehicle. If they don't know the rules and/or can't operate the vehicle properly, they can seriously hurt or kill themselves and the people around them.
Operating a voting machine isn't as bad as that, but it can be argued that it's damaging to the democratic system and therefore the country as a whole.
One problem with your argument: Driving a vehicle on public roads is a privilege, not a right. States can make any laws they want to determine who gets to drive and who doesn't. If you want the privilege of driving on public roads, you must earn it. Voting, however, IS a constitutional right, and the states are required to make it accessible to everyone, without any caveats.
The user IS at fault when they don't follow instructions and check for hanging chads.
At what point do you draw the line of what the user is required to do to have his vote counted? Having your vote counted is a constitutional right. Being able to sell cheap voting machines which malfunction over the slightest ballot defects is not.
The user IS at fault when multiple votes are cast for the same candidate....You can't count a double vote for Gore and Buchanan as a vote for Gore. The intent of the voter is UNKNOWN.
In our current system, you're right. I wish we'd switch to "Approval Voting", where for each candidate you can either check their box (meaning you Approve) or not (you Disapprove). Whoever gets the most votes wins. That works better to get the intent of the voter, since you can easily say "I'd rather elect anyone besides Candidate Jones". This is what I suspect most voters would have said in the 2000 presidential election about G W Bush, what will all the people I know wavering between Nader and Gore, but definitely not wanting Bush.
Slashdot Mirror
They still don't know who those people are. They are suing "the owner of an IP address". That still doesn't identify the alledged copyright infringer, as is evidenced by the fact that they sued people who had never used file sharing software. It was someone else on their computer. So now is there going to be a law for "accessory to copyright infringement"?
They've got to start somewhere. Police start investigations for people and they don't know who they're looking for; often they'll question a few suspects but then change their mind and let them go. A court order recently said the RIAA can't just ask the ISPs for the name, so they have to pursue a case against "John Doe" until a court requires the ISP to reveal a name. What's their alternative?
I haven't seen any court papers, but I assume they don't tie themselves down by simply accusing "the owner of an IP address", but rather whomever was using the IP address at the time they were sharing the copyrighted files, or whoever put them there and left them to be uploaded. There'll be no accessory law, they'll just eventually find the person they're looking for, as in any civil investigation.
Covers court costs and lawyers' fees. IANAL, but is that up front or if you win. Without debating the merits of this case, I would hate to think my taxes could possibly go to random lawsuits to pay random wacko's costs and fees whenever they want to accuse anyone of being a racketeer.
When you win, but most lawyers don't collect their fee until the case is over. (That's one of the reasons lawyers take suge a big cut of the award - they put up their firm's own capital to fund the case).
Do people in the USA honestly flee to Mexico when they are bankrupt? Do people in the USA go to jail when they fail to pay money they own?
:-)
No. Georgia (the US state) used to be a debtor's colony/prison, partially to shield the other states from spanish-controlled Florida. But that was befroe the revolutionary war in 1776
Today, if you find yourself with more debt than you could possibly pay off, you can declare bankruptcy and be protected under bankruptcy laws.
See this very informative USA bankruptcy FAQ
Most people do know that there may be something wrong if people are getting for free what they'd otherwise have to purchase from a store. So it is perceived as a crime, but not a particularly heinous one, and you'd be hard pressed to ge the public agree that one song, or even one entire CD being obtained for free could be worth anywhere near the penalties the DMCA applies. The penalties are potentially many thousands of dollars per song/violation. The public would expect the penalties to be closer to the actual losses incurred from the one user's direct actions, and more related to the cost of the number of lost CD sales that the user single-handedly caused.
Settling out of court is a completely viable option for two parties, and a preferred one often because it means not tying up the courts.
Plus, it avoids those pesky "judges" and "trials by a jury of ones peers" that always tie up the courts, and prevent the mega-rich corporations from having their way with relatively poor individual citizens...
Well they know they're suing people behind IP addresses that were allegedly offering over 1,000 copyrighted songs on Kazaa. The problem is that the law's penalties are way too high, so if you ever got to court and lost, you're bankrupt for life. Even paying a lawyer would cost a few grand over time, so it's cheaper just paying off the RIAA. It's not a racket, but it's a cruel and unusual punishment for a petty copyright violations.
