According to the FAQ, people need to use MSIE 5 or higher for a certain ActiveX control that handles the DRM information of the song. I noticed that the page code does a simple browser check when you click on the download link. When I didn't use MSIE 5 or higher, I kept timing out.
I set my Opera 7.11 to identify itself as MSIE 6.0, and behold: got through to pay and download the song with no problems. I'm curious now: if I downloaded the song, would I be able to play it even without the ActiveX control? And if so, will I have gotten it without any DRM protection?
Thanks everybody for the explanation. My bad; I tend to get copyright and patents confused in the case of software. I have an excuse, though: software code is no different from, let's say, a complech chemical formula. Thus, if pharmaceuticals are awarded patents, I always tend to think that software gets patent protection as well.
That's why they have the 'I agree'-button. Arguing about not being able to see the EULA before the purchase (and the merchant not accepting the return since you opened the box) is a whole other matter, of course.
So while the explicit assumption is that you accept the EULA by clicking the "I agree" button, the implicit assumption is that you agree to the EULA wihout even seeing it when you purchase the software, right? In this case, I'd say that the implicit assumption takes precedence, as it occurs earlier in the life cycle of the product. And as for merchants refusing to accept open packages, I'd blame the publishers who in turn refuse to take back these packages and send the merchants back their money. The method of delivery of EULA is still a questionable one: if a court decides that the implicit assumption really takes precedence, EULA would be void as a legally-binding contract.
If Gorman can map the fiber network though, doesn't that mean someone else could do the same?
And this is exactly why his work must be classified or destroyed. Remember, kids, most recent laws are here not to prevent the bad guys from doing something (by deffinition, they are bad and thus expected to break those laws), but to prevent the average citizen from doing something.
Yeah, I was thinking of that, and can't make up my mind. Here's the few aspect to this issue that I could identify:
* You create an exact copy of the work and try to sell it as an original. You go to jail.
* You create an exact copy and try to sell it as a reprint. You need the permission of the owner.
* You create a copy of the work that is much smaller, not revealing any small details and of a much lower quality. I don't know whether it's permissible or not, but the last time I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I didn't get an EULA stating that my photographs of their artworks cannot be published on the Net without permission. This, IMHO, is similar to thumbnails.
* You use the original art to create a new work. This is derivative work, and should be protected by fair use. For example, I should be able to take Mona Lisa and replace its face with the face of my mom.
* You use the same composition and try to create a work on your own. For example, you get a girl that looks like Mona Lisa, arrange her in the same fashion and try to paint her portrait. I have yet to see a lawsuit against this practice.
All in all, I see potential copyright problems only if you copy these artworks in their full size and quality, which is not the case of thumbnails.
I think you overestimate the abilities of songwriters and composers, and underestimate the abilaties of producers and recording engineers!
That may be so. I must admit that while I have a considerable database of photographs, I never recorded a single song. However, I feel that the technical aspect of taking pictures is as much an art as having a good eye for a composition. I don't think that's the case with music.
As for Photoshop compositions or paintings, I see a gray area here. I have yet to read about a single lawsuit involving an artist using the same composition as his predecessor (with the exception of creating fake paintings), but I've read about enough lawsuits against musicians using the same tune or lyrics to notice a pattern here.
I would agree that using thumbnails falls under fair use, unlike using a lower-quality version of a song. Before I get into my argument, I'd like to point out that the following is just the way I feel about the issue, and not supported by any objective evidence.
I see a difference between the original and artistic aspect when comparing music and picture. In the case of music, art is created by writing the melody and the lyrics. You cannot really degrade the quality of those two if you create an inferior copy. All you'd do is degrading the quality of the sound, but the music remains the same. Hell, you cannot even release the same song yourself without permission of the original writers.
