I realized the subtitles were horrifically bad translations
You have no way of knowing that. (Unless you speak Japanese to make a real comparison with the original).
and sounding like real dialog.
Since subtitles are non-auditory, they by definition do not "sound" like anything. And they shouldn't. They're meant for you to get the literal meaning, nothing more.
No, you are being less accurate. While many fansubbers abide by such a code, not all of them do, and it's dishonest to claim otherwise.
at which point they halt translation/distribution
That bit is especially misleading. The function of fansubbers is (obviously) to create subtitles. Distribution isn't their forte; P2p systems can already keep spreading the files around better than their own servers ever could. They have no way to withdraw the file after release.
The fansubbers who released Ghost In The Shell epsidoes, for example, knew full well that the series would be licensed for USA distribution extremely quickly, and also that removing episodes from their own servers would in no way slow the distribution once it had started.
The "fansubber's code" is a way to pretend lawfullness. Decades ago, when anime releases to outside Japan were rare, it was plausible for them to claim to be distributing something that viewers could get in no other way. Today, the anime market is international, and they can't keep on pretending that "Lost Exile" and "Wolf's Rain" aren't in negotations with Cartoon Network from before they even air in Japan.
Oh wait Congress sends federal funds to local schools.
In the event that the administrator is acting as an agent of Congress, then the instructions Congress can give him are indeed limited by the first amendment. However, the specific comment to which I was responding was: "Once you talk government, you talk first amendment", and it is emphatically false.
The first amendment ONLY applies to the federal government. There are other levels of government that are completely immune to it.
In your view, the police department could walk in to the local newspaper
No. In my view, the police department is a function of state government, and the state constitution provides it's own promise of freedom of speech completely separate from the first amendment of the national constitution.
Indeed, the fact that each state independently created it's own Freedom of Speech right proves that I'm correct: because if the national Constitution's Bill of Rights applied to all levels of government, there would've been no need for the states to provide a Bill of Rights as well! It'd have been redundant.
Section 1 of the the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Nothing you quoted there contradicts me in anyway. No state shall abridge those protections... the protection is specifically that "Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech"... therefore states cannot make a law allowing Congress to abridge freedom of speech. But the state can still do so on its own, because the Constitution has no protection against it.
Note that in the Bill of Rights, only 1 of the 10 amendments applies to national, state, and local governments equally: the right to bear arms cannot be infringed by anyone. All the other rights are protected solely from infringement by the federal Congres.
Note further that most states of the USA provide their own guarantee of freedom of the press, but this is not "the First Amendement". In New York, for example, it's the eigth amendment.
Hard to argue that you're costing a company sales when they arent providing that product.
Nope. That's actually an easy argument: The company WILL someday soon sell its DVDs in the USA, so distributing fansubs earlier will cut into their future sales.
Back in the good-ole days of VHS fansubbing in the 1980s, that was an unlikely event. But today, if an anime has any substantial appeal to Americans, it'll certainly get an international DVD release inside of two years. (Indeed, anime companies are making the USA market a critical part of their business plans. Some anime, like Big-O, has been renewed for new episodes solely on the strength of USA viewership)
For some kinds of show, that isn't true: there are genres whose international appeal is to tiny to support a translated release, and there are also high-profit kids' shows (like Pokemon*) where the audience won't be interested in reading subtitles (especially on TV).
But for many things that get fansubbed today, neither of those excuses works. Prehaps the strongest example is "Ghost In The Shell", an expensive scifi action series that's still being broadcast in Japan, and which already has DVD and televised releases in the USA. Even back in pre-production 3 years ago, this was a tremendously famous series, and it was obvious there would be a major world-wide market. Yet fansubbers went ahead, set their VCRs, and FTPed raws and subs around the world.
* In the case of childrens' shows, there is a further motivation for the producers to condone fansubbing: the shows themselves are usually "toyetic", existing primarily as 22-minute advertisements for toys and branded merchanise. A vendor can hardly argue against free ad time...
When was the last time you saw the pilot or the finale of a show in rerun?
That doesn't support your position. Pilots and finales are rare in syndication because (a) they are often double-length and won't fit in normal timeslots, (b) they are the (naturally) creation or destruction of situations, and can't be mixed around in random order like all the other episodes.
