Flash does make use of hardware decoding. Steve Jobs is just a control freak.
Yes. On one of our Ubuntu machines is regularly used for viewing Youtube videos. I discovered the "hardware acceleration" option because there's a bug in it where the display goes monochrome when in full-screen. Go back to windowed, and it works fine. If I turn off hardware support, full screen shows color. Weird.
Who's implementation of this new standard will define what is considered the standard when people try to conform to the standard?
That is to say...who's standard will become the most standard standard?!
Usually, most people just settle on the standard one.
There's no obligation on the authors of MPEG4 algorithms to provide those for free just so that someone can sell a computer with the price capped at $N.
There was no obligation on the part of our elected officials to make software patentable either. But they did, and they've screwed over a number of industries in the process. Groups like the MPEG-LA are largely parasitic in that the only service they provide is to collect royalties on algorithms whose creators, for the most part, disagree with the entire premise of software patents. And why is that? Well, I'll tell you: it's because those of us in the business recognize that software patents are intrinsically antithetical to our ability to improve upon what is, to advance the state of the art.
Actually, that applies to patents in general, however the presumption was that without such protection, nobody would invest the capital required to turn an otherwise-worthless idea into a shipping product. Now, maybe that's true in the world of physical invention, where millions (or billions) of dollars may be required to build the necessary physical plant. That's just not true in comparatively fast-paced world of software, where patents are a hindrance, and serve no purpose but to slow the pace of progress. Look around you: the software business has been booming for decades without any patent protection whatsoever: what possible need for them do we have now, if not for the desire of certain parties to control the dissemination of competitive technologies? Furthermore, when did competition become a dirty word?
I don't know about Europe and other places. I'm an American, and what I do know is that our Constitution is very clear on one point: patents and copyrights are required to promote the useful arts and sciences. That is their purpose. Period. Nothing in there about milking the world for billions of dollars in royalties by providing legal monopolies on mere ideas. Nothing about squelching innovation. And every time I hear about a promising new technology squeezed out of existence by some patent troll (or existing organization who just can't stand the thought of competition) or millions spent on needless, lawyer-enriching, court-clogging litigation I want to throw up. So would the Founders, if they were still with us.
Keep this in mind: the kinds of people that want software patents are the same kinds of people who have been doing their level best to suppress any form of innovation or technological advancement that they feel threatens their established businesses. Not the kind of people you want in control of progress, at any level.
At less than 100,000 units/year, the H.264 royalty rate is zero.
From 100,000 to 5,000,000 units/year the rate is $0.20/unit (twenty cents)
and above 5,000,000 units/year, the rate is $0.10 (ten cents), until the maximum cap amount of $6.5 million/year is paid.
For now. As has been said elsewhere, in a few years those terms are going to change, and nobody knows what they're going to be yet. If I were planning on being in business then, I'd seriously consider not using H.264. It's a minefield just waiting to be touched off.
If you use H.264, you (potentially, at least) will need to pay its owners a licensing fee.
In my mind, it's somewhat irrelevant as to whether that's regulated by copyright law, patent law, trademark law, contract law, or the laws of thermodynamics; the upshot is the same. If you are reliant on the owner's permission in order to use a piece of software, then that isn't "open".
Well, yes and no. In the U.S., you really can't go after users very easily, especially if they bought the product in good faith, having every reason to believe any patented software content was properly licensed. What's would be the point? You won't get much money, and all you'll succeed in doing is make people believe that you're a bunch of complete assholes and that any product containing your patented algorithms is too dangerous to use. You can, however, go after the manufacturer of the product if you believe they're infringing on your patent.
If MPEG-LA starts going after people who bought H.264-based products who had no idea the product vendor didn't license the codec, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot. Assuming, that is, they're capable of taking the longer view.
The only holds true until 2015. At that stage the terms will change. At this stage we don't know what the new license terms will be, but I'm sure that if H.264 is completely dominating the web then the terms won't be a good, they won't need to be. The current licensing terms are designed with one thing in mind, getting H.264 into a dominant position that can the be taken advantage of at a later date.
Yes. If there was ever a Slashdot story that needs to be marked "it's a trap!" this is it.
H.264 requires people to pay a licensing fee to use.