With pictures, the situation is different. Every photographer will tell you that while composition is extremely important, most of the work goes to achieve technological perfection. That's why photographers are able to take 50 or more pictures of the same composition - to achieve this perfection. However, that perfection is lost once you degrade the quality of the picture. What a thumbnail does is to get across the information of what you see. It fails, however, to get across the beauty of that particular composition.
How about special paper with DRM on it that the printer recognizes and only prints to?
If you use one of the more modern HP color InkJets, you may notice in printer properties that you can set the type of paper you are using, as long as you use an HP paper. Printing quality is supposedly based on this. So far, this is an inclusive approach to making people use proprietary paper, but I can very well imagine HP working hard on a way to make the printer recognize only HP paper for photo printing.
Many thanks for this info. For the past two years, I've been trying to compile a database of the various relationships within the software entertainment industry (a project that started with tracking the copyright ownership of a couple of classic games), and I didn't know this. Will update my database and not make the same mistake again:)
As for you carring around that much of a load, are you packing heat or what?
Coming from an unnamed Eastern European country, I'm simply not used to live on credit and to use anything but cash when paying. Two concepts that apparently sound strange to many Americans who tried to convince me to get a credit card;)
After all, Interplay has had the Star Trek license since 1993, when it published Star Trek: 25th Aviversary. Over the next almost 10 years, Interplay managed to create a very narrow niche - sales of Star Trek games were never really good; in fact, very few ST games made it into the Top 10. So if anybody is responsible for relatively low sales of the games, it's Interplay.
That's not to say that low sales are wrong, but Activision should realize that it acquires a highly profiled franchise, which will not appeal to the same number of people as games like The Sims or the Command & Conquer series.
I found that using cash can cause more privacy problems than it solves. I, for example, use my ATM card only for groceries. I don't care whether the government or anybody else knows which cereals I like and whether I drink 2% or whole milk. I always use the self-checkout lines, and using cash there is a little complicated.
However, elsewhere I use only cash, and I ran into some serious problems already. Examples:
Buying a TV and VCR at BestBuy, total value slightly over $1000. The store does not accept so much cash; I had to buy the two on two separate trips.
Buying a laptop at CompUSA for $1400. Same problem; since it was a single item I could not buy it at all with cash.
Buying some furniture of total value of slightly over $2000 (I also came with my own truck to drive it home). The clerk wanted my name, address and copy of my driver's license. The manager confirmed those requirements I left and bought it elsewhere.
I'm wondering when cash transactions over a certain value would be outlawed altogether.
Last time I installed Netscape (4.71), it hijacked my file extensions in a way that even MSIE was unable to do. Until this day I'm finding files that search for netscape.exe when I try to open them. Since then, I rather pay for Opera than get a free version of Netscape.
[i] I see nothing wrong with letting companies keep their successful copyrights, but I feel they should have an obligation to "use it or lose it"; that is to say, companies should not be able to use copyrights to *suppress* works that could otherwise be in the public domain.[/i]
Care to explain this to me a little? After all, as long as something is a company's property, they have the right to do anything with it. If they feel that selling a product would canibalize the sale of their other products, they should be able to lock it up in a vault and prosecute the distribution of the product. After all, it's their property.
Re:Not as bad as it seems
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
So, while you're busting your ass for free trying to get promoted, are you really going to go and ask your boss for a vacation? Or do you just pile up the unused hours, because it makes you look better come review time.
Nope. I'm busting my ass off because there is work to do. I have the bad habit of being loyal to my employer;). As for vacation, two weeks ago I spent a week on the beach, and I'm planing a two-week road trip in September. Paid vacation, but my boss is not really keeping track of how many days I take off. He's confident that I would place the company's interests before mine.
If you compare this with Sweden for example, they have a very high standard of living, including the vacation benefits.
I was expecting this argument;). I've heard it very many times, and I still don't have a bulletproof counter-argument. However, I don't believe what Sweden is doing is sustainable on a long-time basis. As much as I'd like to live in such a paradise (and I would if Sweden was located in the Caribbean or the same lattitude somewhere else), I'm afraid that sooner or later the system will collapse, most likely under an external shock (war, for example).