Cut and paste is necessary to infringe on copyright,
No. Suppose I watched 1989's "Batman" movie, and then a decade later draw a comic strip featuring Batman and Catwoman in a new crime-fighting adventure of my own imagining. Even though no specific images or sounds were exactly copied from the film, my comic is still a violation of copyright owned by the Bob Kane estate. (It's also a trademark infringement, but that's a separate concern). Arguably copyright shouldn't cover such indirect forms of copying, but it does.
Similarly, if I open a GPL'd.C in one terminal and type the contents into an editor in a 2nd term, I'm still probably infringing (although the imperfect manual copying means I'll be much harder to catch)
Microsoft don't have any kind of history of using patents badly.
Two counterexamples that spring to mind: Microsoft blocked alternative, compatible implementations of it's extended-FAT filesystem by patenting their long-filename technique. And also they attempted to block other people implementing decent LCD fonts by patenting a subpixel rendering technique that had been invented before Billy Gates even dropped out of college.
Um, wrong. Israel is our shining star in the mideast: a sliver of democracy and freedom in a sea of backwards radicalism and militancy.
If Israel were a democracy, you might have a point. But unfortunately, as long as they disenfrachise non-Jews born inside their territory, the word "democracy" doesn't apply.
Once you talk government, you talk first amendment.
Wrong! That's almost as bad as the students in this story. The first amendement does not apply to "government". It only restricts what the federal Congress can do, and has no effect on state or local government officials:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press
What we have here is a failure to communicate. You've got different vocabularies. "Operational" to you means "basically works, most of the time" (Microsoft Windows XP, for example, is "operational").
But in a military procurement context, "operational" means they can use it in actual... operations, which are dangerous missions. The standards are much higher. Even the very Wikipedia page you cite disagrees with you: it plainly says that the F-22 became Operational in Oct 2004, not 2003.
Maybe you do, but most users don't. Less than 30% click next page.
And what percentage of users can write regular expressions? Probably less than 0.3%, so what's the problem?
Anyway, your thesis that regexps will lead to longer result lists is incorrect. If I really want to search for "Windows (95|98)", today my only recourse is to enter "Microsoft Windows" and then manually skip the (majority) of irrelevant hits, or to search for both "Windows 95" and "Windows 98", then manually unify the two returned lists.
Regexps in this case would give me search results that are both shorter and more pertinent.
You might note several decades of steady growth was managed without DRM.
That guy doesn't understand English fully. She thinks "DRM" is a synonym for "copy protection", which is something that PC game publishers have used in some form or another for most of their industry's lifetime.
Nope. Fact #2 is flat-out wrong: The Declaration of Ind was not written by any government- it was published by a group of rebel guerrilas.
Facts #1 and #3 are true but inappropriate, because if today's copyright law had existed back then, the Declaration would've been implicitly copyrighted, and it would've never expired (since the USA doesn't allow copyright to expire anymore)
does it say you can't download? I thought it said you couldn't upload.....
The law doesn't use the word "upload" or "download" (those would be excessively specific). What it does say is that you can't "copy" or "distribute".
Uploading is a form of distributing, and both downloading and uploading are a form of copying. Therefore, without permission, they're both illegal, uploading doubly so.
If a program is loaded into RAM in order to be executed, it is not the Owner of Copy who is doing this, but the computer
That's an insane interpretation. For legal purposes, machines and computers have no willpower, and are instead just tools of people who actually do things. That claim makes almost as much sense as a murderer excusing himself with: "I didn't kill anyone! Only my rifle did, so I didn't break any laws!"
Seriously, if temporary "internal" processing by a computer or a program in order to run a program is considered "copying", then there's not much legal software around
Note that in the UK, that interpretation is correct. Britons cannot legally execute software without the copyright holder explicitly granting license to load it into RAM and CPU registers.
The BSA is a private organization, no? If they're entirly privatly funded, I don't see any reason to force them to accept anyone.
No, the BSA is quasi-governmental, and indeed, that is the reason WHY they're officially anti-homosexual. They are a feeder organization for the USA Military (the antithesis of private), and thus inherit it's policy against homosexual membership.