Not true. For non-commercial streaming use it's royalty-free and if you ship an encoder and/or decoder you only pay royalties for any units over 100,000 that you ship. Outside of a Google it is pretty much free for anyone. And even for someone like Google the royalties cap out at like $6 million dollars a year which is a pittance to someone pulling in 10s of billions of dollars in revenue.
You do realize that that is not cast in stone? That they can change those terms at any time? That the only reason they're so "reasonable" (and I use the term loosely) is to encourage adoption and keep any potential competition at bay? Remember, the first hit is free.
These people aren't stupid (sleazy and highly unethical, yes, but not stupid) and as soon as they believe that their's been a sufficient uptake of their codec they'll start hitting manufacturers and developers up for more money. That's how the game is played, and they'll try to find that sweet spot where they maximize profit at the expense of some number of users. Heinlein said it best, "Never depend upon another man's better nature... he might not have one." Well, here's a case where we already know they don't, so becoming willingly dependent upon MPEG-LA's good will is a foot-in-self-shoot situation.
Most of those users will be people that are unable to legally run that codec unless they buy into expensive licensed software and operating systems. I run a Linux household. Linux does what we need and want, and I'm perfectly legal without giving Microsoft or Apple Computer a penny. I don't like the fact that a good chunk of video content on the Internet might eventually become unavailable to me because of this. That cannot be construed to be good for anyone (except, of course, the MPEG-LA.)
(replying to self) Oops, mixed the names up. libvpx is the Google codec. ffvpx is the alternative VP8 decoder, and I think it's still more performant than the libvpx decoder. A new encoder based on the x264 framework is in the works. Other hardware and software implementations are also being developed. You can't pretend it's just one opaque codec owned by Google. WebM might not formally be a standard yet, but it's an open and well specified format.
So I understand. That's pretty much in character for Google anyway: they're incredibly opaque in terms of their internal operations, but remarkably open when it comes to their choice of Internet standards and public APIs. I doubt they'd have bothered with VP8 or anything like it if there'd been an existing standard that was adequate for their needs (both technically and legally.)
They are riding the gravy train with the patent pool and they aren't going to jeopardize that in litigation against Google.
Yes. It would be a damned shame if Google got some of those oh-so-valuable patents invalidated. I'd really like them to go after IBM: the Nazgûl would take them down a notch or two.
Personally, I say bring it. If indeed WebM and/or Ogg Theora are in violation then they need to fix the violation or get out of the video business. The whole premise that this is wrong is based on the notion that patents on software is wrong which is idiotic IMHO.
You'll need to explain that in more detail. Most people that I know who are in the software industry (myself included) take a diametrically-opposed view of software patents.
Furthermore, even if (and it's a big 'if') software patents have any real benefit to anyone but anti-competitive corporate sociopaths such as Apple Computer, the way the law and the United States Patent Office are handling them is an abomination. Inventions are an expression of an idea: patenting the expression is one thing... patenting the mere idea is another, and that is very wrong.
"China is increasingly seen as the source of international hacking attacks"
We should ask ourselves who also is top of the State Departments shitlist, is there a correlation?
Also ask yourself what address ranges most of the port scans in your firewall logs are coming from. You might get a better idea of what's going than trying to infer cause and effect.
I get some from India too, now and then (and just about everywhere else for that matter) but China does top the list. Whether all those hits are actually from Chinese crackers, or from people in other countries masking their origins I couldn't say.
I had one character from an Indian IP spend about four days trying to get into my FTP server: hundreds of attempts at guessing the password to the username "admin". It looked like he was typing everything manually, and he was very creative. Not his fault that I don't actually have an "admin" account, or even anything particularly valuable there anyway. Maybe he thought I work for the NSA or something.
Inasmuch as it shows that there are ethical people in China. We need reminding that good people can be found in China - not all of them are evil, which is the impression you get from news.
A smart man once said that the Russians love their children too.
So do gangsters. What's your point?
How you behave towards people that are not part of your immediate circle is more telling.
Fair = Judge and Jury that has been bought and paid for by the **AA.