As for people having to have two to three jobs to get by, I'm a little biased against them. Coming from Slovakia where I'd have to work for 15 years to afford one year of college here, I still managed to pull myself through college and find a good job. As such, I believe that the American dream is possible, if you work hard enough. While I am aware that those people work hard, I'm questioning their initial decisions that barred them from better jobs. They are responsible for those decisions, though.
Re:Research says otherwise...
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Many thanks for the link; it's really some interesting stuff. Unfortunatelly, it only talks about manual labor and not mental labor where, imo, most overtime comes from. Unless I misread the original article...
Re:In Europe there is gold at the end of rainbow!
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
This is total fiction. I'm an American who's lived and worked most of his life in Europe, so I know what I'm talking about when I say this is bull.
Depends where you worked, I guess. I started my carreer working in a warehouse for electrical isolation components in Prague, Czech Republic, with 3 weeks of paid vacation. We always had to submit a written request, and then negotiate with co-workers and the management to set our vacation time in a way that would still allow the warehouse to be staffed enough to be operational. Later I became an accountant for an international trucking company in Bratislava, Slovakia, with 4 weeks of vacation time. Again, the same conserns applied. In addition, I was unable to have any vacation on the weekn of 15th every month (the due date of the previous month's Value Added Tax). Of course, while vacation time is set by law in Europe, the way it's being handled varies by the company, so I don't dispute the fact that you may have had a different experience.
Not as bad as it seems
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm one of those poor guys who have chosen a profession in the financial world. For the first year after college, I worked an average of 75 hours per week, and being on an anual wage, I gign't get paid for the extra hours. Over time, the work load decreased as I became more efficient and got promoted. At my fifth year with the company, I'm at 40 hours per week, and no vacation. At least no vacation on paper, but I know that in 95% of cases, I get as many days off as I want to (within reason) if I ask my boss. Add to it paid sick days, and you get a whole different picture.
What these statistics measure is the amount of vacation people are entitled to by theirwork contracts, not the amount of vacation they actually take. Having worked both in Europe and the US, I am aware that even so Europeans get much more vacation, but the approach to it is much more regulated than in the US. Here, it's enough to ask the boss who gives his approval, in most companies I worked for or had friends working for. In Europe, you need to fill an application, and due to the amount of vacation for everyone, the management must carefully balance when to award a vacation to a particular worker. I personally prefer the US approach...
Another thing to take into account is what this hard work gets the country. Because of so much work and overtime, American workers are the most productive in the world. Cut this productivity by 20%, and you automatically increase the variable cost for a product by 20%. Legislate vacation time, and everything will become more expensive, the foreign trade deficit worsens, the dollar devaluates and everything will become even more expensive. True, we work hard, but our hard work reflects in the low product prices and high standard of living.
Their proposal seems to be quite well-prepared, albeit a little too general. However, I would really like to see another section under "Privacy", which would require the users of RFIDs to include them in a way that would make them easy to remove. People should have a choice whether to drive with the tags all the way home or remove them on the spot.
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Not surprising, though. After all, it's the RIAA that's suing, not the porn industry.
I set my Opera 7.11 to identify itself as MSIE 6.0, and behold: got through to pay and download the song with no problems. I'm curious now: if I downloaded the song, would I be able to play it even without the ActiveX control? And if so, will I have gotten it without any DRM protection?
Source: ESA (formerly IDSA).
Any other questions? ;)
Just when I had a couple of rolls of toilet paper custom-printed with "IDSA", they change their name...
Thanks everybody for the explanation. My bad; I tend to get copyright and patents confused in the case of software. I have an excuse, though: software code is no different from, let's say, a complech chemical formula. Thus, if pharmaceuticals are awarded patents, I always tend to think that software gets patent protection as well.
If the copyright was awarded only recently, can the code that was contained in Linux prior to the registration be considered as prior art?
