You're not watching the right movies if you think there are none with character and plot development. Some stories are better told as a single 1.5-2 hour presentation than split over episodes.
This is a decent point. There's a problem right now where Ebay for example will buy up tons of low-cost keywords. Apparently you can buy everything from salad recipes up to but (hopefully) not including dead babies on Ebay, and they do their best to make sure you know it, even for keywords where you would never consider shopping there.
However, I'm inclined to think that companies will come up with better technological innovations to combat this sooner than this Utah bill will make a difference. And this isn't even what the Utah thing fights. What they've outlawed is showing an ad for PSP if I search for Nintendo DS, or an ad for Amazon if I search for Barnes & Noble. These are targeted ads which may actually prove useful to the consumer, but some businesses in Utah apparently got cranky that consumers were finding out that they had a choice in where to shop. Even if it could be reasonably implemented, the law would do nothing to stop unrelated ads on most keywords.
As conservatives like to point out, the level of physical well-being in western societies has reached a point where even most of the poor are better off than the middle class of a generation ago.
Yes, but they like to claim that living under crippling debt is a fair trade off for getting to drive an SUV. Poor is poor. Telling them to shut up and be happy they aren't losing fingers in the auto plants doesn't do a thing to change that.
From what I hear from my relatives, Carleton does need to be more careful about their commercial collaborations. But it's not in the area of engineering or design. It's when it comes to their food services. An exclusivity contract with Coca Cola apparently results in there being only Coke available on that campus.
American universities do the same thing. It's nothing new.
2 years seems a bit extreme to me, though. Not only are you gonna have a tough sell with people who like IP on principle, but there are plenty of products that would actually be harmed by that. Copyright is from the date of creation, right? Well, there are lots of really good films that are made a year or two before they're shown in theaters, let alone released to DVD. Hell, with some independent films, they're shown at festivals years before they get a general release. Any copyright term that ends before they have a reasonable chance to distribute seems excessive. Something closer to 5 years sounds like a more reasonable minimum.
We've watched a bunch of DVDs on a friend's 52" DLP, and no, they still look pretty damn good to me. He's playing it through a 360, so it may be upscaling to 720, I'm not sure. Now, I'm not saying I wouldn't grab some HD media if it was JUST higher resolution. But when HDCP is so amazingly broken that a VP of Westinghouse recommends buying an HDCP stripper to bypass protection so you can play your HD media on hardware that is sold as end-to-end compliant, you know something's messed up. I won't pay someone MORE money for LESS rights to the things I buy, no matter how shiny it is. The fact that the improvement doesn't even really matter when you get down to it... well, that's just another reason not to care.
It does sound like Gaim just doesn't want to fight this. The link you provided confirms that trademark is established at "time of use", not just by registration. They would have had legal grounds to keep this, and maybe even to claim trademark infringement against AIM if they wanted.
I'm curious as to what things you think wouldn't be created today if we went back to a 15 year copyright period? Movies make 90% of their income in theaters and the first couple months of DVD sales. Software obviously has a shorter shelf life than 15 years. Video games drop in price quite drastically after 6 months or so, and can't be making a lot more profit. Music, aside from the odd exception like the Beatles or Dark Side of The Moon is out of steam within 5-10 years. Books may be the slowest to move, but they're also quite cheap to create compared to other forms of media. And if there's a book falls out of copyright after 15 years without making a profit, I don't see a 3rd party company going to the trouble of doing a printing just so they too can continue to be unprofitable, so there's little chance of competition in that case.
Now, I'm not saying that some things don't continue to generate income past 15 years. Music generates royalties on nostalgia radio stations, movies and tv shows through syndication, etc. But as long as the original creator has a fair chance to extract compensation, I see no reason why we shouldn't start trying to expand the public domain again.
There are some musical recordings that are very expensive to make and take much longer that 14 years to recover costs on, let alone make a profit on.
I would like to see the recording company that's willing to invest in a project that they know will not come out of the red for over 15 years. That just seems completely couter-intuitive to the way the music industry operates in general.