I doubt that actually happens. No need for it, since both the judges and juries in the bulk of these cases have proven to be completely ignorant of the technological issues involved, and tend to place more weight on the testimony of the RIAA's (definitely bought-and-paid for) "expert witnesses" (and I use that term very loosely.) I've been following this since the RIAA first began this nonsense, and I cannot see any reason (other than gross negligence on the part of defense lawyers) that these cases were allowed to proceed.
However I can see something like ThePirateBay be prosecuted since, and let's all be honest, they knew damn well the site was used to share copyrighted media (though personally I have my own issues with copyright)
Yes, but in their country what they were doing wasn't originally illegal. About all you can argue then is the ethics of what they were doing, but that's not really germane to this argument. More to the point, the law (and associated ethics) should ideally serve the people, not a few large corporations.
I don't know how are IPv6 numbers to be distributed, if there will be some way to link the IP to a single person. But as they connect directly to servers with their own IP, they will leave a record of the individual computer, instead of the IP of the router.
That's the fallacy of the media industry's legal arguments, that an address can in any way identify an individual infringer. What astounds me is how that argument has worked so many times in court. I mean, my God, let the defense get some of the people in this thread up on the stand as expert witnesses: it wouldn't be hard to completely demolish these fools. Yet that rarely seems to be happening, which leads me to believe that a lot of the RIAA's victims are not receiving an adequate defense.
The absolute best that you can do is identify a computer system that might (or might not) not have been connected to the Internet at a specific time, and that only if that machine was assigned an address by the user's ISP. Even then, in the same way that a postal address cannot guarantee that a given communication is received by the desired person, neither can an IP address identify a specific person. It gets worse than that: in my house, for example, I have several computers and portable devices that are allocated local non-routable addresses by my DHCP server. On top of that, those addresses change now and then. I also allow certain visitors to use their mobile equipment on my connection. Good luck trying to figure out who did what on the Internet in that environment.
Another big problem with the use of IP address to detect infringement is that they frequently depend upon ISP log entries. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want my future dependent upon the real-time clock chip in some server box somewhere, running logging software that was never intended to be used for legal proceedings.
The RIAA is full of crap, has always been full of crap, and they need to be taken down. Hard. There's been talk of applying the RICO act in some of their cases: I hope that happens and some of their lawyers get put away for twenty. The problem is, the Justice Department is just full of ex-RIAA attorneys, so I don't see that happening any time soon.
They can still sue you, and just claim you must have destroyed the evidence. But if they do find something, you're royally fucked.
It's like talking to cops. You can't talk yourself out of being arrested. You can talk yourself into deeper trouble. Take advantage of your rights, because no one else is going to have your interests at heart as much as you do.
What it comes down to is this: don't offer any information to the cops beyond the bare minimum. Miranda says it all: it will be used against you. Don't say anything until you've spoken to your lawyer, because you may compromise his ability to help you if you shoot off your mouth. Nothing ruins a defense attorney's day faster than finding out you already incriminated yourself.
The IP / law enforcement fiasco that America is suffering right now reminds me of a scene from the old Max Headroom show. Edison Carter gets framed for credit fraud, and when his boss finds out he says, "That's worse than murder!" In that future society, costing a corporation money was considered more heinous than an act of murder. That series was prophetic in a number of ways, and we are seeing increasingly heavy penalties applied to less and less intrinsically serious "crimes". That's being done at the behest of some very large corporations, organizations that are exerting criminal influence upon our elected officials. Fine, so citizen X has a couple hundred illegally-copied MP3s on his computer. Should that be enough to have his life turned upside down, bankrupted, and left with nothing? People commit actual violent crimes in our society and suffer far less punishment. It's just ridiculous.
How about we turn the (apparently blind) eye of law enforcement upon certain corrupt Congresspeople and their media industry paymasters? The ones that shifted the balance of power in copyright so far in favor of the holder that it no longer serves its Constitutional mandate? Yeah, those. This is a serious matter: people's lives are being destroyed over trivia, in an act of domestic terrorism that cannot be ignored. Neither can we ignore the overall cost to society of extreme copyright: it hurts us all, most especially those who are capable of the act of creation.
