When Microsoft talks about "security" they're talking about securing the property&rights of digital rights owners (BSA, MPAA, etc) from the untrustworthy users who licensed the software and DVD
Which may help explain why there are no native Linux clients for Netflix and Amazon Video On Demand. No iTunes. No Kindle Reader for the Linux PC.
No Hulu or Pandora without Flash or Adobe AIR.
Why Windows 7 sells to 300 million users and takes a 23% market share.
Even better, how about a lightweight browser that doesn't require plugins to view videos?
Developments that affect the web and the browser move along many tracks.
The Flash based game can be as elegant as "Machinarium" and it can be here today and not something we have to wait for until 2014.
Media codecs in particular are a moving target.
HEVC, aka H.265, should be ready in about two to three years. HEVC is not exclusively or evenprimarilyy a web or smartphone codec - it has a lot to offer to a streaming media service like Netflix or an HDTV manufacturer like Mitsubishi,Samsung or Panasonic.
Which means that if the HEVC "app" becomes a marketable bullet point in theatrical production and home video sales, then licensing the codec across the board makes perfect sense, because the incremental cost is effectively zero.
It makes even more sense if you own a significant share of the technology.
Different orders can be considered when they become self aware. Until then, its a tool damnit. My hammer doesn't try to protect me, nor would I want it to.
But many tools do try to protect you.
Which is why industrial and craft workers in the 21st Century tend to keep all their fingers and toes.
As the user/owner of a non-self aware device, it should obey me, even if my intention is to use it to destroy itself, or others.
Those in harm's way are free to disagree.
It may be because I was raised in an environment where the phone, the car, the truck, the electricity and the tractor had to work - and work for everyone, all the time, an environment where death was never very far away.
But something permanently soured me on the notion that the phone is a toy and the network my personal playpen.
What the XBox 360 is doing for Microsoft
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
·
· Score: 2
What exactly is the X360 doing for Microsoft?
2nd Quarter, Entertainment and Devices
Revenues: $3.7 Billion Dollars. Up $1 Billion Y/Y. Operating Profit: $637 Million Dollars. 8 million Kinect sensors sold in sixty days. Console sales up 21% XBox Live membership up 30%.
Kinect has the potential to take the UI of "Minority Report" and the re-incarnated "Hawaii 5-0" mainstream among home users.
It can plausibly described as a breakthrough tech in robotics. Nothing this capable has ever been so cheap and its developed is being fueled and funded by the XBox 360.
The "next generation" console may not be a console - but something more like a peripheral for your OnLive gaming "app" that plugs into your Internt- enabled HDTV.
Pretty soon, we'll be seeing stuff like "most violent blogs of all time" and "webcomics are destroying our youth". Just as soon as the mainstream media catches up with this decade.
And in the decade to come, the schlock blogs and webcomics that caused all the fuss will be buried and forgotten.
You only remember the good stuff.
Think of the films released in 1939, all released until the strict production codes of the mid to late thirties. 1939 in film.
Films which have never left the air since their first release for television. You might have been fortunate enough to see some of them shown in a restored Art Deco era theater.
Now try to name 10 pre-code sound films.
"I'm No Angel"
"When I'm good I'm very good. But when I'm bad I'm better."
"Buelah, Peel me a grape."
The problem is that there is only one Mae West. One EC comics --- and you need more than that to push back against the censors.
There are about 950 licensees, a list which reads like an Asian Fortune 750 in tech.
Re:A Microsoft Nokia bad-analogy award
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And even now, teeny-tiny Nintendo is still outselling it 2 to 1
Nintendo isn't teeny-tiny.
It's a company with 4,000 employess and $16 billion a year in revenues.
The $150 Kinect controller had sales of 8 million units over the holidays. That is not bad for an accessory that sells for about $50-$100 less than a Wii bundle.
Google is pushing an open codec while Microsoft is pushing a closed one. It's to Google's benefit to have an open web, and to Microsoft's to close it off as much as possible. Not much has changed.
Google is pushing a codec that is all but invisible except as a YouTube transcode.
Google is supporting Flash because Flash supports content protection and hardware accleration.
Bullet points which actually matter in a Netflix market for video.
Microsoft is looking at video applications in the corporate market.
In home entertainment.
It is looking at Netflix's 20% share of peak hour Internet traffic in the states.