So while the explicit assumption is that you accept the EULA by clicking the "I agree" button, the implicit assumption is that you agree to the EULA wihout even seeing it when you purchase the software, right? In this case, I'd say that the implicit assumption takes precedence, as it occurs earlier in the life cycle of the product. And as for merchants refusing to accept open packages, I'd blame the publishers who in turn refuse to take back these packages and send the merchants back their money. The method of delivery of EULA is still a questionable one: if a court decides that the implicit assumption really takes precedence, EULA would be void as a legally-binding contract.
And this is exactly why his work must be classified or destroyed. Remember, kids, most recent laws are here not to prevent the bad guys from doing something (by deffinition, they are bad and thus expected to break those laws), but to prevent the average citizen from doing something.
* You create an exact copy of the work and try to sell it as an original. You go to jail.
* You create an exact copy and try to sell it as a reprint. You need the permission of the owner.
* You create a copy of the work that is much smaller, not revealing any small details and of a much lower quality. I don't know whether it's permissible or not, but the last time I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I didn't get an EULA stating that my photographs of their artworks cannot be published on the Net without permission. This, IMHO, is similar to thumbnails.
* You use the original art to create a new work. This is derivative work, and should be protected by fair use. For example, I should be able to take Mona Lisa and replace its face with the face of my mom.
* You use the same composition and try to create a work on your own. For example, you get a girl that looks like Mona Lisa, arrange her in the same fashion and try to paint her portrait. I have yet to see a lawsuit against this practice.
All in all, I see potential copyright problems only if you copy these artworks in their full size and quality, which is not the case of thumbnails.
That may be so. I must admit that while I have a considerable database of photographs, I never recorded a single song. However, I feel that the technical aspect of taking pictures is as much an art as having a good eye for a composition. I don't think that's the case with music.
As for Photoshop compositions or paintings, I see a gray area here. I have yet to read about a single lawsuit involving an artist using the same composition as his predecessor (with the exception of creating fake paintings), but I've read about enough lawsuits against musicians using the same tune or lyrics to notice a pattern here.
I see a difference between the original and artistic aspect when comparing music and picture. In the case of music, art is created by writing the melody and the lyrics. You cannot really degrade the quality of those two if you create an inferior copy. All you'd do is degrading the quality of the sound, but the music remains the same. Hell, you cannot even release the same song yourself without permission of the original writers.
With pictures, the situation is different. Every photographer will tell you that while composition is extremely important, most of the work goes to achieve technological perfection. That's why photographers are able to take 50 or more pictures of the same composition - to achieve this perfection. However, that perfection is lost once you degrade the quality of the picture. What a thumbnail does is to get across the information of what you see. It fails, however, to get across the beauty of that particular composition.
That's just my $0.02...
If you use one of the more modern HP color InkJets, you may notice in printer properties that you can set the type of paper you are using, as long as you use an HP paper. Printing quality is supposedly based on this. So far, this is an inclusive approach to making people use proprietary paper, but I can very well imagine HP working hard on a way to make the printer recognize only HP paper for photo printing.
Many thanks for this info. For the past two years, I've been trying to compile a database of the various relationships within the software entertainment industry (a project that started with tracking the copyright ownership of a couple of classic games), and I didn't know this. Will update my database and not make the same mistake again :)
Coming from an unnamed Eastern European country, I'm simply not used to live on credit and to use anything but cash when paying. Two concepts that apparently sound strange to many Americans who tried to convince me to get a credit card ;)
That's not to say that low sales are wrong, but Activision should realize that it acquires a highly profiled franchise, which will not appeal to the same number of people as games like The Sims or the Command & Conquer series.
However, elsewhere I use only cash, and I ran into some serious problems already. Examples:
- Buying a TV and VCR at BestBuy, total value slightly over $1000. The store does not accept so much cash; I had to buy the two on two separate trips.