(The BSA also forbids atheist membership, although that fact is much less reported- so much that individual sub-groups probably ignore it on occasion)
Then, determine if "... additional alternating-hand keystrokes speed up the QWERTY layout."
That analogy is equally as valid as claiming that because cars are slower than airplanes, they're slower than horses too.
If you read the comparison again, it was simply stating that Qwerty is faster than ALPHABETIC layouts, which is obviously true. At the time qwerty was invented, there was no dvorak, and the competitors were no better (and usually tremendously worse, like ABCDEF)
Re:Hi I use IRC legitimately for business purposes
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Is IRC All Bad?
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· Score: 1
Hold a picture of one of my singers to the original. Is there any likeness?
My PC office doesn't much resemble a 12-screen multiplex, but downloading Lemony Snicket handicam AVIs is still illegal.
there's a section of the copyright law that deals specifically with tribute bands
What country? Not the USA or UK, for sure.
3. Bullshit, there's a section of the copyright law that deals specifically with tribute bands in reference to parody.
Tribute bands are not parody, by definition. Those Madonna-men may be parody if they are intentionally funny, but in that case, they aren't a "tribute". The words "tribute" and "parody" just don't cooperate- one is approving and infringing, the other disapproving and noninfringing. The Van Halen guys are almost certainly required to pay (although hard rock is quite open to parody, I doubt that is their intent)
4. I was referring to the tracks. Most often karaoke companies have to "reverse engineer" a song, put it to musical notation, then have a studio band play it.
Why do they bother to "reverse engineer"? The cost of buying the sheet music is trivial compared to licensing the permission to use it. (The music may need to be seriously modified to be appropriate for inexpert singers, though). Karaoke companies are definately paying Harry Browne, or they'd have already been sued into bankrupcy.
Why should the original artist get a cut of that?
That word "should" means you're asking a question about whether the existing law is good or bad. That's a valid concern, but it's irrelevant to the fact that the law, as it is written today, makes your actions illegal.
I would agree that copyright protection is too broad and strict, but just because I think a law is unfair doesn't allow me to pretend they don't exist. Lots of people think their marijuana habits are harmless- but even if they're right, it's still illegal.
Two simple extensions to the BitTorrent protocol would eliminate the need for trackers:
No, that won't work. (Prehaps you elided major bits in the service of brevity...)
Allow peers to download the torrent from one another
That part could function, but would be of low utility. It might be fun to see what other files some host is seeding, but that won't get you very far.
Allow peers to exchange lists of neighbours
There is no such thing as a "neighbor" in bittorrent. There are "peers" and "seeds" (which are just peers at 100%). But merely listing off the other peers someone knows won't solve anything- after all, today's peers aren't aware of any peers aside from those working on the exact same *.torrent file. (In the case of 2nd-generation clients like Azurues, the process is aware of all torrents to which that user is connected. That increases the graph connectedness, but not by much)
For the neighbours list to be at all interesting, there would have to be a new mechanism added to maintain a portion of a dynamic mesh- each peer must strive to be aware of at least ~10 other random peers, distinct from those working on the same download. That's new code unlike anything already in bittorrent. Far more important than writing that code is convincing users to run it (instead of just stripping their clients down to the original bittorrent functionality). If I author a 100% legal file (like a Knoppix ISO), my goal is in seeing that file get maximum distribution. I do NOT want to devote my bandwidth and CPU resources to maintaining a dynamic global mesh whose primary utility is to copyright infringers evading prosecution. (If they weren't afraid of government suppression, then the same functions could be accomplished more efficiently with centralized websites, like the just-terminated Supernova)
And then, even if a (nearly) fully-connected global mesh of bittorrent peers is created, you still haven't outlined any searching function. A peer could search for a file by exhaustively walking the mesh and downloading every single *.torrent for pattern-matching, but that's monstrously inefficient. Far better searching could be added with a few new message types, but it would require much time and bandwidth; easily more bandwidth than the actual contents of the shared files! (Indeed, the biggest technical challenge to the Gnutella protocol was how to optimize that searching- a job that was neither easy, nor wholely successful) A strongly legal user (such as a corporation distributing patches for their commercial software) will not enjoy a continual flood of search requests for Paris Hilton videos. "Our customers can find our torrent on our web page! Why would we even want searching in the protocol? I'll have to check with legal, but I don't think we can install this P2P stuff..."