It is looking at what services like OnLive may mean to the next generation of console gaming.
It looking at the next generation video codecs like HEVC.
Yes, they could do that, but that would guarantee continuation of the current situation, where Linux users privately infringe patents, and everybody else running a business that needs to use H.264 has to pay royalties
There are no royalties on internal use of H.264 video.
There are no royalties on H.264 Internet video free to the viewer. No royalties on sales of video shorts less than twelve minutes.
The lesser of 2% of sales or 2 cents a title on feature length videos sold by title. Think about that the next time you go shopping for Pixar on Blu-Ray at Walmart.
Subscription services with less than 100,000 subscribers pay nothing.
Broadcasters and cable services serving more than 100,000 households and less than 500,000 have the option of a one-time charge per encoder of $2,500 or $2,500/yr.
MPEG LA is major league ball.
They do not want to hear from you until you are raking in the green.
The whole point of HTML5 was to standardize web video..
How do you propose to do that?
HEVC/H.265 will be final in about two to three years.
HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320x240) up to 1080p and Ultra HDTV (7680x4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut and dynamic range.
Not to mention:
Half the bit rate of H.264 or WebM for the same subjective video quality.
Good news for Netflix.
The problem with "open standards" are many:
The global standards commitee moves slowly. It is riddled with national, ideological, commercial and technical rivalries.
MP3 began as a digital audio codec for motion pictures.
There are many tracks along which such defacto standards may evolve and gain traction - and not much of anything in the way to slow them down.
The chances are good next season's Vizio will have thirty or so content protected client "apps" for the Internet-enabled HDTV.
Most of them available as well as a one-click install for OSX, the iOS and Windows PC or mobile device.
MPEG LA on the other hand actively does not want any codec better than say Microsoft Video 1...available on royalty free terms. They would lose out on a substantial amount of royalties if devices like phones or low end Digital Cameras used such a format rather than one of their formats.
I was interested when the article mentioned "overbearing intellectual property laws" and "reform", but the article is less about "reform" and more about gutting Intellectual Property.
The non-profit Library of America publishes handome hardcover editions of the best in American writing.
Most of these books are the product of the modern copyright era. The authors, men and wormen, white and black, who found it possible to make a living as full time professional writers.
This is something quite new:
In 1842 there was still no international copyright law, a condition that was stunting American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writerrs ----but only if their countries reciprocated.
This American publishers adamantly refused to do. Instead, they competed in bribing English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. The sheets were rushed by boat over to the United States, where the jolly pirates churned out cheap editions in a matter of hours.
But it was not only British authors they were robbing. Few publishers were willing to pay American authors for books when they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Herman Melville was hurt by the lack of an international copyright, and such eminent American authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne had to pay publishers an advance, rather than vice versa, in order to have their books produced. The early giants of American literature had to scramble for work at customhouses and in other government jobs, and Edgar Allan Poe, according to his biographer Sidney P. Moss, had to raise advance money for one collection of poems by soliciting 75 cents a head from his fellow West Point classmates, to whom he then dedicated the book.
"Here's something wonderfully innovative that OtherOS on a Playstation made possible before Sony shut it down: The USâ(TM) Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently unveiled a supercomputer made out of 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles" (I'm pretty sure the US Air Force can work out something with Sony)
The HPC cluster doesn't need a firmware upgrade.
What it needs is a subsidy from Sony's retail customers.
2,000 loss-leader consoles taken out of retail distribution channels. 2,000 consoles which won't return a dime in video game and Blu-Ray disk sales, PSN, PlayStation Home and other revenue streams.
There are two strategies MS can play:
Old school IE: Make own standards to try to vendor lock-in people with the MS platform
Standards compliant IE: Try to closely adhere to standards and basically render like all the other browsers
There is a third option:
"Bullet point" compliance. But support for whatever "de-facto" standards evolve as well.
The geek's "open standards" are a highly politicized commitee product and typically finalized about the time the Last Trumpet blows.
That is why Google tried for a pre-emptive strike with WebM.
But it is also why Google has been remarkably soft-spoken about Flash and Microsoft's H.264 extension for Chrome -
and quieter still about HEVC/H.265 - which is only two or three years out.