Sunset provisions have their goods and bads... It's good to force a review of a laws, witht he hopes of undoing a particularly bad one, such as the Patriot Act.
But it also creates uncertainty, in that every time the administration changes, or power in the senate or house shifts parties, all the work done by the previous congress could be reversed through a "review".
Don't many laws already have sunset provisions?
You're absolutely right.
The core problem is that the law allows for ridiculously high monetary penalties for violating a copyright. It seems to have been written to deter those who would make millions off bootlegged distribution. But it's being applied to people who violated copyright for no financial gain, and typically they weren't even aware they were sharing files (they only thought they were downloading for themselves).
I mean, imagine that a law was passed to penalize big businesses from dumping garbage in rivers, and it would cost them $100,000 per incident. But since "incident" was so vaguely defined, even dropping a gum wrapper off a canoe would mean you violated the law. So the gov't could sue you for $100,000, but they offer to settle for $3,000. A lawyer would cost you $3,000 anyway, so what the hell do you do? You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
I think the best that could come out of this is that the law will be declared unconstitutional on the basis of "penalty doesn't fit the crime" (via cruel/unusual punishment). If the RIAA successfully prosecuted everyone they've contacted for one song each (over 2000 by my count so far?) and got the maximum penalty of $30,000, they would have been awarded $60,000,000 dollars! WTF? Were they really damaged $60,000,000 by the sharing of 2000 songs? Those 2,000 people could have been sharing the same single song to at least 10 people, so even if the RIAA lost $20 worth of missed-album purchases, they'd still be only be $40,000 in the hole. And that's not even considering that the record companies pocket just a percentage of each album's sticker price.
From http://www.arizona.edu/home/p2p-programs.shtml
I wish one of our legislators would read this and realize how ridiculous it is:
Growing all that corn also takes a Lot of Water. more water than rain. The High Plains Aquifer is steadily being drained and by some estimates may not last as long as the world's petrolium reserves.
You seem to know about this stuff...
Do you know if anyone has considered using wind or solar energy to power the ethanol producing equipment? Considering corn is farmed on lots of land with lots of wind and sun, it seems like this could help ethanol production become more viable.
OpenOffice.org's presentation software "Impress" can open and save PowerPoint files:
From http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html
"Of course, you are free to use your old Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, or save your work in PowerPoint format for sending to people who are still locked into Microsoft products. Alternatively, use IMPRESS's built-in ability to create Flash (.swf) versions of your presentations."
I played the demo level in Dark Forces: Jedi Knight dozens of times, and it made me want the full game (which I asked for and got for xmas one year). If I hadn't played that free, short demo, I wouldn't have wanted the full game.
All the benchmarks and reviews in the world can't substitute for actually playing a demo of the game.
And also walking on the tail would be the equivalent of yanking Tony Soprano's tie while he was yelling at you for screwing up a delivery... It's a wonder Jabba didn't kill Han right then and there.
lol! Yeah Han wasn't exactly in a good bargaining position at that moment...
So this enhanced version is "the movie Lucas really wanted to make". What, was the original too good?
Plus, in the starport Jabba's moving around, and has all these expressions, just like a lame-ass cartoon. It contrasts terribly with the stationary, smug, heartless Jabba we know and love from his palace and on his yacht in the Sarlacc Pit scene.
In the first film, they took some cutting-room floor footage of Han talking to Jabba as he's preparing to take off in the Millenium Falcon.
Want to hate that scene even more?
Notice the part where Han circles Jabba while proposing a deal. Originally, that was fine since Jabba was a fat guy who looked like the rancor handler. But now that they were pasting a big slug with a long tail over the guy, Han couldn't really walk around hom anymore. Unadjusted, Han would be walking right through the animation.
Their solution? Make it look like Han is stepping on Jabba's tail by cutting him from the background and moving him up a bit then down a bit as he circles Jabba. They even make Jabba comically cringe when Han "steps" on his tail. This looks about as real as when a kid bounces a doll along the ground to make it "walk".
Peter Jackson's actually been pretty reasonable with his DVD editions of LOTR. One fullscreen, One widescreen, and One Collector's Multi-disc widescreen for each of the three movies. Although he did stagger it, so if you wanted to see it ASAP on DVD you had to buy/rent the single disc version a month or two before the Collector's edition was released.