P2p filesharing apps have 3 features that can be peerified: 0. Mesh maintenance 1. Filename searching 2. File content transfer
The Kazaa and Gnutella networks function because the same program does all 3, and end-users have little ability to selectively disable (One can't download without forwarding some search requests). BitTorrent only implements one of those features, rendering it simpler and more elegant (especially if you follow the Unix design philosophy. "Do one thing & do it well"). For (legal|illegal) torrents, the first 2 functions are handled by (google.com|piratebay.org).
It would be worthwhile (at least for intellectual satisfaction) to create a P2P solution to the first 2 functions as a bittorrent complement, but such would be best done in a separate application. It should sit in the taskbar updating the mesh, pop up a window to search for a file, and then hand off the actual downloading to the user's favorite bittorrent client. ("CRL invoking BT")
Re:Hi I use IRC legitimately for business purposes
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Is IRC All Bad?
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· Score: 2, Informative
My bandwidth is sponsored by AOL/TW since i'm like the only guy not broadcasting porn or pirated movies.
a. I define karaoke as a parody, and im sure others would agree with me.
While it's true that few people would enjoy ripping karaoke versions of Garth Brooks for their IPods, it certainly isn't legal parody.
b. Do tribute bands pay licensing fee's?
Absolutely! But that money goes to a different set of agencies, primarily Harry Fox.
c. Karaoke tracks are never performed by the original artists, why are they getting royaltees for music they do not produce?
That's an ambiguous statement. You might've meant that your singers are volunteers who give permission to stream their singing, but there's still the instrumental track you're infringing on. Those instrumentals may or may not be by the first people to publish that song, but even cover bands are original in some respect. (A first generation copy is "more original" than ones copied from it, etc)
As to why the big-name performers get more money than the band who actually made the karaoke CDs, that's a valid objection. It's really just a matter of bookkeeping overhead- it would be too hard for you to submit a list of all songs you've streamed over the year, so they just average it out and assume your playlist mirrors the Billboard 200. For more info, jwz wrote a complete article. (It's on webcasting, which you're still doing, even though you overlay other peoples' vocals)
I'm one of only 2 in the world doing this.
There is no such thing as "legality through obscurity". Sure, the rareness of the activity means you are unlikely to be the target of a lawsuit, but it doesn't mean you can honestly describe your site as a "legal use" for statistical analysis of a protocol.
Slashdot Mirror
I realized the subtitles were horrifically bad translations
You have no way of knowing that. (Unless you speak Japanese to make a real comparison with the original).
and sounding like real dialog.
Since subtitles are non-auditory, they by definition do not "sound" like anything. And they shouldn't. They're meant for you to get the literal meaning, nothing more.
but the only Japanese cartoon
Metropolis was not a CARicature tune. It also was an inferior effort (even the century-old original was better).
To expand more accurately on that
No, you are being less accurate. While many fansubbers abide by such a code, not all of them do, and it's dishonest to claim otherwise.
at which point they halt translation/distribution
That bit is especially misleading. The function of fansubbers is (obviously) to create subtitles. Distribution isn't their forte; P2p systems can already keep spreading the files around better than their own servers ever could. They have no way to withdraw the file after release.
The fansubbers who released Ghost In The Shell epsidoes, for example, knew full well that the series would be licensed for USA distribution extremely quickly, and also that removing episodes from their own servers would in no way slow the distribution once it had started.
The "fansubber's code" is a way to pretend lawfullness. Decades ago, when anime releases to outside Japan were rare, it was plausible for them to claim to be distributing something that viewers could get in no other way. Today, the anime market is international, and they can't keep on pretending that "Lost Exile" and "Wolf's Rain" aren't in negotations with Cartoon Network from before they even air in Japan.
Oh wait Congress sends federal funds to local schools.
In the event that the administrator is acting as an agent of Congress, then the instructions Congress can give him are indeed limited by the first amendment. However, the specific comment to which I was responding was: "Once you talk government, you talk first amendment", and it is emphatically false.