What makes this even more tragic is that the deterrent effect that the RIAA has been trying to generate with their lawsuit mill has been anything but effective. In fact, it isn't working. Another poster quoted Wil Wheaton: Wil almost got it right when he said the entertainment industry needs to make it easy for people to legitimately acquire content. That's entirely true, but they also need to make it reasonably priced. Twenty bucks for a plastic disc that has a dozen songs, most of which are filler? Please. Even iTunes' buck or so a track is excessive. So, in the age of a global network maybe you don't get to charge whatever the hell you want for your product: maybe you need to focus more on being a good value instead. That's a tough sell to the music industry, in particular, since for most of their existence they've been accustomed to offering the exact opposite.
the only IP lawyer I know very much believes in IP. And I know him well enough that he'd be honest.
I'm sure he does a good job for his clients. On the other hand, just because he believes in that which pays his salary absolutely does not mean that what he does for a living is good for society as a whole. I mean, that's like asking a surgeon if you need surgery. Don't be surprised if the answer is biased in his favor.
I know IP lawyers too, and the honest ones admit that it's largely parasitic in nature, that overarching IP law is causing significant damage to both culture and industry, suppressing technological advancement, and transferring wealth at unprecedented levels to the pockets of large IP holders and their attorneys.
and if scum sucking lawyers like in TFA start using that excuse to make fishing expeditions frankly we're all fucked.
There have already been Constitutionality questions raised about many aspects of the RIAA lawsuit mill. In fact, we're already beyond the merely ridiculous, in both the outrageous claims these lawyers make, the "evidence" they present, what courts have been accepting from overpaid Armani suits.
The thing is, there's some precedent for these kinds of fishing expeditions, and it doesn't even take a schlock outfit like the RIAA to start one. The first of which I was aware was the infamous Steve Jackson Games case, where the Secret Service took the word of a phone company (a phone company!) that wrongdoing had been committed, and caused quite a bit of damage. When it got to court they lost, and received a reprimand from the judge for their sloppy investigative practices.
Law enforcement always tends to take the side of large corporate legal departments over individuals: the tragedy there is that the corporation can afford to pay for its mistakes, while the average citizen cannot and can easily be bankrupted.
and I love not having to install a virus scanner on my phone
What? If you were talking about Windows vs. Mac I might believe you. But closed-source operating systems are not inherently more secure than open source OSes... usually quite the opposite. Your feeling of security is probably misplaced.
Why do you guys get so worked up over what someone else uses or prefers? Why are you telling him to fuck around with his phone in order to like it like you like it? People are different, they have different preferences.
*choke* *gasp* *pant*
Did you actually read my posts? Seriously? I'm sorry, but your comment is absolutely hilarious given that I was not telling him to make his phone like mine, I was telling him that he could, with very little effort, make it closer to what he would like, to make it better suit his own preferences. Android allows you to do that, Apple does not. There's a dozen or so completely different user interfaces available for Android, so odds are he can find one that will better suit him. Some are designed to be iPhone-like, even. Heck, you can roll your own home app replacement if you can hack Android development, In any event, I was simply trying to help out a person who already owns an Android device make better use of his equipment. Didn't think that was too much to ask... sorry if that offended your sensibilities.
Okay, I have to go wipe off the coffee that just ran out of my nose. Thank you for that.
Head for your local Starbucks and mod down the unbelievers! Let's those mod points fly Apple Warriors!
No kidding: look at my original comment.
To all you fanboys with mod points, be careful: I wasn't insulting your favorite company or its products, I was taking you to task for your choices. If that's enough to make you mod someone down, you have pretty damn thin skins.
Or what if Apple bought them and made it the only network for iPhones and iPads?
Apple hasn't got the back-end infrastructure and services to make that worth the effort. Besides, they're making billions doing just what they're doing now.
Google, on the other hand... Google has a hand that hasn't been played yet. If AT&T doesn't succeed in eliminating T-Mobile as competition and taking over their spectrum, Google may become a player here. Time will tell.
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Flash does make use of hardware decoding. Steve Jobs is just a control freak.
Yes. On one of our Ubuntu machines is regularly used for viewing Youtube videos. I discovered the "hardware acceleration" option because there's a bug in it where the display goes monochrome when in full-screen. Go back to windowed, and it works fine. If I turn off hardware support, full screen shows color. Weird.
