All of the above lack either quality or user control. Some have quirks like needing to break encryption and being careful about your hardware locking up due to changing region codes
I can see a long list of what will add time to your prison time.
Use a: phone: 10 points gun: 30 points
That is how the system works now.
It is the way it has always worked.
The old-time judge and jury may not have been keeping a scorecard.
But they were always free to distinguish between the amateur and the pro. To consider evidence of premeditation. The reality - or the potential - for a violent escalation of the crime.
Tech extends the criminal's reach. It makes his job easier. Criminal prosecution for wire fraud is as old as the telegraph.
However, it is patent encumbered. Therefore, you would expect a rational competitor to do the following: Copy h.264 as closely as possible in all unpatented respects, or respects where patents can be worked around. Nobody is giving you any extra credit for re-inventing the wheel
The problem here is that H.264 licensors are industrial giants like Mitsubishi Electric.
Philips. Samsung. LG. Fujitsu. Hitachi, NTT...
It's easy to forget that H.264 is a broadcast standard:
NTT Electronics has produced the world's first High 4:2:2 Profile HDTV/SDTV encoder/decoder. With outstanding flexibility through its support of both the MPEG-2 and AVC/H.264 video compression formats, the HV9100 series fits any situation in this period of transition between any formats. HV9100 series
The geek sees the web and the cell phone. But this battle is playing out on a much larger stage.
So how about everyone everywhere assume everything is either copyrighted or patented or trademarked and just submit to "them" who ever "them" may be.
Your Linux distribution has a trademarked logo. The software is licensed. It just might include some patented technologies.
H.264 support in Ubuntu's OEM distribution, for example.
Most of the software in Ubuntu is covered under the GNU General Public License. This *is* a license agreement. Unlike most license agreements, however, it does not restrict your usage of the software, but it does restrict the terms under which you can re-distribute it. Likewise, while most of the software is covered by the GPL, *all* the software on the system is covered by some kind of license agreement be it MIT, X, Artistic, Apache, BSD, GPL, LGPL, etc, etc. You will find the license agreements for the various pieces of software installed on your system in/usr/share/doc/*/copyright. Ubuntu license agreement
The "Creative Commons" license is - by default - a license protected by the law of copyright:
CC's Unported licenses were created using standard terms from the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and other international treaties related to copyright and intellectual property.FFAQ
MicroCenter.com stocks all of 13 items in Linux software, including, somewhat improbably, Slackware Linux.
there are 1.5 million kids out there using OLPC laptops. for example, every elementary school kid in uruguay has an XO. i'm having trouble seeing the failure in this.
Deployment of the XO beyond Central and South America is almost non-existent. Rwanda is the only real success story.
If you want a keyboard, plug it in the USB port or connect it with Bluetooth, tablet willing...
The XO is meant for kids. In punishing third-world environments. It is supposed to be self-contained. It is supposed to be cheap. Standardized. No extraneous parts to be lost or broken. Energy efficient.
but like so many muggles out there, Negroponte believed the crap Microsoft was telling him.
OLPC was sold as a take-it-or-leave-it package deal to the third world education minister.
The hardware. The software. Linux, FOSS and SUGAR.
The constructivist philosophy of education - the classroom without a teacher, to simplify things drastically.
The education minister wasn't buying into any of this.
The push for Windows and Office came from him.
Deployment of the XO beyond Central and South America was and remains insignificant, with the sole exception of Rwanda - and that came a year after dual-booting XP and MS Office became an option.
Total confirmed deployment is about 1.3 million units. One Laptop Per Child [Summary of laptop orders}
look at Adobe's new feature in Photoshop whereby you can remove stuff from pictures just by painting a boundary around it, and it fills in the background. Now, I'll agree that you shouldn't be able to just copy the code directly from Photoshop and use it in your own application wholesale. But as the laws are set up now, you can't even implement your own version of this feature, and that's absolutely horrible for innovation.
That is simply not true.
You are free to find your own solution to the problem. You are not free to use Adobe's code - wholesale or retail - without a license.
Hell, just look what's going on with the H.264 battle. Not only are some people saying you can't use that codec--by far, the most popular and well-supported codec on the Internet--to make your own videos without paying up to MPEG LA
Your H.264 camcorder ships with an personal-use license.
