My guess would be Orrin Hatch, or maybe Berman or Coble. And given the way these assholes have been treating American manufacturing and industry, when the dust settles the media industry may end up being our only industry. Although, when you get right down to it all the big media conglomerates aren't U.S.-based organizations anyway. They're all foreign-owned, so for these Congressmen to make that claim is more than a little disingenuous.
This isn't about Congress and it's not limited to the US.
From exactly where do you think countries like France are getting their equally bad ideas? The United States has been pushing our skewed ideas of Intellectual Property on most of the civilized world, and that is Congress' fault.
Not at all. The little white lie is lubricant which makes civilization possible. Most of us, in fact, don't even want to know the absolute truth about the people we know, love, and with whom we work.
As TFA points out, the DMCA -- as unlikely as this seems -- is actually on the side of the angels in this one.
Not at all. Congress knew what it was doing when it put that provision in there, and knew that it could be used as a method of suppressing, well, pretty much anything. And that kind of abuse is exactly what has been happening. They effectively gave Joe Blow the power to remove anything he doesn't like, and when Joe Blow is a big boy with the power to issue thousands of takedowns regardless of merit... well. The results have been entirely predictable.
A court order should have been required in order to take anything down.
in all the cases I've seen I've yet to see one where the case was about downloading.
From a technical perspective, that's because proving distribution is much more easily done than proving receipt. From the legal standpoint, though, if they could easily show that someone downloaded a copyrighted work, what would be the significance of it?
But surely we're talking about p2p technologies whereby downloading comes hand-in-hand with uploading?
You can't make such a sweeping statement. If you're using something like the Gnutella protocol, you don't have to upload at all. You can simply leech. Consequently you are performing no distribution at all.
Protocols like Bit Torrent, on the other hand, generally don't permit leeching... you have to upload at least some percentage of what you download. With a typical asymmetric home broadband connection, if you terminate the torrent as soon as you have a complete copy of the file odds are you'll only have shared a fraction of the total.
I don't know how the law treats partial distribution. If I make copies of the first chapter of a book and hand them out, am I in the same amount of legal hot water as copying and distributing the entire work?
That would only work if there were an infallible (or near infallible) method of determining when copyright infringement occurred. There isn't, and the only way to make that happen would require technological infringement upon so many other rights that it would be unacceptable. Furthermore, who would you like to have in charge of issuing said "tickets"? The RIAA? Ha.
Even cops, who have the luxury of actually seeing a citizen commit a crime, often get it wrong. Worse yet, what you're proposing would be wide open to abuse and would, in effect, become a tax, not a penalty. Presumably there would be no court time involved, so we would end up with an automated MediaSentry-like system spitting out demands for cash. No thanks.
Copyright law is supposed to be a balance of the needs of society and those of content creators. Keep in mind that society is supposed to determine that balance, not megacorps who have acquired ownership (through often dubious means) to works they did not even create. Regardless, they've resorted to bribery of high government officials to maintain their hegemony. That eliminates any claims to moral high ground to which they might otherwise have been entitled.
Keep firmly in mind that this is not about We the People vs. The Artists. This is about We the People vs. a corrupt government colluding with an equally corrupt entertainment industry that does not, and has not ever, represented the creative members of our culture.
What do you mean, "increasingly siding"? Most of this fuss is because of the DMCA, and that was only the latest in a long line of copyright "adjustments" that Congress made in favor if big copyright owners. Congress has been siding with rightsholders for a long time.
The land mass required for those solar cells is immense.
So what? North America has thousands upon thousands of square miles of unarable, unlivable land that could be put to good use.
Forgetting that for moment, everybody thinks that because solar is "free" that it's better than a conventional power system. The real issue is that solar is diffuse. The investment in physical plant required to replace a single 2400 MW nuclear facility would be immense. The cost of energy storage for nighttime and off-season reserves makes solar impractical as a primary power source. Supplemental at best.
If anything, we need more dense power sources, not comparatively weak ones like Earth-based solar. Mr. Fusion, where are you?