The first amendment ONLY applies to the federal government. There are other levels of government that are completely immune to it.
In your view, the police department could walk in to the local newspaper
No. In my view, the police department is a function of state government, and the state constitution provides it's own promise of freedom of speech completely separate from the first amendment of the national constitution.
Indeed, the fact that each state independently created it's own Freedom of Speech right proves that I'm correct: because if the national Constitution's Bill of Rights applied to all levels of government, there would've been no need for the states to provide a Bill of Rights as well! It'd have been redundant.
Section 1 of the the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Nothing you quoted there contradicts me in anyway. No state shall abridge those protections... the protection is specifically that "Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech"... therefore states cannot make a law allowing Congress to abridge freedom of speech. But the state can still do so on its own, because the Constitution has no protection against it.
Note that in the Bill of Rights, only 1 of the 10 amendments applies to national, state, and local governments equally: the right to bear arms cannot be infringed by anyone. All the other rights are protected solely from infringement by the federal Congres.
Note further that most states of the USA provide their own guarantee of freedom of the press, but this is not "the First Amendement". In New York, for example, it's the eigth amendment.
I thought the latter was apple?
Apple was the original owner of a patent which Microsoft attempted to abuse.
Hard to argue that you're costing a company sales when they arent providing that product.
Nope. That's actually an easy argument: The company WILL someday soon sell its DVDs in the USA, so distributing fansubs earlier will cut into their future sales.
Back in the good-ole days of VHS fansubbing in the 1980s, that was an unlikely event. But today, if an anime has any substantial appeal to Americans, it'll certainly get an international DVD release inside of two years. (Indeed, anime companies are making the USA market a critical part of their business plans. Some anime, like Big-O, has been renewed for new episodes solely on the strength of USA viewership)
For some kinds of show, that isn't true: there are genres whose international appeal is to tiny to support a translated release, and there are also high-profit kids' shows (like Pokemon*) where the audience won't be interested in reading subtitles (especially on TV).
But for many things that get fansubbed today, neither of those excuses works. Prehaps the strongest example is "Ghost In The Shell", an expensive scifi action series that's still being broadcast in Japan, and which already has DVD and televised releases in the USA. Even back in pre-production 3 years ago, this was a tremendously famous series, and it was obvious there would be a major world-wide market. Yet fansubbers went ahead, set their VCRs, and FTPed raws and subs around the world.
* In the case of childrens' shows, there is a further motivation for the producers to condone fansubbing: the shows themselves are usually "toyetic", existing primarily as 22-minute advertisements for toys and branded merchanise. A vendor can hardly argue against free ad time...
When was the last time you saw the pilot or the finale of a show in rerun?
That doesn't support your position. Pilots and finales are rare in syndication because (a) they are often double-length and won't fit in normal timeslots, (b) they are the (naturally) creation or destruction of situations, and can't be mixed around in random order like all the other episodes.
Cut and paste is necessary to infringe on copyright,
.C in one terminal and type the contents into an editor in a 2nd term, I'm still probably infringing (although the imperfect manual copying means I'll be much harder to catch)
No. Suppose I watched 1989's "Batman" movie, and then a decade later draw a comic strip featuring Batman and Catwoman in a new crime-fighting adventure of my own imagining. Even though no specific images or sounds were exactly copied from the film, my comic is still a violation of copyright owned by the Bob Kane estate. (It's also a trademark infringement, but that's a separate concern). Arguably copyright shouldn't cover such indirect forms of copying, but it does.
Similarly, if I open a GPL'd
Microsoft don't have any kind of history of using patents badly.
Two counterexamples that spring to mind: Microsoft blocked alternative, compatible implementations of it's extended-FAT filesystem by patenting their long-filename technique. And also they attempted to block other people implementing decent LCD fonts by patenting a subpixel rendering technique that had been invented before Billy Gates even dropped out of college.
They are rarely used, they generally increase the size of the result set, and they increase the workload substantially.
Wow, self-contradiction within the scope of a single sentence. If they're "rarely used", then they can't possibly increase workload very much,
Um, wrong. Israel is our shining star in the mideast: a sliver of democracy and freedom in a sea of backwards radicalism and militancy.