As for "some degree of control"... that's all well and good, but who says you SHOULD have control over a set of words? The current "IP climate" has given everyone this warped view of ideas as something that can be owned. That they can be owned at all is a construct of government designed to promote research and creative works, and that they can be owned essentially forever is a distortion of the legal system by Disney and MGM. There's no good reason, aside from that, that anybody should be able to say, "this idea is mine, you aren't allowed to use it unless I say so".
Trademarks probably should be allowed to remain. I'm a little confused about this, though... I was under the distinct impression that trademarks took effect as soon as you began to market something with a unique name, not requiring some official registration. And if that's not how it is, it should be. It seems like in this case Gaim should have been the ones to keep the name, but they didn't have the legal/monetary resources or desire to fight it through. Which is a whole other kind of bullshit altogether.
Except now you can use it with your google login to chat with all your friends who use gmail. Even the ones who would have been too lazy to install an IM client.
I'm of the opinion that the original 14 year copyright term was reasonable. Anything more is overkill (well, heck, let's bump it to 15 just to be nice). Seriously... if you can't extract enough value out of an original creative work in 15 years to make it worth your while, the work's probably not that good in the first place. After that, let it go back to the public. Copyright is supposed to be a concession to the reality that not all work can be service-oriented, not a license to completely replace goods and services with ideas in gigantic sectors of our economy.
Uh huh. I'm saying I have a 32" LCD HD television, and normal DVD resolution is just fine for me. Yeah, if you pause it and try to count freckles on some guy in the background, HD-DVD is gonna work a lot better, but when you're watching a film from 10-15 feet back and people are moving around on screen, it really doesn't make a difference. The average consumer does not care. Don't get me wrong, HD sets have some advantages. For one, you can use progressive scan to get a brighter image and drop that annoying flicker along line edges. That's a huge improvement. But paying extra for extra resolution that you're not really going to notice, and the privilege of working with a broken protection scheme? Nuh huh.
Here's a couple neat facts for you: 1) many sets currently on the market have a broken implementation of HDMI that causes the authentication to fail. 2) There are literally NO computers which can currently play HD media in full quality. 3) No movies or TV shows are shot in 1080. Many are not shot in 720. The image that you get on an "HD" disc is most likely upscaled during the mastering process, to some degree.
Exactly. One of the strongest aspects of software under the GPL is that it never goes away. People can take it and improve it, but only if they release their improvements so that others have the same option. This body of code that's been accumulating for the past 40 years has a massive advantage over proprietary software, in that code doesn't just disappear as it does with closed-source development. Licensing code in such a way that it CAN disappear (or at least become stunted and irrelevant) as you describe... it's death for OSS, plain and simple. It kills the momentum that makes OSS so damn good.
It also doesn't change the fact that the closed-source drivers are complete crap. You should probably look into the situation a bit before you start making off-handed remarks.
I really really don't see how they expect to hide this. At some point it has to exist in unencrypted form so that it can be used to extract the title key from the disk. So they can try to hide that, but as soon as someone pokes their way past the obfuscation, it's going to come out. With some patience, someone who knows assembly should be able to tease out the part of the code that accesses the disc for the first time, and then it's game over.
You do still have access to the title keys on all pre-revocation discs. However, it is in the spec that a player shall disable itself if it finds its current key on the revocation list. That includes old discs as well. So while you still COULD decrypt the title key, the player will by-design refuse to do so.
It's not. Or more specifically, not in the way you want.
Storing the revocation list like this is likely only useful so that the device can give the user specific instructions to go look for an update, and maybe disable itself even for older discs. Every new disc will still fail to provide a disc key to the player, as the player key will not be included in the tree of allowed ones. You still couldn't play new discs, the best you might do is prevent the player from understanding that it needs an upgrade.