Who's implementation of this new standard will define what is considered the standard when people try to conform to the standard? That is to say...who's standard will become the most standard standard?!
Usually, most people just settle on the standard one.
There have been a bunch of posts so far, and none of them were 1, 2, 3, ???, 4 Profitt?! For shame Slashdot, for shaaaaaaame.
1. Develop efficient video codec.
2. Patent the Hell out it.
3. Release to the world under "reasonable" license.
4. Sue anyone who doesn't comply.
5. Wait a few years.
6. Change license agreement.
7. Sue anyone who doesn't comply.
8. Profit!!!!
There's no obligation on the authors of MPEG4 algorithms to provide those for free just so that someone can sell a computer with the price capped at $N.
There was no obligation on the part of our elected officials to make software patentable either. But they did, and they've screwed over a number of industries in the process. Groups like the MPEG-LA are largely parasitic in that the only service they provide is to collect royalties on algorithms whose creators, for the most part, disagree with the entire premise of software patents. And why is that? Well, I'll tell you: it's because those of us in the business recognize that software patents are intrinsically antithetical to our ability to improve upon what is, to advance the state of the art.
Actually, that applies to patents in general, however the presumption was that without such protection, nobody would invest the capital required to turn an otherwise-worthless idea into a shipping product. Now, maybe that's true in the world of physical invention, where millions (or billions) of dollars may be required to build the necessary physical plant. That's just not true in comparatively fast-paced world of software, where patents are a hindrance, and serve no purpose but to slow the pace of progress. Look around you: the software business has been booming for decades without any patent protection whatsoever: what possible need for them do we have now, if not for the desire of certain parties to control the dissemination of competitive technologies? Furthermore, when did competition become a dirty word?
I don't know about Europe and other places. I'm an American, and what I do know is that our Constitution is very clear on one point: patents and copyrights are required to promote the useful arts and sciences. That is their purpose. Period. Nothing in there about milking the world for billions of dollars in royalties by providing legal monopolies on mere ideas. Nothing about squelching innovation. And every time I hear about a promising new technology squeezed out of existence by some patent troll (or existing organization who just can't stand the thought of competition) or millions spent on needless, lawyer-enriching, court-clogging litigation I want to throw up. So would the Founders, if they were still with us.
Keep this in mind: the kinds of people that want software patents are the same kinds of people who have been doing their level best to suppress any form of innovation or technological advancement that they feel threatens their established businesses. Not the kind of people you want in control of progress, at any level.
Wtf is modding this asshole insightful?
I don't think he's an asshole, I just think he hasn't thought this all the way through.
At less than 100,000 units/year, the H.264 royalty rate is zero. From 100,000 to 5,000,000 units/year the rate is $0.20/unit (twenty cents) and above 5,000,000 units/year, the rate is $0.10 (ten cents), until the maximum cap amount of $6.5 million/year is paid.
Source: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf
For now. As has been said elsewhere, in a few years those terms are going to change, and nobody knows what they're going to be yet. If I were planning on being in business then, I'd seriously consider not using H.264. It's a minefield just waiting to be touched off.
If you use H.264, you (potentially, at least) will need to pay its owners a licensing fee.
In my mind, it's somewhat irrelevant as to whether that's regulated by copyright law, patent law, trademark law, contract law, or the laws of thermodynamics; the upshot is the same. If you are reliant on the owner's permission in order to use a piece of software, then that isn't "open".
Well, yes and no. In the U.S., you really can't go after users very easily, especially if they bought the product in good faith, having every reason to believe any patented software content was properly licensed. What's would be the point? You won't get much money, and all you'll succeed in doing is make people believe that you're a bunch of complete assholes and that any product containing your patented algorithms is too dangerous to use. You can, however, go after the manufacturer of the product if you believe they're infringing on your patent.
If MPEG-LA starts going after people who bought H.264-based products who had no idea the product vendor didn't license the codec, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot. Assuming, that is, they're capable of taking the longer view.
The only holds true until 2015. At that stage the terms will change. At this stage we don't know what the new license terms will be, but I'm sure that if H.264 is completely dominating the web then the terms won't be a good, they won't need to be. The current licensing terms are designed with one thing in mind, getting H.264 into a dominant position that can the be taken advantage of at a later date.