The target for HEVC is scaleable HD video and theater sound at something like half the bit rate of H.264. That is good news for Netflix. But also for the enterprise which wants to stream HD security video and other content on the corporate intra-web.
The integrated "app" looks like the future for the home user.
You won't launch Netflix, Pandora, Rhapsody, or OnLive gaming through your media PC or your browser, you will launch them through the Universal Remote that serves your Internet enabled HDTV and home theater sound system.
The supporting hardware and codecs used will those which make most sense to the content provider like Disney and the brand name hardware manufacturers - industrial giants like Mitshubishi and Samsung.
It disheartens me to see people so excited over what OnLive promises, since in the end it's only "benefit" over properly designed games is to the publishers, via perfect and unbreakable DRM.
Vizio will be adding an OnLive "app" to its Internet enabled HDTV suite.
It is easy to imagine the OnLive client becoming as deeply embedded into the "home theater" market as Netflix and Pandora.
But DRM isn't the only thing here that will ruffle the geek's feathers.
The "app" bypasses the "standards based" browser as a platform - and it is the raw performance of the video codec and other essential technologies which matter - and not their freedom or openess.
The movie studios are notorious for taking from the commons without giving back. Walt Disney Pictures especially is known for adapting films, often right after they go out of copyright (such as Pinocchio and The Jungle Book), and then closing the barn door behind it by not only successfully lobbying for successive legislative extensions of the term of copyright in all works published during the existence of the company but also acting like it owns the original work and harassing smaller studios that make their own adaptations
For "The Jungle Book," there are only two versions that are likely to survive, Korda's vivid live-action Technicolor epic from 1942 and Disney's delightful and inventive animated musical from 1967.
For "Pinocchio," IMDB returns about 60 results going back to 1911. Pinocchio
It's telling, I think, that the Disney version is the only one the geek remembers or gives a damn about.
The book is not the movie.
Originally, Pinocchio was to be depicted as a Charlie McCarthy-esque wise guy, equally as rambunctious and sarcastic as the puppet in the original novel. He looked exactly like a real wooden puppet with, among other things, a long pointed nose, a peaked cap, and bare wooden hands. But Walt found that no one could really sympathize with such a character and so the designer Milt Kahl had to redesign the puppet as much as possible. Eventually, they revised the puppet to make him look more like a real boy, with, among other things, a button nose, a child's Tyrolean hat, and standard cartoon character 4-fingered (or 3 and a thumb) hands with Mickey Mouse-type gloves on them. Milt quoted " I don't think of him as a puppet, but as a little boy". The only parts of him that still looked more or less like a puppet were his arms and legs. In this film, he is still led astray by deceiving characters, but gradually learns bit by bit, and even exhibits his good heart when he is offered to go to Pleasure Island by saying he needs to go home two times, before Honest John and Gideon pick him up themselves and carry him away.
Additionally, it was at this stage that the character of the cricket was expanded. Jiminy Cricket became central to the story
What the geek wants from Disney is a set of signature - marketable - Lego blocks.
Pre-built stories and scripts. Character designs and animation. Background art and visual effects. Music, song and vocal performance.
Disney owns a trademark on "Pinocchio" for dolls, so good luck selling toys based on your own film adaptation of Collodi's novel.
Google Shopping returns about 1,300 hits for Pinocchio dolls, 3,000 for Pinocchio puppets. As popular as the trademarked Disney designs may be, they are not the only game in town.
Question: What does a service provider have to do in order to qualify for safe harbor protection?
Answer: In addition to informing its customers of its policies (discussed above), a service provider must follow the proper notice and takedown procedures (discussed above) and also meet several other requirements in order to qualify for exemption under the safe harbor provisions....
Finally, the service provider must not have knowledge that the material or activity is infringing or of the fact that the infringing material exists on its network. [512(c)(1)(A)], [512(d)(1)(A)].
If it does discover such material before being contacted by the copyright owners, it is instructed to remove, or disable access to, the material itself. [512(c)(1)(A)(iii)], [512(d)(1)(C)].
The service provider must not gain any financial benefit that is attributable to the infringing material. [512(c)(1)(B)], [512(d)(2)].
Question: What is third-party liability, also known as "secondary liability"?