If Israel were a democracy, you might have a point. But unfortunately, as long as they disenfrachise non-Jews born inside their territory, the word "democracy" doesn't apply.
Wrong! That's almost as bad as the students in this story. The first amendement does not apply to "government". It only restricts what the federal Congress can do, and has no effect on state or local government officials:
As I said, the F-22 is already operational.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. You've got different vocabularies. "Operational" to you means "basically works, most of the time" (Microsoft Windows XP, for example, is "operational").
But in a military procurement context, "operational" means they can use it in actual... operations, which are dangerous missions. The standards are much higher. Even the very Wikipedia page you cite disagrees with you: it plainly says that the F-22 became Operational in Oct 2004, not 2003.
Maybe you do, but most users don't. Less than 30% click next page.
And what percentage of users can write regular expressions? Probably less than 0.3%, so what's the problem?
Anyway, your thesis that regexps will lead to longer result lists is incorrect. If I really want to search for "Windows (95|98)", today my only recourse is to enter "Microsoft Windows" and then manually skip the (majority) of irrelevant hits, or to search for both "Windows 95" and "Windows 98", then manually unify the two returned lists.
Regexps in this case would give me search results that are both shorter and more pertinent.
You might note several decades of steady growth was managed without DRM.
That guy doesn't understand English fully. She thinks "DRM" is a synonym for "copy protection", which is something that PC game publishers have used in some form or another for most of their industry's lifetime.
That analogy doesn't work:
Nope. Fact #2 is flat-out wrong: The Declaration of Ind was not written by any government- it was published by a group of rebel guerrilas.
Facts #1 and #3 are true but inappropriate, because if today's copyright law had existed back then, the Declaration would've been implicitly copyrighted, and it would've never expired (since the USA doesn't allow copyright to expire anymore)
In no way was it intended to make it "illegal" to read a book without a license.
Funny, because back in 1602 when copyright was invented, that was EXACTLY what is was meant for...
does it say you can't download? I thought it said you couldn't upload.....
The law doesn't use the word "upload" or "download" (those would be excessively specific). What it does say is that you can't "copy" or "distribute".
Uploading is a form of distributing, and both downloading and uploading are a form of copying. Therefore, without permission, they're both illegal, uploading doubly so.
If a program is loaded into RAM in order to be executed, it is not the Owner of Copy who is doing this, but the computer
That's an insane interpretation. For legal purposes, machines and computers have no willpower, and are instead just tools of people who actually do things. That claim makes almost as much sense as a murderer excusing himself with: "I didn't kill anyone! Only my rifle did, so I didn't break any laws!"
Seriously, if temporary "internal" processing by a computer or a program in order to run a program is considered "copying", then there's not much legal software around
Note that in the UK, that interpretation is correct. Britons cannot legally execute software without the copyright holder explicitly granting license to load it into RAM and CPU registers.
The BSA is a private organization, no? If they're entirly privatly funded, I don't see any reason to force them to accept anyone.
No, the BSA is quasi-governmental, and indeed, that is the reason WHY they're officially anti-homosexual. They are a feeder organization for the USA Military (the antithesis of private), and thus inherit it's policy against homosexual membership.
(The BSA also forbids atheist membership, although that fact is much less reported- so much that individual sub-groups probably ignore it on occasion)
Then, determine if "... additional alternating-hand keystrokes speed up the QWERTY layout."
That analogy is equally as valid as claiming that because cars are slower than airplanes, they're slower than horses too.
If you read the comparison again, it was simply stating that Qwerty is faster than ALPHABETIC layouts, which is obviously true. At the time qwerty was invented, there was no dvorak, and the competitors were no better (and usually tremendously worse, like ABCDEF)
Hold a picture of one of my singers to the original. Is there any likeness?
My PC office doesn't much resemble a 12-screen multiplex, but downloading Lemony Snicket handicam AVIs is still illegal.
there's a section of the copyright law that deals specifically with tribute bands
What country? Not the USA or UK, for sure.