Yes. If there was ever a Slashdot story that needs to be marked "it's a trap!" this is it.
H.264 requires people to pay a licensing fee to use.
Not true. For non-commercial streaming use it's royalty-free and if you ship an encoder and/or decoder you only pay royalties for any units over 100,000 that you ship. Outside of a Google it is pretty much free for anyone. And even for someone like Google the royalties cap out at like $6 million dollars a year which is a pittance to someone pulling in 10s of billions of dollars in revenue.
You do realize that that is not cast in stone? That they can change those terms at any time? That the only reason they're so "reasonable" (and I use the term loosely) is to encourage adoption and keep any potential competition at bay? Remember, the first hit is free.
... he might not have one." Well, here's a case where we already know they don't, so becoming willingly dependent upon MPEG-LA's good will is a foot-in-self-shoot situation.
These people aren't stupid (sleazy and highly unethical, yes, but not stupid) and as soon as they believe that their's been a sufficient uptake of their codec they'll start hitting manufacturers and developers up for more money. That's how the game is played, and they'll try to find that sweet spot where they maximize profit at the expense of some number of users. Heinlein said it best, "Never depend upon another man's better nature
Most of those users will be people that are unable to legally run that codec unless they buy into expensive licensed software and operating systems. I run a Linux household. Linux does what we need and want, and I'm perfectly legal without giving Microsoft or Apple Computer a penny. I don't like the fact that a good chunk of video content on the Internet might eventually become unavailable to me because of this. That cannot be construed to be good for anyone (except, of course, the MPEG-LA.)
(replying to self) Oops, mixed the names up. libvpx is the Google codec. ffvpx is the alternative VP8 decoder, and I think it's still more performant than the libvpx decoder. A new encoder based on the x264 framework is in the works. Other hardware and software implementations are also being developed. You can't pretend it's just one opaque codec owned by Google. WebM might not formally be a standard yet, but it's an open and well specified format.
So I understand. That's pretty much in character for Google anyway: they're incredibly opaque in terms of their internal operations, but remarkably open when it comes to their choice of Internet standards and public APIs. I doubt they'd have bothered with VP8 or anything like it if there'd been an existing standard that was adequate for their needs (both technically and legally.)
They are riding the gravy train with the patent pool and they aren't going to jeopardize that in litigation against Google.
Yes. It would be a damned shame if Google got some of those oh-so-valuable patents invalidated. I'd really like them to go after IBM: the Nazgûl would take them down a notch or two.
Personally, I say bring it. If indeed WebM and/or Ogg Theora are in violation then they need to fix the violation or get out of the video business. The whole premise that this is wrong is based on the notion that patents on software is wrong which is idiotic IMHO.
You'll need to explain that in more detail. Most people that I know who are in the software industry (myself included) take a diametrically-opposed view of software patents.
... patenting the mere idea is another, and that is very wrong.
Furthermore, even if (and it's a big 'if') software patents have any real benefit to anyone but anti-competitive corporate sociopaths such as Apple Computer, the way the law and the United States Patent Office are handling them is an abomination. Inventions are an expression of an idea: patenting the expression is one thing
This is like pedophiles pledging to restrict their attentions only to children who want it.
Good analogy. Try again using a car.
"China is increasingly seen as the source of international hacking attacks" We should ask ourselves who also is top of the State Departments shitlist, is there a correlation?
Also ask yourself what address ranges most of the port scans in your firewall logs are coming from. You might get a better idea of what's going than trying to infer cause and effect.
I get some from India too, now and then (and just about everywhere else for that matter) but China does top the list. Whether all those hits are actually from Chinese crackers, or from people in other countries masking their origins I couldn't say.
I had one character from an Indian IP spend about four days trying to get into my FTP server: hundreds of attempts at guessing the password to the username "admin". It looked like he was typing everything manually, and he was very creative. Not his fault that I don't actually have an "admin" account, or even anything particularly valuable there anyway. Maybe he thought I work for the NSA or something.
Oh well.
Inasmuch as it shows that there are ethical people in China. We need reminding that good people can be found in China - not all of them are evil, which is the impression you get from news.
A smart man once said that the Russians love their children too.