Answer: The concept of third party liability refers, as the name implies, to situations in which responsibility for harm can be placed on a party in addition to the one that actually caused the injury. The most common example comes from tort law: a customer in a grocery store drops a bottle of wine and another customer slips on the puddle and injures himself; he may bring an action for negligence against the customer who dropped the bottle and against the owner of the grocery store. Under the common law doctrine of third-party liability, a plaintiff must show not only that an injury actually occurred, but also (in most cases) that some sort of connection existed between the third party and the person who actually caused the injury.
As such the concept of third-party liability is often divided into two different types: contributory infringement and vicarious liability.
Typically, contributory infringement exists when the third party either assists in the commission of the act which causes the injury, or simply induces the primary party to do so commit the act which caused the injury.
Vicarious liability often requires the third party to have exerted some form of control over the primary party's actions.
In copyright law, vicarious liability may be established if the third party had the "right and ability to control" the infringer's activities, and if the third party received some financial benefit from the acts of infringement.
If you know you are hosting infringing content and do nothing about it you are dead.
You can't let things slide until someone rats you out.
If you are aiding the infringer in any way - or rewarding him for posting infringing content - you are dead. If you penalize the legitimate content provider you are dead.
If you are making money on the infringement you are dead.
Copyright has evolved from a concept conceived to protect the temporary financial incentive of inventors as encouragement of advancing humanities to a god-give right for corporations to hold indefinitely the exclusive right to monetary gains regarding anything they find a way to copyright or patent.
When I look at the career of Brad Bird what I see is ambition, accomplishment and creativity:
Up The Simpsons Ratatouille The Incredibles The Iron Giant
Tell me what the geek brings to the table when all he has to offer is the 10,000th clone of Tetris. Tell me why I should care when he is cut off at the knees.
And you wonder why more and more companies are fleeing to China where (U.S. - remember we created the entire world "patent system" to cover our asses after we blatantly stole everything we could in the 1700s and 1800s) patents simply don't exist.
LG is a South Korean industrial mega-corp - a cartel. Sony is a Japanese industrial mega-corp - a cartel. The cartel does not welcome newcomers to its markets. Not an unfamiliar pattern in Asia. Tell me what makes China different.
Not tremendously relevant to the discussion, but what happened to the old borg-gates icon? I don't like the new one.
ST:TNG was cancelled in 1994. The world of Windows 3.1.
The borg icon, like the stained glass window, is a barrier to clear-headed thinking.
Windows 7 is a capable and - in many ways - a far more open platform than the Mac or the iOS.
While the Linux distribution - as a "community oriented" client OS - seems to be fading to black. The "killer apps" in FOSS are multi-platform and however open Android and Chrome may be in theory, they are both unmistakably Google branded.
Slashdot Mirror
When Microsoft talks about "security" they're talking about securing the property&rights of digital rights owners (BSA, MPAA, etc) from the untrustworthy users who licensed the software and DVD
Which may help explain why there are no native Linux clients for Netflix and Amazon Video On Demand. No iTunes. No Kindle Reader for the Linux PC.
No Hulu or Pandora without Flash or Adobe AIR.
Why Windows 7 sells to 300 million users and takes a 23% market share.
Even better, how about a lightweight browser that doesn't require plugins to view videos?
Developments that affect the web and the browser move along many tracks.
The Flash based game can be as elegant as "Machinarium" and it can be here today and not something we have to wait for until 2014.
Media codecs in particular are a moving target.
HEVC, aka H.265, should be ready in about two to three years. HEVC is not exclusively or evenprimarilyy a web or smartphone codec - it has a lot to offer to a streaming media service like Netflix or an HDTV manufacturer like Mitsubishi,Samsung or Panasonic.
Which means that if the HEVC "app" becomes a marketable bullet point in theatrical production and home video sales, then licensing the codec across the board makes perfect sense, because the incremental cost is effectively zero.
It makes even more sense if you own a significant share of the technology.
Different orders can be considered when they become self aware. Until then, its a tool damnit. My hammer doesn't try to protect me, nor would I want it to.
But many tools do try to protect you.
Which is why industrial and craft workers in the 21st Century tend to keep all their fingers and toes.
As the user/owner of a non-self aware device, it should obey me, even if my intention is to use it to destroy itself, or others.
Those in harm's way are free to disagree.