You can make all the H.264 videos your family, friends and neighbors are willing and able to endure before dragging out the shotgun - like the 8mm home movies and 35mm slide shows of years past - there's not a jury in the world who would vote to convict.
You pay only when you get into commercial distribution in a really big way.
Shorts 12 minutes or less are royalty free.
Royalties on sales by title are 2% of sales or 2 cents a unit, whichever is lower. Unless you are grossing $150K/yr or more, that's pocket change and MPEG LA doesn't want to hear from you.
There are no royalties on subscription sales until you have over 100,000 paying subscribers a year.
Even then, royalties are per subscriber. You can charge $12.50/hr for The Playboy Channel and owe MPEG LA no more than The Lacrosse Channel at 45 cents/mo.
Your home town TV station pays a one-time charge of $2,500 per encoder or on a scale that starts at $2,500/yr for markets of 100,000-499,000. AVC/H.264 Terms Summary
The idea that an end user of a consumer product needs a "license" to use the piece of hardware that they have bought in good faith, or is in the slightest way obliged to pay heed to any usage restrictions or fees that some patent holder tries to levy is completely at odds with natural justice and common sense.
The patent holder's rights are rooted in the U.S. Constitution.
"Natural Justice" is a container into which you can pour anything you want. In American law you "get it in writing." In the Constitution. In the statute books. In judicial decisions....
You don't need a commercial license for H.264 until you are raking in the green.
2 cents a disk on retail sales of $200,000. Subscription plans with over 100,000 paid subscribers.
You might think differently if you got the manual your $8000 Pro HD camera out and read the manual
Your camera shipped with the generic end-user consumer license.
Your costs for MPEG 4 distribution look like this:
Shorts 12 minutes and under -
$0
Retail sales by title -
The lower of 2% of the price paid to the Licensee (on first arms length sale of the video) or $0.02 per title.
If you aren't grossing $150K+ in sales they have no interest in you whatever.
Subscription sales [The Geek's Strip Club Channel or DVD of the Month] -
100,000 subscribers or less - $0/yr. 100,000-250,000 - $25,000/yr 250,000-500,000 - $50,000/yr 500,000=1 million -$100,000 - $50,000. Over 1 Million - $100,000/yr
Free TV Broadcast -
1-Time $2,500 fee for each AVC encoder OR Annual Fee For Markets Of 100,000 and Over - Starting at $2,500/yr
Internet -
End user does not pay by title or subscription - $0/yr [May in the future rise to the equivalent of Free TV Broadcast]
Enterprise Cap [Commonly owned legal entities] -
$5 million/yr
That is the real cost of H.264 licensing to a service provider the size of Disney or Google. Which means that production, storage and distribution of VP8 video is going to have to be mighty damn cheap to be competitive. SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
The uproar would be both hilarious and effective. Trust me, it would work very quickly as the ISP has absolutely no way of verifying the emails
It would be more than inconvenient for the senders if the e-mails were traced back to their sources. In the states, I would predict conviction on multiple federal felony charges.
We forget that there was music (and movies!) before there was a massive industry to get rich off them.
The box office for a Chaplin short in 1915 was $100,000.
Roughly $2 million, adjusted for inflation.
During 1915, the Charlie Chaplin craze stormed the United States. Essanay vigorously promoted Chaplin's image, creating merchandise from photocards to books to toys, sheet music, fan cards,. All authorized merchandise stamped with Essanay name, and where possible the studios Indian-head logo. Star paraphernalia as an idea was not new, but the body of Chaplin merchandise was unlike anything seen in film before.Charles Chaplin
P.T. Barnum had perfected the system before 1850. Jenny Lind's net for her first concert tour in the states was $250,000. $3.6 tax-free millions, adjusted for inflation.
And will the copyright holders offer to make up the shortfall after the ISP ditches all it's best customers?
The ISP's best customers are those who make the least demands on the service. The customers who are paying for media content provided by the ISP or its owners and partners.
Not those whose P2P traffic maxes out the bandwidth available over their shared Internet connection - for which they are paying the mass market price.