So do gangsters. What's your point?
How you behave towards people that are not part of your immediate circle is more telling.
Fair = Judge and Jury that has been bought and paid for by the **AA.
I doubt that actually happens. No need for it, since both the judges and juries in the bulk of these cases have proven to be completely ignorant of the technological issues involved, and tend to place more weight on the testimony of the RIAA's (definitely bought-and-paid for) "expert witnesses" (and I use that term very loosely.) I've been following this since the RIAA first began this nonsense, and I cannot see any reason (other than gross negligence on the part of defense lawyers) that these cases were allowed to proceed.
However I can see something like ThePirateBay be prosecuted since, and let's all be honest, they knew damn well the site was used to share copyrighted media (though personally I have my own issues with copyright)
Yes, but in their country what they were doing wasn't originally illegal. About all you can argue then is the ethics of what they were doing, but that's not really germane to this argument. More to the point, the law (and associated ethics) should ideally serve the people, not a few large corporations.
I don't know how are IPv6 numbers to be distributed, if there will be some way to link the IP to a single person. But as they connect directly to servers with their own IP, they will leave a record of the individual computer, instead of the IP of the router.
That's the fallacy of the media industry's legal arguments, that an address can in any way identify an individual infringer. What astounds me is how that argument has worked so many times in court. I mean, my God, let the defense get some of the people in this thread up on the stand as expert witnesses: it wouldn't be hard to completely demolish these fools. Yet that rarely seems to be happening, which leads me to believe that a lot of the RIAA's victims are not receiving an adequate defense.
The absolute best that you can do is identify a computer system that might (or might not) not have been connected to the Internet at a specific time, and that only if that machine was assigned an address by the user's ISP. Even then, in the same way that a postal address cannot guarantee that a given communication is received by the desired person, neither can an IP address identify a specific person. It gets worse than that: in my house, for example, I have several computers and portable devices that are allocated local non-routable addresses by my DHCP server. On top of that, those addresses change now and then. I also allow certain visitors to use their mobile equipment on my connection. Good luck trying to figure out who did what on the Internet in that environment.
Another big problem with the use of IP address to detect infringement is that they frequently depend upon ISP log entries. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want my future dependent upon the real-time clock chip in some server box somewhere, running logging software that was never intended to be used for legal proceedings.
The RIAA is full of crap, has always been full of crap, and they need to be taken down. Hard. There's been talk of applying the RICO act in some of their cases: I hope that happens and some of their lawyers get put away for twenty. The problem is, the Justice Department is just full of ex-RIAA attorneys, so I don't see that happening any time soon.
They can still sue you, and just claim you must have destroyed the evidence. But if they do find something, you're royally fucked.
It's like talking to cops. You can't talk yourself out of being arrested. You can talk yourself into deeper trouble. Take advantage of your rights, because no one else is going to have your interests at heart as much as you do.
What it comes down to is this: don't offer any information to the cops beyond the bare minimum. Miranda says it all: it will be used against you. Don't say anything until you've spoken to your lawyer, because you may compromise his ability to help you if you shoot off your mouth. Nothing ruins a defense attorney's day faster than finding out you already incriminated yourself.
The IP / law enforcement fiasco that America is suffering right now reminds me of a scene from the old Max Headroom show. Edison Carter gets framed for credit fraud, and when his boss finds out he says, "That's worse than murder!" In that future society, costing a corporation money was considered more heinous than an act of murder. That series was prophetic in a number of ways, and we are seeing increasingly heavy penalties applied to less and less intrinsically serious "crimes". That's being done at the behest of some very large corporations, organizations that are exerting criminal influence upon our elected officials. Fine, so citizen X has a couple hundred illegally-copied MP3s on his computer. Should that be enough to have his life turned upside down, bankrupted, and left with nothing? People commit actual violent crimes in our society and suffer far less punishment. It's just ridiculous.
How about we turn the (apparently blind) eye of law enforcement upon certain corrupt Congresspeople and their media industry paymasters? The ones that shifted the balance of power in copyright so far in favor of the holder that it no longer serves its Constitutional mandate? Yeah, those. This is a serious matter: people's lives are being destroyed over trivia, in an act of domestic terrorism that cannot be ignored. Neither can we ignore the overall cost to society of extreme copyright: it hurts us all, most especially those who are capable of the act of creation.