It may be because I was raised in an environment where the phone, the car, the truck, the electricity and the tractor had to work - and work for everyone, all the time, an environment where death was never very far away.
But something permanently soured me on the notion that the phone is a toy and the network my personal playpen.
What exactly is the X360 doing for Microsoft?
2nd Quarter, Entertainment and Devices
Revenues: $3.7 Billion Dollars. Up $1 Billion Y/Y.
Operating Profit: $637 Million Dollars.
8 million Kinect sensors sold in sixty days.
Console sales up 21%
XBox Live membership up 30%.
Microsoft's second quarter Kinects
Kinect has the potential to take the UI of "Minority Report" and the re-incarnated "Hawaii 5-0" mainstream among home users.
It can plausibly described as a breakthrough tech in robotics. Nothing this capable has ever been so cheap and its developed is being fueled and funded by the XBox 360.
The "next generation" console may not be a console - but something more like a peripheral for your OnLive gaming "app" that plugs into your Internt- enabled HDTV.
Pretty soon, we'll be seeing stuff like "most violent blogs of all time" and "webcomics are destroying our youth". Just as soon as the mainstream media catches up with this decade.
And in the decade to come, the schlock blogs and webcomics that caused all the fuss will be buried and forgotten.
You only remember the good stuff.
Think of the films released in 1939, all released until the strict production codes of the mid to late thirties. 1939 in film.
Films which have never left the air since their first release for television. You might have been fortunate enough to see some of them shown in a restored Art Deco era theater.
Now try to name 10 pre-code sound films.
"I'm No Angel"
"When I'm good I'm very good. But when I'm bad I'm better."
"Buelah, Peel me a grape."
The problem is that there is only one Mae West. One EC comics --- and you need more than that to push back against the censors.
Carmageddon, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM.
The violence in Carmageddon is on the level of a Roadrunner and Coyote cartoon. Doom is an amusement park's dark house ride.
Personally, I'd rather people with issues do their beating, raping and killing in video games rather than in real life.
Well, that's the question, isn't it?
Will their "issues" be resolved in the game or be carried over into real life?
Very informative. Do you have a source?
SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
AVC/H.264 Licensors
There are about thirty licensors, mostly industrial global giants in manufacturing like Mitsubishi, which began R&D in television 85 years ago.
AVC/H.264 Licensees
There are about 950 licensees, a list which reads like an Asian Fortune 750 in tech.
And even now, teeny-tiny Nintendo is still outselling it 2 to 1
Nintendo isn't teeny-tiny.
It's a company with 4,000 employess and $16 billion a year in revenues.
The $150 Kinect controller had sales of 8 million units over the holidays. That is not bad for an accessory that sells for about $50-$100 less than a Wii bundle.
What does being 'legit' have anything to do with things? We are talking the RIAA here.
We are talking about digital performance rights - and it means that that SoundExchange may have some money for you:
The split:
45% to the lead performer (s)
5% to other performers
50% to the recording's copyright owner.
FAQ: What is a featured artist?
45,619 performers registered
5,881 copyright owners
$537 million dollars distributed.
The 50/50 split between the performing artists and the copyright owner is some light years removed from the Slashdot stereotype.
The performer and the copyright owner can, of course, be one and the same.
"Going legit" makes the IPO possible.
"Going legit" puts the Pandora "app" on every Internet enabled audio and video device sold in the states.
That immeadiately sets you apart from all but a bare handful of the 20,000 or so audio streams accessible through your PC's Internet radio tuner.
Google is pushing an open codec while Microsoft is pushing a closed one. It's to Google's benefit to have an open web, and to Microsoft's to close it off as much as possible. Not much has changed.
Google is pushing a codec that is all but invisible except as a YouTube transcode.
Google is supporting Flash because Flash supports content protection and hardware accleration.
Bullet points which actually matter in a Netflix market for video.
Microsoft is looking at video applications in the corporate market.
In home entertainment.
It is looking at Netflix's 20% share of peak hour Internet traffic in the states.
It is looking at what services like OnLive may mean to the next generation of console gaming.
It looking at the next generation video codecs like HEVC.
The machine was rather difficult to operate.
The last of Adams' books was published in 1992.
In 2011 your Livio NPR or Pandora desktop Internet radio can tune 20,000 stations - but has a small screen and a bare five presets.