The thing that annoys me the most is that Intel has guessed wrong badly twice in trying to drive the market deeper into their corner(RAMBUS, Itanium) and AMD has guessed right both times (DDR, X86-64) and all the time Intel cranks out a profit every quarter and AMD come's up for air for a couple of quarters every other year. If Intel were going against an equal-sized adversary they'd be chapter 11 some years ago for making such mistakes.
I wonder if Intel's exclusive, deep discount intel-only deal with Dell will ever come up in an anti-trust hearing. Dell gets to remain ahead of the competition with awesome processor prices, and Intel gets guaranteed market share.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex. Is there a place on the web that panders to my lust for violence?
:-)
Chack out what George W Bush is doing.
lol
Don't forget about the "Super Secret" communications. 'Encrypted "Super Secret" communications will be done with Wingdings 16'
This message is in violation of the DMCA for circumventing encryption techniques.
Since when is it legal to completely rip someone's background music and change the vocals?
In which of Weird Al's songs/parodies does he take a copyrighted recording, edit out the vocals, and add his own? The ones I can think of he just replays them using his own band.
Teaching your child how to recognize when they're not paying attention is the first step
Great quote! The first step in any sort of reform, revising national laws, teaching a child, etc, is to teach tehm to step back and recognize the problem from the outside.
Paraphrase from Albert Einstein: "A problem cannot be solved using the same mindset that created it."
However more important to an employer, another employee could punch a friend in, making it appear as if they were there.
My girlfriend worked somewhere where a pair of employees did just that...
One worked from 7am-3pm, the other worked 9-5. The first would punch them both in at 7, then leave at 3 without punching out. The second would punch both out at 5, earning 2 hours overtime each that they didn't actually work.
For a current example, there is currently no such fund for those sued by the RIAA, thus rather than spend 10's of thousands of dollars to beat the RIAA in court, poor individuals have to settle by paying $3000 or so and never even get to see a trial!
If there were a fund, someone who got the RIAA threat would actually take them to court.
Not to troll, but I'm curious why somebody using XP strictly for gaming would shell out the extra $$$ for XP Pro vs. XP standard/home?
m e_pro.asp
Better local networking/wireless networking options?
Actually, this site has a great breakdown of what Pro has that Home doesn't:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_ho
Thad's never fly...
500 people cast their vote for say Raplh Nader.
Bush seems to have beaten Gore by 300 votes.
Among others, those 500 votes for Nader are contested, and those people can come and essnetiall re-vote.
Those 500 Nader fans, knowing Nader lost by way more than 500 votes, now switch and vote for the lesser of the two evils, Gore.
Gore wins by 200 votes.
So you don't really know the voter's original intent, since they can change it from what they voted the first time.
With Approval voting, you let them express their complete unambiguious intent all at once. You'd still have the same ballot counting issues, but at least you'd get a more accurate view of voter intent.
Think of it this way: Do you thnik you should be required to take a test before getting your driver's license?
The test is designed to make sure the person had at least a very minimal understanding of the rules and how to safely operate a vehicle. If they don't know the rules and/or can't operate the vehicle properly, they can seriously hurt or kill themselves and the people around them.
Operating a voting machine isn't as bad as that, but it can be argued that it's damaging to the democratic system and therefore the country as a whole.
One problem with your argument: Driving a vehicle on public roads is a privilege, not a right. States can make any laws they want to determine who gets to drive and who doesn't. If you want the privilege of driving on public roads, you must earn it. Voting, however, IS a constitutional right, and the states are required to make it accessible to everyone, without any caveats.
The user IS at fault when they don't follow instructions and check for hanging chads.
...You can't count a double vote for Gore and Buchanan as a vote for Gore. The intent of the voter is UNKNOWN.
At what point do you draw the line of what the user is required to do to have his vote counted? Having your vote counted is a constitutional right. Being able to sell cheap voting machines which malfunction over the slightest ballot defects is not.
The user IS at fault when multiple votes are cast for the same candidate.
In our current system, you're right. I wish we'd switch to "Approval Voting", where for each candidate you can either check their box (meaning you Approve) or not (you Disapprove). Whoever gets the most votes wins. That works better to get the intent of the voter, since you can easily say "I'd rather elect anyone besides Candidate Jones". This is what I suspect most voters would have said in the 2000 presidential election about G W Bush, what will all the people I know wavering between Nader and Gore, but definitely not wanting Bush.