A lot of them do not hold very many patents in the pool, and are actually paying more to the MPEG-LA than they get back in royalties.
There are no royalties on sales of less than 100,000 units/yr.
Royalties for an H.264 encoder/decoder max out at 10 cents a unit [sales of 5 million units/yr or more] or $5 million/yr, whichever is lower.
That is not a problem for LG, Mitsubishi, Samsung. Sony, and the rest, who have carved out huge chunks of the market in video hardware, amateur and pro.
They might consider it worthwhile to spend the money to invalidate a few hundred patents.
MPEG LA is in the heavyweight division. These people are not going to roll over and play dead simply because Google has entered the match.
H.264 licensors include:
Apple DAEWOO Electronics Dolby Laboratories Licensing France Télécom Fraunhofer Fujitsu Hitachi Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V LG Electronics Inc Microsoft Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation [NTT] Panasonic Samsung Scientific-Atlanta Sharp Siemens Sony Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York Toshiba Victor Company of Japan, Limited
There are global industrial giants here whose interest in H.264 extend far beyond the cell phone and YouTube:
Broadcast, cable and satellite technologies Consumer Products and Services [Blu-Ray. Console Video Gaming. Digital phtography and HD Camcorder Video. HDTV and Home Theater Audio, Set-Top Boxes] Military Applications Theatrical Production. CCTV Applications [Medical, Industrial, Security Video, Etc]
read up about undocumented dos functions in ms-dos and what happened when you tried to run windows 3 in dr-dos...
Fair enough:
The AARD code was a segment of obfuscated machine code that is included in several executables, including the installer and WIN.COM, in a beta release of Microsoft Windows 3.1. The code ran several functional tests on the underlying DOS that succeeded on MS-DOS, but resulted in a technical support message on competing operating systems. The name was derived from Microsoft programmer Aaron R. Reynolds (1955-2008), who used "AARD" to sign his work. ("AARD" was found in the machine code of the installer.) Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1.
Regardless of what decisions they make, does it bother anyone else that a board or 15 people apparently decides the curriculum for the whole country? Seems like that would be the first thing to fix.
The problem is the central purchasing power of the Texas board.
$600 million dollars a year.
In most states local school districts make the choice - and pay the bill - from a broader selection of texts that meet state guidelines - the social and political battles are fought out publicly district-by-district.
The Court further clarifies that this injunction covers any acts of direct infringement, as defined in 17 U.S.C. 106, that take place in the United States. To the extent that an act of reproducing, copying, distributing, performing, or displaying takes place in the United States, it may violate 17 U.S.C. 106, subject to the generally applicable requirements and defenses of the Copyright Act.
As explained in the Court's December 23, 2009 Order, "United States copyright law does not require that both parties be located in the United States. Rather, the acts of uploading and downloading are each independent grounds of copyright infringement liability." Summary Judgment Order at 19. Each download or upload of Plaintiffs' copyrighted material violates Plaintiffs' copyrights if even a single United States-based user is involved in the "swarm" process of distributing, transmitting, or receiving a portion of a computer file containing Plaintiffs' copyrighted content.
Slashdot Mirror
Premeditated" is an adjective only used when talking about murder
Not strictly true.
The usage is common enough in murder cases, of course.
premeditated
All of the above lack either quality or user control. Some have quirks like needing to break encryption and being careful about your hardware locking up due to changing region codes
A second full-featured Sony DVD player will set you back all of $30. Sony DVP SR200P/B DVD player.
The second internal DVD drive for you media PC, $20. LG GH22NP20 Super Multi DVD Burner
There are just three regional codes for Blu-Ray. Japan, East Asia and the Americas are region A/1.
Regional codes a piss-poor excuse for piracy.
Use a:
phone: 10 points
gun: 30 points
That is how the system works now.
It is the way it has always worked.
The old-time judge and jury may not have been keeping a scorecard.
But they were always free to distinguish between the amateur and the pro. To consider evidence of premeditation. The reality - or the potential - for a violent escalation of the crime.
Tech extends the criminal's reach. It makes his job easier. Criminal prosecution for wire fraud is as old as the telegraph.