Yes, they could do that, but that would guarantee continuation of the current situation, where Linux users privately infringe patents, and everybody else running a business that needs to use H.264 has to pay royalties
There are no royalties on internal use of H.264 video.
There are no royalties on H.264 Internet video free to the viewer. No royalties on sales of video shorts less than twelve minutes.
The lesser of 2% of sales or 2 cents a title on feature length videos sold by title. Think about that the next time you go shopping for Pixar on Blu-Ray at Walmart.
Subscription services with less than 100,000 subscribers pay nothing.
Broadcasters and cable services serving more than 100,000 households and less than 500,000 have the option of a one-time charge per encoder of $2,500 or $2,500/yr.
MPEG LA is major league ball.
They do not want to hear from you until you are raking in the green.
The whole point of HTML5 was to standardize web video..
How do you propose to do that?
HEVC/H.265 will be final in about two to three years.
HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320x240) up to 1080p and Ultra HDTV (7680x4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut and dynamic range.
Not to mention:
Half the bit rate of H.264 or WebM for the same subjective video quality.
Good news for Netflix.
The problem with "open standards" are many:
The global standards commitee moves slowly. It is riddled with national, ideological, commercial and technical rivalries.
MP3 began as a digital audio codec for motion pictures.
There are many tracks along which such defacto standards may evolve and gain traction - and not much of anything in the way to slow them down.
The chances are good next season's Vizio will have thirty or so content protected client "apps" for the Internet-enabled HDTV.
Most of them available as well as a one-click install for OSX, the iOS and Windows PC or mobile device.
But not for Linux.
MPEG LA on the other hand actively does not want any codec better than say Microsoft Video 1...available on royalty free terms. They would lose out on a substantial amount of royalties if devices like phones or low end Digital Cameras used such a format rather than one of their formats.
The twenty-nine H.264 licensors include:
Apple. Bosch. Cisco. Daewoo. Dolby. Ericsson. Fraunhofer. Fujitsu. HP. Hitachi. JVC. LG. Microsoft. Mitsubishi. NTT. Panasonic. Philips. Samsung. Sharp. Siemens. Sony. Toshiba.
The global manufacturing and distribution horsepower on that list would be difficult to match.
The 950 or so H.264 licensees rounds out a list of the global 1,000 in tech --- and the Asian Fortune 500 in tech.
These guys are all big enough to be paying the fixed-price H.264 Enterprise Cap. They all need to license H.264 for other product lines.
Studio production. Broadcast, cable and sattelite distribution. CCTV.
Freeview in the UK.
The "Internet Enabled" HDTV in the states.
The Blu-Ray player, the video game console....
The geek sees the Internet, or part of it, anyway.
[Not the part where the content-protected Disney and PIxar "app" is baked into every HDTV on the planet.]
He sees the smartphone. But that is all he sees.
Google shopping returns about 77,000 hits for "H.264." 24,000 hits simply for H.264 surveillance cameras.
I was interested when the article mentioned "overbearing intellectual property laws" and "reform", but the article is less about "reform" and more about gutting Intellectual Property.
The non-profit Library of America publishes handome hardcover editions of the best in American writing.
Most of these books are the product of the modern copyright era. The authors, men and wormen, white and black, who found it possible to make a living as full time professional writers.
This is something quite new:
In 1842 there was still no international copyright law, a condition that was stunting American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writerrs ----but only if their countries reciprocated.
This American publishers adamantly refused to do. Instead, they competed in bribing English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. The sheets were rushed by boat over to the United States, where the jolly pirates churned out cheap editions in a matter of hours.
But it was not only British authors they were robbing. Few publishers were willing to pay American authors for books when they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Herman Melville was hurt by the lack of an international copyright, and such eminent American authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne had to pay publishers an advance, rather than vice versa, in order to have their books produced. The early giants of American literature had to scramble for work at customhouses and in other government jobs, and Edgar Allan Poe, according to his biographer Sidney P. Moss, had to raise advance money for one collection of poems by soliciting 75 cents a head from his fellow West Point classmates, to whom he then dedicated the book.
Copy Wrong
"Here's something wonderfully innovative that OtherOS on a Playstation made possible before Sony shut it down: The USâ(TM) Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently unveiled a supercomputer made out of 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles" (I'm pretty sure the US Air Force can work out something with Sony)
The HPC cluster doesn't need a firmware upgrade.