You do realize, I hope, that only the 0.1% of consumers who are technically savvy actually care about the actual resolution. Hell, I understand it, but I also know that DVDs look great on my 32" widescreen, and that's through a PS2. Progressive scan and a more natural aspect ratio do wonders, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay more money for slightly higher res and a content protection scheme so strict I'll be lucky to be allowed to play the discs I buy on any hardware I own. The extra resolution really isn't worth it. If the started doing HDMI or something, then maybe.
I would argue that they have, or at least are on the verge of doing so. For the average home user, their choices are determined by one of two sources: what a young relative or neighbor recommends and sets up for them, or what comes installed on the computer when they buy it. Well, the young folks are trying Linux and Mac, and they're convincing distributors to make both more widely available as well. Similarly, in an IT department, the source is an extremely technical individual, and they're experimenting too. Yes, the majority of Windows users are technically illiterate, but they rely on a small minority of users who actually know what they're doing to help them get things running. If MS loses that group, their numbers will stay high for another 5-10 years as their install base gets phased out, but you'll see larger numbers of new machines going to some other platform as they get switched over on a case-by-case basis.
Ok. So I'm not one of those people imagining scanning in any item and getting an instant working copy. But I think that within 10 years we're going to see home "fab printers" within the price range of 20-30% of the population, and plans for devices being made specifically for these things. While it's hard to replicate just any random item, it's much more within our grasp to specifically design an item so that it can be fabricated easily. All our designs right now revolve around the idea of physical manufacture and assembly, and once these printers become more advanced, I think we'll see that change.
YOU ARE MEASURING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION. Use your common sense example-making muscles. This really isn't that hard.
I haven't been talking about floor height error or vertical measurements at any point. I've only been talking about the horizontal deviation of vertical columns. The fact that you keep misunderstanding what I'm arguing, and then ranting against that strawman, is a pretty strong reason to take nothing you say seriously. I've explained this like four times now and you still don't seem to get it.
Y'see, anyone with even a basic understanding of architectural engineering knows that a structure built on sand will eventually settle plumb; the amount of time it takes varies by weight, and I'm sure the pyramids are enormously heavy, but five thousand years would be long enough for a modern skyscraper to settle plumb, let alone a pyramid.
The Giza pyramid is built on a rock outcropping. It is built directly on solid bedrock. Not sand. Again, you give me no reason to think you know what you're talking about.
It would only seem so to the poorly educated; a single mason can excavate a Giza-sized block of limestone using bronze tools in approx six hours, according to Rossi, who cites a Yale study in which people actually excavated blocks for several weeks.
That seems falacious, given that modern quaries using power tools are only required to dress blocks to within 0.25", while the blocks in the pyramids are dressed to a tolerance of 0.01".
As for sources, feel free to check out I.E.S. Edwards, Ancient Egypt, William Flinders Petrie, Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (precision measurements which I've been citing, made as far back as the 1800s, many current researchers have cited this work), A. Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, and for a more speculative look, Chris Dunn's, The Giza Power Plant, which is an assessment of the building tolerances and methods by a man with 35 years of experience in various physical engineering fields.
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You're not watching the right movies if you think there are none with character and plot development. Some stories are better told as a single 1.5-2 hour presentation than split over episodes.
This is a decent point. There's a problem right now where Ebay for example will buy up tons of low-cost keywords. Apparently you can buy everything from salad recipes up to but (hopefully) not including dead babies on Ebay, and they do their best to make sure you know it, even for keywords where you would never consider shopping there.
However, I'm inclined to think that companies will come up with better technological innovations to combat this sooner than this Utah bill will make a difference. And this isn't even what the Utah thing fights. What they've outlawed is showing an ad for PSP if I search for Nintendo DS, or an ad for Amazon if I search for Barnes & Noble. These are targeted ads which may actually prove useful to the consumer, but some businesses in Utah apparently got cranky that consumers were finding out that they had a choice in where to shop. Even if it could be reasonably implemented, the law would do nothing to stop unrelated ads on most keywords.
Showing ads related to your search term on Google or Yahoo hardly counts as "spyware".
Bull. I've posted both pro- and anti-Microsoft things, and they've ended up as informative.