However, it is patent encumbered. Therefore, you would expect a rational competitor to do the following: Copy h.264 as closely as possible in all unpatented respects, or respects where patents can be worked around. Nobody is giving you any extra credit for re-inventing the wheel
The problem here is that H.264 licensors are industrial giants like Mitsubishi Electric.
Philips. Samsung. LG. Fujitsu. Hitachi, NTT...
It's easy to forget that H.264 is a broadcast standard:
NTT Electronics has produced the world's first High 4:2:2 Profile HDTV/SDTV encoder/decoder. With outstanding flexibility through its support of both the MPEG-2 and AVC/H.264 video compression formats, the HV9100 series fits any situation in this period of transition between any formats. HV9100 series
The geek sees the web and the cell phone. But this battle is playing out on a much larger stage.
So how about everyone everywhere assume everything is either copyrighted or patented or trademarked and just submit to "them" who ever "them" may be.
Your Linux distribution has a trademarked logo. The software is licensed. It just might include some patented technologies.
H.264 support in Ubuntu's OEM distribution, for example.
Most of the software in Ubuntu is covered under the GNU General Public License. This *is* a license agreement. Unlike most license agreements, however, it does not restrict your usage of the software, but it does restrict the terms under which you can re-distribute it. /usr/share/doc/*/copyright. Ubuntu license agreement
Likewise, while most of the software is covered by the GPL, *all* the software on the system is covered by some kind of license agreement be it MIT, X, Artistic, Apache, BSD, GPL, LGPL, etc, etc.
You will find the license agreements for the various pieces of software installed on your system in
The "Creative Commons" license is - by default - a license protected by the law of copyright:
CC's Unported licenses were created using standard terms from the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and other international treaties related to copyright and intellectual property. FFAQ
MicroCenter.com stocks all of 13 items in Linux software, including, somewhat improbably, Slackware Linux.
Linux Software
MicroCenter catalogs about 30,000 items in all.
In hardware, 2 low-spec Ubuntu Linux [Desktop] PCs.
That the - IP protected to the max - product owns the consumer market space couldn't be made plainer.
Are there sufficient legal issues here for the Court to even take up the case?
A question that deserves to be modded up.
The Supreme Court hears about 75 to 100 cases a year.
The P2P user caught shopping LimeWire or The Pirate Bay for his free music fix isn't likely to rank high on their list of priorities.
Deployment of the XO beyond Central and South America is almost non-existent. Rwanda is the only real success story.
If you want a keyboard, plug it in the USB port or connect it with Bluetooth, tablet willing...
The XO is meant for kids. In punishing third-world environments. It is supposed to be self-contained. It is supposed to be cheap. Standardized. No extraneous parts to be lost or broken. Energy efficient.
but like so many muggles out there, Negroponte believed the crap Microsoft was telling him.
OLPC was sold as a take-it-or-leave-it package deal to the third world education minister.
The hardware. The software. Linux, FOSS and SUGAR.
The constructivist philosophy of education - the classroom without a teacher, to simplify things drastically.
The education minister wasn't buying into any of this.
The push for Windows and Office came from him.
Deployment of the XO beyond Central and South America was and remains insignificant, with the sole exception of Rwanda - and that came a year after dual-booting XP and MS Office became an option.
Total confirmed deployment is about 1.3 million units. One Laptop Per Child [Summary of laptop orders}
look at Adobe's new feature in Photoshop whereby you can remove stuff from pictures just by painting a boundary around it, and it fills in the background. Now, I'll agree that you shouldn't be able to just copy the code directly from Photoshop and use it in your own application wholesale. But as the laws are set up now, you can't even implement your own version of this feature, and that's absolutely horrible for innovation.
That is simply not true.
You are free to find your own solution to the problem. You are not free to use Adobe's code - wholesale or retail - without a license.
Hell, just look what's going on with the H.264 battle. Not only are some people saying you can't use that codec--by far, the most popular and well-supported codec on the Internet--to make your own videos without paying up to MPEG LA
Your H.264 camcorder ships with an personal-use license.
You can make all the H.264 videos your family, friends and neighbors are willing and able to endure before dragging out the shotgun - like the 8mm home movies and 35mm slide shows of years past - there's not a jury in the world who would vote to convict.