What it needs is a subsidy from Sony's retail customers.
2,000 loss-leader consoles taken out of retail distribution channels. 2,000 consoles which won't return a dime in video game and Blu-Ray disk sales, PSN, PlayStation Home and other revenue streams.
There are two strategies MS can play: Old school IE: Make own standards to try to vendor lock-in people with the MS platform Standards compliant IE: Try to closely adhere to standards and basically render like all the other browsers
There is a third option:
"Bullet point" compliance. But support for whatever "de-facto" standards evolve as well.
The geek's "open standards" are a highly politicized commitee product and typically finalized about the time the Last Trumpet blows.
That is why Google tried for a pre-emptive strike with WebM.
But it is also why Google has been remarkably soft-spoken about Flash and Microsoft's H.264 extension for Chrome -
and quieter still about HEVC/H.265 - which is only two or three years out.
The target for HEVC is scaleable HD video and theater sound at something like half the bit rate of H.264. That is good news for Netflix. But also for the enterprise which wants to stream HD security video and other content on the corporate intra-web.
The integrated "app" looks like the future for the home user.
You won't launch Netflix, Pandora, Rhapsody, or OnLive gaming through your media PC or your browser, you will launch them through the Universal Remote that serves your Internet enabled HDTV and home theater sound system.
The supporting hardware and codecs used will those which make most sense to the content provider like Disney and the brand name hardware manufacturers - industrial giants like Mitshubishi and Samsung.
It disheartens me to see people so excited over what OnLive promises, since in the end it's only "benefit" over properly designed games is to the publishers, via perfect and unbreakable DRM.
Vizio will be adding an OnLive "app" to its Internet enabled HDTV suite.
It is easy to imagine the OnLive client becoming as deeply embedded into the "home theater" market as Netflix and Pandora.
But DRM isn't the only thing here that will ruffle the geek's feathers.
The "app" bypasses the "standards based" browser as a platform - and it is the raw performance of the video codec and other essential technologies which matter - and not their freedom or openess.
The movie studios are notorious for taking from the commons without giving back. Walt Disney Pictures especially is known for adapting films, often right after they go out of copyright (such as Pinocchio and The Jungle Book), and then closing the barn door behind it by not only successfully lobbying for successive legislative extensions of the term of copyright in all works published during the existence of the company but also acting like it owns the original work and harassing smaller studios that make their own adaptations
For "The Jungle Book," there are only two versions that are likely to survive, Korda's vivid live-action Technicolor epic from 1942 and Disney's delightful and inventive animated musical from 1967.
For "Pinocchio," IMDB returns about 60 results going back to 1911. Pinocchio
It's telling, I think, that the Disney version is the only one the geek remembers or gives a damn about.
The book is not the movie.
Originally, Pinocchio was to be depicted as a Charlie McCarthy-esque wise guy, equally as rambunctious and sarcastic as the puppet in the original novel. He looked exactly like a real wooden puppet with, among other things, a long pointed nose, a peaked cap, and bare wooden hands. But Walt found that no one could really sympathize with such a character and so the designer Milt Kahl had to redesign the puppet as much as possible. Eventually, they revised the puppet to make him look more like a real boy, with, among other things, a button nose, a child's Tyrolean hat, and standard cartoon character 4-fingered (or 3 and a thumb) hands with Mickey Mouse-type gloves on them. Milt quoted " I don't think of him as a puppet, but as a little boy". The only parts of him that still looked more or less like a puppet were his arms and legs. In this film, he is still led astray by deceiving characters, but gradually learns bit by bit, and even exhibits his good heart when he is offered to go to Pleasure Island by saying he needs to go home two times, before Honest John and Gideon pick him up themselves and carry him away.
Additionally, it was at this stage that the character of the cricket was expanded. Jiminy Cricket became central to the story
Pinocchio
What the geek wants from Disney is a set of signature - marketable - Lego blocks.
Pre-built stories and scripts. Character designs and animation. Background art and visual effects. Music, song and vocal performance.
Disney owns a trademark on "Pinocchio" for dolls, so good luck selling toys based on your own film adaptation of Collodi's novel.