2 years seems a bit extreme to me, though. Not only are you gonna have a tough sell with people who like IP on principle, but there are plenty of products that would actually be harmed by that. Copyright is from the date of creation, right? Well, there are lots of really good films that are made a year or two before they're shown in theaters, let alone released to DVD. Hell, with some independent films, they're shown at festivals years before they get a general release. Any copyright term that ends before they have a reasonable chance to distribute seems excessive. Something closer to 5 years sounds like a more reasonable minimum.
We've watched a bunch of DVDs on a friend's 52" DLP, and no, they still look pretty damn good to me. He's playing it through a 360, so it may be upscaling to 720, I'm not sure. Now, I'm not saying I wouldn't grab some HD media if it was JUST higher resolution. But when HDCP is so amazingly broken that a VP of Westinghouse recommends buying an HDCP stripper to bypass protection so you can play your HD media on hardware that is sold as end-to-end compliant, you know something's messed up. I won't pay someone MORE money for LESS rights to the things I buy, no matter how shiny it is. The fact that the improvement doesn't even really matter when you get down to it... well, that's just another reason not to care.
It does sound like Gaim just doesn't want to fight this. The link you provided confirms that trademark is established at "time of use", not just by registration. They would have had legal grounds to keep this, and maybe even to claim trademark infringement against AIM if they wanted.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html
I'm curious as to what things you think wouldn't be created today if we went back to a 15 year copyright period? Movies make 90% of their income in theaters and the first couple months of DVD sales. Software obviously has a shorter shelf life than 15 years. Video games drop in price quite drastically after 6 months or so, and can't be making a lot more profit. Music, aside from the odd exception like the Beatles or Dark Side of The Moon is out of steam within 5-10 years. Books may be the slowest to move, but they're also quite cheap to create compared to other forms of media. And if there's a book falls out of copyright after 15 years without making a profit, I don't see a 3rd party company going to the trouble of doing a printing just so they too can continue to be unprofitable, so there's little chance of competition in that case.
Now, I'm not saying that some things don't continue to generate income past 15 years. Music generates royalties on nostalgia radio stations, movies and tv shows through syndication, etc. But as long as the original creator has a fair chance to extract compensation, I see no reason why we shouldn't start trying to expand the public domain again.
As for "some degree of control"... that's all well and good, but who says you SHOULD have control over a set of words? The current "IP climate" has given everyone this warped view of ideas as something that can be owned. That they can be owned at all is a construct of government designed to promote research and creative works, and that they can be owned essentially forever is a distortion of the legal system by Disney and MGM. There's no good reason, aside from that, that anybody should be able to say, "this idea is mine, you aren't allowed to use it unless I say so".
Trademarks probably should be allowed to remain. I'm a little confused about this, though... I was under the distinct impression that trademarks took effect as soon as you began to market something with a unique name, not requiring some official registration. And if that's not how it is, it should be. It seems like in this case Gaim should have been the ones to keep the name, but they didn't have the legal/monetary resources or desire to fight it through. Which is a whole other kind of bullshit altogether.
Except now you can use it with your google login to chat with all your friends who use gmail. Even the ones who would have been too lazy to install an IM client.
I'm of the opinion that the original 14 year copyright term was reasonable. Anything more is overkill (well, heck, let's bump it to 15 just to be nice). Seriously... if you can't extract enough value out of an original creative work in 15 years to make it worth your while, the work's probably not that good in the first place. After that, let it go back to the public. Copyright is supposed to be a concession to the reality that not all work can be service-oriented, not a license to completely replace goods and services with ideas in gigantic sectors of our economy.
Uh huh. I'm saying I have a 32" LCD HD television, and normal DVD resolution is just fine for me. Yeah, if you pause it and try to count freckles on some guy in the background, HD-DVD is gonna work a lot better, but when you're watching a film from 10-15 feet back and people are moving around on screen, it really doesn't make a difference. The average consumer does not care. Don't get me wrong, HD sets have some advantages. For one, you can use progressive scan to get a brighter image and drop that annoying flicker along line edges. That's a huge improvement. But paying extra for extra resolution that you're not really going to notice, and the privilege of working with a broken protection scheme? Nuh huh.