You pay only when you get into commercial distribution in a really big way.
Shorts 12 minutes or less are royalty free.
Royalties on sales by title are 2% of sales or 2 cents a unit, whichever is lower. Unless you are grossing $150K/yr or more, that's pocket change and MPEG LA doesn't want to hear from you.
There are no royalties on subscription sales until you have over 100,000 paying subscribers a year.
Even then, royalties are per subscriber. You can charge $12.50/hr for The Playboy Channel and owe MPEG LA no more than The Lacrosse Channel at 45 cents/mo.
Your home town TV station pays a one-time charge of $2,500 per encoder or on a scale that starts at $2,500/yr for markets of 100,000-499,000. AVC/H.264 Terms Summary
How much does Sourceforge charge for every disk downloaded from a free software bundle?
You think Sourceforge pays nothing for storage, bandwidth and administration?
Sourceforge has other sources of revenue.
The idea that an end user of a consumer product needs a "license" to use the piece of hardware that they have bought in good faith, or is in the slightest way obliged to pay heed to any usage restrictions or fees that some patent holder tries to levy is completely at odds with natural justice and common sense.
The patent holder's rights are rooted in the U.S. Constitution.
"Natural Justice" is a container into which you can pour anything you want. In American law you "get it in writing." In the Constitution. In the statute books. In judicial decisions....
You don't need a commercial license for H.264 until you are raking in the green.
2 cents a disk on retail sales of $200,000. Subscription plans with over 100,000 paid subscribers.
500,000 - 1 million
$75,000/yr
You might think differently if you got the manual your $8000 Pro HD camera out and read the manual
Your camera shipped with the generic end-user consumer license.
Your costs for MPEG 4 distribution look like this:
Shorts 12 minutes and under -
$0
Retail sales by title -
The lower of 2% of the price paid to the Licensee (on first arms length sale of the video) or $0.02 per title.
If you aren't grossing $150K+ in sales they have no interest in you whatever.
Subscription sales [The Geek's Strip Club Channel or DVD of the Month] -
100,000 subscribers or less - $0/yr.
100,000-250,000 - $25,000/yr
250,000-500,000 - $50,000/yr
500,000=1 million -$100,000 - $50,000.
Over 1 Million - $100,000/yr
Free TV Broadcast -
1-Time $2,500 fee for each AVC encoder
OR
Annual Fee For Markets Of 100,000 and Over - Starting at $2,500/yr
Internet -
End user does not pay by title or subscription - $0/yr [May in the future rise to the equivalent of Free TV Broadcast]
Enterprise Cap [Commonly owned legal entities] -
$5 million/yr
That is the real cost of H.264 licensing to a service provider the size of Disney or Google. Which means that production, storage and distribution of VP8 video is going to have to be mighty damn cheap to be competitive. SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
If you goal is to distribute software free of charge, then even a $0.01 licensing fee totally cripples that.
The cost of duplicating and distributing your free-as-in-beer software bundle are surely going to be much more than a penny a a disk.
their MPEG licensing fee is on the order of $2 per manufactured device
MPEG-2 PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE SUMMARY
The uproar would be both hilarious and effective. Trust me, it would work very quickly as the ISP has absolutely no way of verifying the emails
It would be more than inconvenient for the senders if the e-mails were traced back to their sources. In the states, I would predict conviction on multiple federal felony charges.
We forget that there was music (and movies!) before there was a massive industry to get rich off them.
The box office for a Chaplin short in 1915 was $100,000.
Roughly $2 million, adjusted for inflation.
During 1915, the Charlie Chaplin craze stormed the United States. Essanay vigorously promoted Chaplin's image, creating merchandise from photocards to books to toys, sheet music, fan cards,. All authorized merchandise stamped with Essanay name, and where possible the studios Indian-head logo. Star paraphernalia as an idea was not new, but the body of Chaplin merchandise was unlike anything seen in film before. Charles Chaplin
P.T. Barnum had perfected the system before 1850. Jenny Lind's net for her first concert tour in the states was $250,000. $3.6 tax-free millions, adjusted for inflation.
And will the copyright holders offer to make up the shortfall after the ISP ditches all it's best customers?