Google Shopping returns about 1,300 hits for Pinocchio dolls, 3,000 for Pinocchio puppets. As popular as the trademarked Disney designs may be, they are not the only game in town.
Without registering, I could download Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat from hotfile.com
Now tell me what files you can download after your "membership fee " clears through your bank card or PayPal.
Question: What does a service provider have to do in order to qualify for safe harbor protection?
Answer: In addition to informing its customers of its policies (discussed above), a service provider must follow the proper notice and takedown procedures (discussed above) and also meet several other requirements in order to qualify for exemption under the safe harbor provisions. ...
Finally, the service provider must not have knowledge that the material or activity is infringing or of the fact that the infringing material exists on its network. [512(c)(1)(A)], [512(d)(1)(A)].
If it does discover such material before being contacted by the copyright owners, it is instructed to remove, or disable access to, the material itself. [512(c)(1)(A)(iii)], [512(d)(1)(C)].
The service provider must not gain any financial benefit that is attributable to the infringing material. [512(c)(1)(B)], [512(d)(2)].
Question: What is third-party liability, also known as "secondary liability"?
Answer: The concept of third party liability refers, as the name implies, to situations in which responsibility for harm can be placed on a party in addition to the one that actually caused the injury. The most common example comes from tort law: a customer in a grocery store drops a bottle of wine and another customer slips on the puddle and injures himself; he may bring an action for negligence against the customer who dropped the bottle and against the owner of the grocery store. Under the common law doctrine of third-party liability, a plaintiff must show not only that an injury actually occurred, but also (in most cases) that some sort of connection existed between the third party and the person who actually caused the injury.
As such the concept of third-party liability is often divided into two different types: contributory infringement and vicarious liability.
Typically, contributory infringement exists when the third party either assists in the commission of the act which causes the injury, or simply induces the primary party to do so commit the act which caused the injury.
Vicarious liability often requires the third party to have exerted some form of control over the primary party's actions.
In copyright law, vicarious liability may be established if the third party had the "right and ability to control" the infringer's activities, and if the third party received some financial benefit from the acts of infringement.
Frequently Asked Questions (And Answers) about DMCA Safe Harbor
If you know you are hosting infringing content and do nothing about it you are dead.
You can't let things slide until someone rats you out.
If you are aiding the infringer in any way - or rewarding him for posting infringing content - you are dead. If you penalize the legitimate content provider you are dead.
If you are making money on the infringement you are dead.
Copyright has evolved from a concept conceived to protect the temporary financial incentive of inventors as encouragement of advancing humanities to a god-give right for corporations to hold indefinitely the exclusive right to monetary gains regarding anything they find a way to copyright or patent.
When I look at the career of Brad Bird what I see is ambition, accomplishment and creativity:
Up
The Simpsons
Ratatouille
The Incredibles
The Iron Giant
Tell me what the geek brings to the table when all he has to offer is the 10,000th clone of Tetris. Tell me why I should care when he is cut off at the knees.
And you wonder why more and more companies are fleeing to China where (U.S. - remember we created the entire world "patent system" to cover our asses after we blatantly stole everything we could in the 1700s and 1800s) patents simply don't exist.
LG is a South Korean industrial mega-corp - a cartel. Sony is a Japanese industrial mega-corp - a cartel. The cartel does not welcome newcomers to its markets. Not an unfamiliar pattern in Asia. Tell me what makes China different.
Because of this, nothing he does will get MS out of its slump.
If this is a "slump," I'll take more of the same.
In the second quarter:
Revenues: $19.95 billion.
Business software profits up 35%
Server and tools profits up 22%
Entertainment group profits up 86%.
Kinect is a winner.
Windows revenues down 30%. But with Win 7 approaching a 25% share of the global market for a client OS, that is not the end of the world. No, the iPad Is Not Killing Microsoft's Business
Not tremendously relevant to the discussion, but what happened to the old borg-gates icon? I don't like the new one.
ST:TNG was cancelled in 1994. The world of Windows 3.1.
The borg icon, like the stained glass window, is a barrier to clear-headed thinking.
Windows 7 is a capable and - in many ways - a far more open platform than the Mac or the iOS.
While the Linux distribution - as a "community oriented" client OS - seems to be fading to black. The "killer apps" in FOSS are multi-platform and however open Android and Chrome may be in theory, they are both unmistakably Google branded.