Ultimately, this comes down to whether you believe that email is more analogous to a sealed letter sent through the Post Office, or an open postcard. Tampering with the former is a felony, whereas unauthorized reading of the latter is, well... expected, I guess. I've always treated my email more as the electronic equivalent of a postcard.
I'm fairly unusual in taking that position though. People have an unreasoning expectation that a computer will keep their communications from prying eyes, which it most certainly can. That is not, however, the default in most cases.
They are fucking worthless spineless jackasses. What is the goddamn point? Really, what's the fucking point anymore?
I'd say they're more on the order of criminals and traitors to their own country. Certainly I'm feeling betrayed. But you're right... that doesn't make them any less worthless.
She's not a whore. She was gang-raped. Repeatedly. By Congress.
Okay, I finally gotta answer my own sig... All Americans suck because we haven't the cojones (or even the awareness, in most cases) to do anything much about this. It'll blow over, some more citizens will get fucked by yet another stupidass law, and nobody will care as long as they aren't personally affected by it.
Sheep, indeed. It is starting to become more obvious though, this slide into post-WW II East German-style fascism. My girlfriend, for example, is from West Africa, and she regularly sends money home to her family via Western Union. The last time she tried a few days ago, she was told that she was "sending too much money" and asked a series of invasive questions about her family ties, and told that she'd have to wait ten days before sending any more funds. In fact, she won't be allowed to send money unless she goes through this process of being asked for highly personal information ("who is this xxx person that you're sent money to last month. What relation are they to you? Who else do you send money to? Why do you send it? Don't they have jobs?" etc. etc. and wait ten days. Really appalling, and it's not just her: a number of people she works with who use that company have been screwed the same way. Not just for sending money to Africa either: all over the place. This is not funny: her family depend upon her for basics. Apparently, our government no longer cares who it hurts.
I did some research, and apparently this is all because of some Treasury Department "guidelines" and yet another secret watchlist, this time for anyone with remotely Arab-sounding names. My girlfriend is African... she's not a Muslim and neither her first or last name are remotely Arabic. Yet, some part of her name is apparently on this list (even partial matches to names on the list result in blocked transfers), probably created by a bunch of middle-aged white Christian males seeing terrorists behind every shrub. It's bat-shit-fucking-insane.
I sent Western Union a letter explaining that we would no longer be using their service and why. I don't expect a reply, but my girlfriend was truly incensed by this (she's been using Western Union for a couple of decades now) and it made her feel a little better.
I would have expected an organization that lives solely on trust, the trust of its customer base, to have been more willing to tell the Feds to fuck off. But I'm willing to bet that there's some government contracts involved at some level, and WU would get punished for standing up to them. Isn't that what happened to QWest for NOT going along with the illegal wiretapping?
Sure, POTS runs off batteries at the CO, but nothing says you can't run your cable/DSL modem and VoIP box from a battery. That's what I do. I've coasted through a number of power failures with no loss of service (I have Comcast as my ISP and AT&T's Callvantage for my VoIP service.) Plus which, the AT&T service allows you to assign a backup cellphone number, to which all incoming calls are routed in case they can't get through to your VoIP unit.
It also only works in dry environments, since the water has to evaporate at a good rate. My mother lives out west (105 degrees in the shade yesterday, almost zero humidity) and their house has an evaporative cooler. They don't have a conventional air conditioner... they don't need it.
Yeah, really. I mean, my peak usage last year was 54 gb one month... usually I'm around 25-30. I'm on Comcast and since they won't tell me anything about how much I can download without being stigmatized as a "bandwidth hog" I try to keep it under fifty. If I had 900 Gb down / 30 Gb up I'd say it was a good deal.
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My guess would be Orrin Hatch, or maybe Berman or Coble. And given the way these assholes have been treating American manufacturing and industry, when the dust settles the media industry may end up being our only industry. Although, when you get right down to it all the big media conglomerates aren't U.S.-based organizations anyway. They're all foreign-owned, so for these Congressmen to make that claim is more than a little disingenuous.
This isn't about Congress and it's not limited to the US.