What makes this even more tragic is that the deterrent effect that the RIAA has been trying to generate with their lawsuit mill has been anything but effective. In fact, it isn't working. Another poster quoted Wil Wheaton: Wil almost got it right when he said the entertainment industry needs to make it easy for people to legitimately acquire content. That's entirely true, but they also need to make it reasonably priced. Twenty bucks for a plastic disc that has a dozen songs, most of which are filler? Please. Even iTunes' buck or so a track is excessive. So, in the age of a global network maybe you don't get to charge whatever the hell you want for your product: maybe you need to focus more on being a good value instead. That's a tough sell to the music industry, in particular, since for most of their existence they've been accustomed to offering the exact opposite.
That's too bad. Times change.
the only IP lawyer I know very much believes in IP. And I know him well enough that he'd be honest.
I'm sure he does a good job for his clients. On the other hand, just because he believes in that which pays his salary absolutely does not mean that what he does for a living is good for society as a whole. I mean, that's like asking a surgeon if you need surgery. Don't be surprised if the answer is biased in his favor.
I know IP lawyers too, and the honest ones admit that it's largely parasitic in nature, that overarching IP law is causing significant damage to both culture and industry, suppressing technological advancement, and transferring wealth at unprecedented levels to the pockets of large IP holders and their attorneys.
They still send in their hourly bills though.
and if scum sucking lawyers like in TFA start using that excuse to make fishing expeditions frankly we're all fucked.
There have already been Constitutionality questions raised about many aspects of the RIAA lawsuit mill. In fact, we're already beyond the merely ridiculous, in both the outrageous claims these lawyers make, the "evidence" they present, what courts have been accepting from overpaid Armani suits.
The thing is, there's some precedent for these kinds of fishing expeditions, and it doesn't even take a schlock outfit like the RIAA to start one. The first of which I was aware was the infamous Steve Jackson Games case, where the Secret Service took the word of a phone company (a phone company!) that wrongdoing had been committed, and caused quite a bit of damage. When it got to court they lost, and received a reprimand from the judge for their sloppy investigative practices.
Law enforcement always tends to take the side of large corporate legal departments over individuals: the tragedy there is that the corporation can afford to pay for its mistakes, while the average citizen cannot and can easily be bankrupted.
and I love not having to install a virus scanner on my phone
What? If you were talking about Windows vs. Mac I might believe you. But closed-source operating systems are not inherently more secure than open source OSes ... usually quite the opposite. Your feeling of security is probably misplaced.
Why do you guys get so worked up over what someone else uses or prefers? Why are you telling him to fuck around with his phone in order to like it like you like it? People are different, they have different preferences.
*choke* *gasp* *pant*
... sorry if that offended your sensibilities.
Did you actually read my posts? Seriously? I'm sorry, but your comment is absolutely hilarious given that I was not telling him to make his phone like mine, I was telling him that he could, with very little effort, make it closer to what he would like, to make it better suit his own preferences. Android allows you to do that, Apple does not. There's a dozen or so completely different user interfaces available for Android, so odds are he can find one that will better suit him. Some are designed to be iPhone-like, even. Heck, you can roll your own home app replacement if you can hack Android development, In any event, I was simply trying to help out a person who already owns an Android device make better use of his equipment. Didn't think that was too much to ask
Okay, I have to go wipe off the coffee that just ran out of my nose. Thank you for that.
Head for your local Starbucks and mod down the unbelievers! Let's those mod points fly Apple Warriors!
No kidding: look at my original comment.
To all you fanboys with mod points, be careful: I wasn't insulting your favorite company or its products, I was taking you to task for your choices. If that's enough to make you mod someone down, you have pretty damn thin skins.
Or what if Apple bought them and made it the only network for iPhones and iPads?
Apple hasn't got the back-end infrastructure and services to make that worth the effort. Besides, they're making billions doing just what they're doing now.
... Google has a hand that hasn't been played yet. If AT&T doesn't succeed in eliminating T-Mobile as competition and taking over their spectrum, Google may become a player here. Time will tell.
Google, on the other hand