- Buying a laptop at CompUSA for $1400. Same problem; since it was a single item I could not buy it at all with cash.
- Buying some furniture of total value of slightly over $2000 (I also came with my own truck to drive it home). The clerk wanted my name, address and copy of my driver's license. The manager confirmed those requirements I left and bought it elsewhere.
I'm wondering when cash transactions over a certain value would be outlawed altogether.Many thanks. This makes a lot of sense, and it's an argument I haven't thought of before.
Last time I installed Netscape (4.71), it hijacked my file extensions in a way that even MSIE was unable to do. Until this day I'm finding files that search for netscape.exe when I try to open them. Since then, I rather pay for Opera than get a free version of Netscape.
Care to explain this to me a little? After all, as long as something is a company's property, they have the right to do anything with it. If they feel that selling a product would canibalize the sale of their other products, they should be able to lock it up in a vault and prosecute the distribution of the product. After all, it's their property.
Nope. I'm busting my ass off because there is work to do. I have the bad habit of being loyal to my employer ;). As for vacation, two weeks ago I spent a week on the beach, and I'm planing a two-week road trip in September. Paid vacation, but my boss is not really keeping track of how many days I take off. He's confident that I would place the company's interests before mine.
I was expecting this argument ;). I've heard it very many times, and I still don't have a bulletproof counter-argument. However, I don't believe what Sweden is doing is sustainable on a long-time basis. As much as I'd like to live in such a paradise (and I would if Sweden was located in the Caribbean or the same lattitude somewhere else), I'm afraid that sooner or later the system will collapse, most likely under an external shock (war, for example).
As for people having to have two to three jobs to get by, I'm a little biased against them. Coming from Slovakia where I'd have to work for 15 years to afford one year of college here, I still managed to pull myself through college and find a good job. As such, I believe that the American dream is possible, if you work hard enough. While I am aware that those people work hard, I'm questioning their initial decisions that barred them from better jobs. They are responsible for those decisions, though.
Many thanks for the link; it's really some interesting stuff. Unfortunatelly, it only talks about manual labor and not mental labor where, imo, most overtime comes from. Unless I misread the original article...
Depends where you worked, I guess. I started my carreer working in a warehouse for electrical isolation components in Prague, Czech Republic, with 3 weeks of paid vacation. We always had to submit a written request, and then negotiate with co-workers and the management to set our vacation time in a way that would still allow the warehouse to be staffed enough to be operational. Later I became an accountant for an international trucking company in Bratislava, Slovakia, with 4 weeks of vacation time. Again, the same conserns applied. In addition, I was unable to have any vacation on the weekn of 15th every month (the due date of the previous month's Value Added Tax). Of course, while vacation time is set by law in Europe, the way it's being handled varies by the company, so I don't dispute the fact that you may have had a different experience.
What these statistics measure is the amount of vacation people are entitled to by theirwork contracts, not the amount of vacation they actually take. Having worked both in Europe and the US, I am aware that even so Europeans get much more vacation, but the approach to it is much more regulated than in the US. Here, it's enough to ask the boss who gives his approval, in most companies I worked for or had friends working for. In Europe, you need to fill an application, and due to the amount of vacation for everyone, the management must carefully balance when to award a vacation to a particular worker. I personally prefer the US approach...
Another thing to take into account is what this hard work gets the country. Because of so much work and overtime, American workers are the most productive in the world. Cut this productivity by 20%, and you automatically increase the variable cost for a product by 20%. Legislate vacation time, and everything will become more expensive, the foreign trade deficit worsens, the dollar devaluates and everything will become even more expensive. True, we work hard, but our hard work reflects in the low product prices and high standard of living.
Their proposal seems to be quite well-prepared, albeit a little too general. However, I would really like to see another section under "Privacy", which would require the users of RFIDs to include them in a way that would make them easy to remove. People should have a choice whether to drive with the tags all the way home or remove them on the spot.