From exactly where do you think countries like France are getting their equally bad ideas? The United States has been pushing our skewed ideas of Intellectual Property on most of the civilized world, and that is Congress' fault.
Not at all. The little white lie is lubricant which makes civilization possible. Most of us, in fact, don't even want to know the absolute truth about the people we know, love, and with whom we work.
As TFA points out, the DMCA -- as unlikely as this seems -- is actually on the side of the angels in this one.
... well. The results have been entirely predictable.
Not at all. Congress knew what it was doing when it put that provision in there, and knew that it could be used as a method of suppressing, well, pretty much anything. And that kind of abuse is exactly what has been happening. They effectively gave Joe Blow the power to remove anything he doesn't like, and when Joe Blow is a big boy with the power to issue thousands of takedowns regardless of merit
A court order should have been required in order to take anything down.
My presumption in coming up with that sig was that any +n insightful that resulted wouldn't be completely and irrevocably ignorant.
in all the cases I've seen I've yet to see one where the case was about downloading.
From a technical perspective, that's because proving distribution is much more easily done than proving receipt. From the legal standpoint, though, if they could easily show that someone downloaded a copyrighted work, what would be the significance of it?
But surely we're talking about p2p technologies whereby downloading comes hand-in-hand with uploading?
... you have to upload at least some percentage of what you download. With a typical asymmetric home broadband connection, if you terminate the torrent as soon as you have a complete copy of the file odds are you'll only have shared a fraction of the total.
You can't make such a sweeping statement. If you're using something like the Gnutella protocol, you don't have to upload at all. You can simply leech. Consequently you are performing no distribution at all.
Protocols like Bit Torrent, on the other hand, generally don't permit leeching
I don't know how the law treats partial distribution. If I make copies of the first chapter of a book and hand them out, am I in the same amount of legal hot water as copying and distributing the entire work?
That would only work if there were an infallible (or near infallible) method of determining when copyright infringement occurred. There isn't, and the only way to make that happen would require technological infringement upon so many other rights that it would be unacceptable. Furthermore, who would you like to have in charge of issuing said "tickets"? The RIAA? Ha.
Even cops, who have the luxury of actually seeing a citizen commit a crime, often get it wrong. Worse yet, what you're proposing would be wide open to abuse and would, in effect, become a tax, not a penalty. Presumably there would be no court time involved, so we would end up with an automated MediaSentry-like system spitting out demands for cash. No thanks.
Copyright law is supposed to be a balance of the needs of society and those of content creators. Keep in mind that society is supposed to determine that balance, not megacorps who have acquired ownership (through often dubious means) to works they did not even create. Regardless, they've resorted to bribery of high government officials to maintain their hegemony. That eliminates any claims to moral high ground to which they might otherwise have been entitled.
Keep firmly in mind that this is not about We the People vs. The Artists. This is about We the People vs. a corrupt government colluding with an equally corrupt entertainment industry that does not, and has not ever, represented the creative members of our culture.
What do you mean, "increasingly siding"? Most of this fuss is because of the DMCA, and that was only the latest in a long line of copyright "adjustments" that Congress made in favor if big copyright owners. Congress has been siding with rightsholders for a long time.
The land mass required for those solar cells is immense.
So what? North America has thousands upon thousands of square miles of unarable, unlivable land that could be put to good use.
Forgetting that for moment, everybody thinks that because solar is "free" that it's better than a conventional power system. The real issue is that solar is diffuse. The investment in physical plant required to replace a single 2400 MW nuclear facility would be immense. The cost of energy storage for nighttime and off-season reserves makes solar impractical as a primary power source. Supplemental at best.
If anything, we need more dense power sources, not comparatively weak ones like Earth-based solar. Mr. Fusion, where are you?
I think a lot of people around the either world want us to a. be better then we are or b. appear worse than we are.
I propose the term "bloodsucking leech" which is equally pejorative and definitely more representative.
Ultimately, this comes down to whether you believe that email is more analogous to a sealed letter sent through the Post Office, or an open postcard. Tampering with the former is a felony, whereas unauthorized reading of the latter is, well ... expected, I guess. I've always treated my email more as the electronic equivalent of a postcard.