The ISP's best customers are those who make the least demands on the service. The customers who are paying for media content provided by the ISP or its owners and partners.
Not those whose P2P traffic maxes out the bandwidth available over their shared Internet connection - for which they are paying the mass market price.
A lot of them do not hold very many patents in the pool, and are actually paying more to the MPEG-LA than they get back in royalties.
There are no royalties on sales of less than 100,000 units/yr.
Royalties for an H.264 encoder/decoder max out at 10 cents a unit [sales of 5 million units/yr or more] or $5 million/yr, whichever is lower.
That is not a problem for LG, Mitsubishi, Samsung. Sony, and the rest, who have carved out huge chunks of the market in video hardware, amateur and pro.
They might consider it worthwhile to spend the money to invalidate a few hundred patents.
MPEG LA is in the heavyweight division. These people are not going to roll over and play dead simply because Google has entered the match.
H.264 licensors include:
Apple
DAEWOO Electronics
Dolby Laboratories Licensing
France Télécom
Fraunhofer
Fujitsu
Hitachi
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V
LG Electronics Inc
Microsoft
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation [NTT]
Panasonic
Samsung
Scientific-Atlanta
Sharp
Siemens
Sony
Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson
The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York
Toshiba
Victor Company of Japan, Limited
There are global industrial giants here whose interest in H.264 extend far beyond the cell phone and YouTube:
Broadcast, cable and satellite technologies
Consumer Products and Services [Blu-Ray. Console Video Gaming. Digital phtography and HD Camcorder Video. HDTV and Home Theater Audio, Set-Top Boxes]
Military Applications
Theatrical Production.
CCTV Applications [Medical, Industrial, Security Video, Etc]
I wonder how much of his traffic is actually from the US.
Stats from Alexa for Isohunt.com:
Visitors by Country
[Percent of Site Traffic][Rounded]
USA 17.4%
India 9%
UK 7%
Canada 4%
Australia 6%
Japan 4%
Audience Demographics
[Relative to the general internet population]
Age: 18-24
Interest drops off a cliff as the audience ages.
Gender: Male
Has Children: Close call. But probably not.
Education: Some college
Browsing location: Home and School. No surprise there.
idohunt.com
read up about undocumented dos functions in ms-dos and what happened when you tried to run windows 3 in dr-dos...
Fair enough:
The AARD code was a segment of obfuscated machine code that is included in several executables, including the installer and WIN.COM, in a beta release of Microsoft Windows 3.1. The code ran several functional tests on the underlying DOS that succeeded on MS-DOS, but resulted in a technical support message on competing operating systems. The name was derived from Microsoft programmer Aaron R. Reynolds (1955-2008), who used "AARD" to sign his work. ("AARD" was found in the machine code of the installer.) Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1.
AARD code
Regardless of what decisions they make, does it bother anyone else that a board or 15 people apparently decides the curriculum for the whole country? Seems like that would be the first thing to fix.
The problem is the central purchasing power of the Texas board.
$600 million dollars a year.
In most states local school districts make the choice - and pay the bill - from a broader selection of texts that meet state guidelines - the social and political battles are fought out publicly district-by-district.
Despite rumors that we are ordered to filter by keywords for the US, there's only a proposed order, no actual order.
The isoHunt announcement is dated April 5 Annonucements. The permanent injunction was filed May 20th. isoHunt Permanent Injunction
The court had this to say about its right to act:
The Court further clarifies that this injunction covers any acts
of direct infringement, as defined in 17 U.S.C. 106, that take place
in the United States. To the extent that an act of reproducing,
copying, distributing, performing, or displaying takes place in the
United States, it may violate 17 U.S.C. 106, subject to the generally
applicable requirements and defenses of the Copyright Act.
As
explained in the Court's December 23, 2009 Order, "United States
copyright law does not require that both parties be located in the
United States. Rather, the acts of uploading and downloading are each
independent grounds of copyright infringement liability." Summary
Judgment Order at 19. Each download or upload of Plaintiffs'
copyrighted material violates Plaintiffs' copyrights if even a single
United States-based user is involved in the "swarm" process of
distributing, transmitting, or receiving a portion of a computer file
containing Plaintiffs' copyrighted content.