Here's a couple neat facts for you: 1) many sets currently on the market have a broken implementation of HDMI that causes the authentication to fail. 2) There are literally NO computers which can currently play HD media in full quality. 3) No movies or TV shows are shot in 1080. Many are not shot in 720. The image that you get on an "HD" disc is most likely upscaled during the mastering process, to some degree.
Exactly. One of the strongest aspects of software under the GPL is that it never goes away. People can take it and improve it, but only if they release their improvements so that others have the same option. This body of code that's been accumulating for the past 40 years has a massive advantage over proprietary software, in that code doesn't just disappear as it does with closed-source development. Licensing code in such a way that it CAN disappear (or at least become stunted and irrelevant) as you describe... it's death for OSS, plain and simple. It kills the momentum that makes OSS so damn good.
It also doesn't change the fact that the closed-source drivers are complete crap. You should probably look into the situation a bit before you start making off-handed remarks.
I really really don't see how they expect to hide this. At some point it has to exist in unencrypted form so that it can be used to extract the title key from the disk. So they can try to hide that, but as soon as someone pokes their way past the obfuscation, it's going to come out. With some patience, someone who knows assembly should be able to tease out the part of the code that accesses the disc for the first time, and then it's game over.
You do still have access to the title keys on all pre-revocation discs. However, it is in the spec that a player shall disable itself if it finds its current key on the revocation list. That includes old discs as well. So while you still COULD decrypt the title key, the player will by-design refuse to do so.
It's not. Or more specifically, not in the way you want.
Storing the revocation list like this is likely only useful so that the device can give the user specific instructions to go look for an update, and maybe disable itself even for older discs. Every new disc will still fail to provide a disc key to the player, as the player key will not be included in the tree of allowed ones. You still couldn't play new discs, the best you might do is prevent the player from understanding that it needs an upgrade.
You do realize, I hope, that only the 0.1% of consumers who are technically savvy actually care about the actual resolution. Hell, I understand it, but I also know that DVDs look great on my 32" widescreen, and that's through a PS2. Progressive scan and a more natural aspect ratio do wonders, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay more money for slightly higher res and a content protection scheme so strict I'll be lucky to be allowed to play the discs I buy on any hardware I own. The extra resolution really isn't worth it. If the started doing HDMI or something, then maybe.
I would argue that they have, or at least are on the verge of doing so. For the average home user, their choices are determined by one of two sources: what a young relative or neighbor recommends and sets up for them, or what comes installed on the computer when they buy it. Well, the young folks are trying Linux and Mac, and they're convincing distributors to make both more widely available as well. Similarly, in an IT department, the source is an extremely technical individual, and they're experimenting too. Yes, the majority of Windows users are technically illiterate, but they rely on a small minority of users who actually know what they're doing to help them get things running. If MS loses that group, their numbers will stay high for another 5-10 years as their install base gets phased out, but you'll see larger numbers of new machines going to some other platform as they get switched over on a case-by-case basis.
Ok. So I'm not one of those people imagining scanning in any item and getting an instant working copy. But I think that within 10 years we're going to see home "fab printers" within the price range of 20-30% of the population, and plans for devices being made specifically for these things. While it's hard to replicate just any random item, it's much more within our grasp to specifically design an item so that it can be fabricated easily. All our designs right now revolve around the idea of physical manufacture and assembly, and once these printers become more advanced, I think we'll see that change.
As for sources, feel free to check out I.E.S. Edwards, Ancient Egypt, William Flinders Petrie, Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (precision measurements which I've been citing, made as far back as the 1800s, many current researchers have cited this work), A. Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, and for a more speculative look, Chris Dunn's, The Giza Power Plant, which is an assessment of the building tolerances and methods by a man with 35 years of experience in various physical engineering fields.