I'm fairly unusual in taking that position though. People have an unreasoning expectation that a computer will keep their communications from prying eyes, which it most certainly can. That is not, however, the default in most cases.
... without costing the consumer any more
... I think it will cost the consumer more. A lot more.
Oh
At least here in the U.S. I'm sure our Asian friends will enjoy their new hundred gigabit connections.
They are fucking worthless spineless jackasses. What is the goddamn point? Really, what's the fucking point anymore?
... that doesn't make them any less worthless.
I'd say they're more on the order of criminals and traitors to their own country. Certainly I'm feeling betrayed. But you're right
Lady Liberty was nice until she became a whore.
... All Americans suck because we haven't the cojones (or even the awareness, in most cases) to do anything much about this. It'll blow over, some more citizens will get fucked by yet another stupidass law, and nobody will care as long as they aren't personally affected by it.
... she's not a Muslim and neither her first or last name are remotely Arabic. Yet, some part of her name is apparently on this list (even partial matches to names on the list result in blocked transfers), probably created by a bunch of middle-aged white Christian males seeing terrorists behind every shrub. It's bat-shit-fucking-insane.
She's not a whore. She was gang-raped. Repeatedly. By Congress.
Okay, I finally gotta answer my own sig
Sheep, indeed. It is starting to become more obvious though, this slide into post-WW II East German-style fascism. My girlfriend, for example, is from West Africa, and she regularly sends money home to her family via Western Union. The last time she tried a few days ago, she was told that she was "sending too much money" and asked a series of invasive questions about her family ties, and told that she'd have to wait ten days before sending any more funds. In fact, she won't be allowed to send money unless she goes through this process of being asked for highly personal information ("who is this xxx person that you're sent money to last month. What relation are they to you? Who else do you send money to? Why do you send it? Don't they have jobs?" etc. etc. and wait ten days. Really appalling, and it's not just her: a number of people she works with who use that company have been screwed the same way. Not just for sending money to Africa either: all over the place. This is not funny: her family depend upon her for basics. Apparently, our government no longer cares who it hurts.
I did some research, and apparently this is all because of some Treasury Department "guidelines" and yet another secret watchlist, this time for anyone with remotely Arab-sounding names. My girlfriend is African
I sent Western Union a letter explaining that we would no longer be using their service and why. I don't expect a reply, but my girlfriend was truly incensed by this (she's been using Western Union for a couple of decades now) and it made her feel a little better.
I would have expected an organization that lives solely on trust, the trust of its customer base, to have been more willing to tell the Feds to fuck off. But I'm willing to bet that there's some government contracts involved at some level, and WU would get punished for standing up to them. Isn't that what happened to QWest for NOT going along with the illegal wiretapping?
Pretty much anything by Andre (Alice Mary) Norton.
Most residential Internet access is still dialup, and most of the customers are fine with that.
Not anymore
Sure, POTS runs off batteries at the CO, but nothing says you can't run your cable/DSL modem and VoIP box from a battery. That's what I do. I've coasted through a number of power failures with no loss of service (I have Comcast as my ISP and AT&T's Callvantage for my VoIP service.) Plus which, the AT&T service allows you to assign a backup cellphone number, to which all incoming calls are routed in case they can't get through to your VoIP unit.
Well, no question it's a killer filesystem.
It also only works in dry environments, since the water has to evaporate at a good rate. My mother lives out west (105 degrees in the shade yesterday, almost zero humidity) and their house has an evaporative cooler. They don't have a conventional air conditioner ... they don't need it.
Actually, it's a technical term for situations when you Can't Access Porno.
I stand corrected.
Yeah, really. I mean, my peak usage last year was 54 gb one month ... usually I'm around 25-30. I'm on Comcast and since they won't tell me anything about how much I can download without being stigmatized as a "bandwidth hog" I try to keep it under fifty. If I had 900 Gb down / 30 Gb up I'd say it was a good deal.
Yes, the degree of intellectual honesty that judge displayed is heartening.