3. Bullshit, there's a section of the copyright law that deals specifically with tribute bands in reference to parody.
Tribute bands are not parody, by definition. Those Madonna-men may be parody if they are intentionally funny, but in that case, they aren't a "tribute". The words "tribute" and "parody" just don't cooperate- one is approving and infringing, the other disapproving and noninfringing. The Van Halen guys are almost certainly required to pay (although hard rock is quite open to parody, I doubt that is their intent)
4. I was referring to the tracks. Most often karaoke companies have to "reverse engineer" a song, put it to musical notation, then have a studio band play it.
Why do they bother to "reverse engineer"? The cost of buying the sheet music is trivial compared to licensing the permission to use it. (The music may need to be seriously modified to be appropriate for inexpert singers, though). Karaoke companies are definately paying Harry Browne, or they'd have already been sued into bankrupcy.
Why should the original artist get a cut of that?
That word "should" means you're asking a question about whether the existing law is good or bad. That's a valid concern, but it's irrelevant to the fact that the law, as it is written today, makes your actions illegal.
I would agree that copyright protection is too broad and strict, but just because I think a law is unfair doesn't allow me to pretend they don't exist. Lots of people think their marijuana habits are harmless- but even if they're right, it's still illegal.
Two simple extensions to the BitTorrent protocol would eliminate the need for trackers:
No, that won't work. (Prehaps you elided major bits in the service of brevity...)
Allow peers to download the torrent from one another
That part could function, but would be of low utility. It might be fun to see what other files some host is seeding, but that won't get you very far.
Allow peers to exchange lists of neighbours
There is no such thing as a "neighbor" in bittorrent. There are "peers" and "seeds" (which are just peers at 100%). But merely listing off the other peers someone knows won't solve anything- after all, today's peers aren't aware of any peers aside from those working on the exact same *.torrent file. (In the case of 2nd-generation clients like Azurues, the process is aware of all torrents to which that user is connected. That increases the graph connectedness, but not by much)
For the neighbours list to be at all interesting, there would have to be a new mechanism added to maintain a portion of a dynamic mesh- each peer must strive to be aware of at least ~10 other random peers, distinct from those working on the same download. That's new code unlike anything already in bittorrent. Far more important than writing that code is convincing users to run it (instead of just stripping their clients down to the original bittorrent functionality). If I author a 100% legal file (like a Knoppix ISO), my goal is in seeing that file get maximum distribution. I do NOT want to devote my bandwidth and CPU resources to maintaining a dynamic global mesh whose primary utility is to copyright infringers evading prosecution. (If they weren't afraid of government suppression, then the same functions could be accomplished more efficiently with centralized websites, like the just-terminated Supernova)
And then, even if a (nearly) fully-connected global mesh of bittorrent peers is created, you still haven't outlined any searching function. A peer could search for a file by exhaustively walking the mesh and downloading every single *.torrent for pattern-matching, but that's monstrously inefficient. Far better searching could be added with a few new message types, but it would require much time and bandwidth; easily more bandwidth than the actual contents of the shared files! (Indeed, the biggest technical challenge to the Gnutella protocol was how to optimize that searching- a job that was neither easy, nor wholely successful) A strongly legal user (such as a corporation distributing patches for their commercial software) will not enjoy a continual flood of search requests for Paris Hilton videos. "Our customers can find our torrent on our web page! Why would we even want searching in the protocol? I'll have to check with legal, but I don't think we can install this P2P stuff..."
P2p filesharing apps have 3 features that can be peerified:
0. Mesh maintenance
1. Filename searching
2. File content transfer
The Kazaa and Gnutella networks function because the same program does all 3, and end-users have little ability to selectively disable (One can't download without forwarding some search requests). BitTorrent only implements one of those features, rendering it simpler and more elegant (especially if you follow the Unix design philosophy. "Do one thing & do it well"). For (legal|illegal) torrents, the first 2 functions are handled by (google.com|piratebay.org).
It would be worthwhile (at least for intellectual satisfaction) to create a P2P solution to the first 2 functions as a bittorrent complement, but such would be best done in a separate application. It should sit in the taskbar updating the mesh, pop up a window to search for a file, and then hand off the actual downloading to the user's favorite bittorrent client. ("CRL invoking BT")
My bandwidth is sponsored by AOL/TW since i'm like the only guy not broadcasting porn or pirated movies.
Oh, I thought it was sponsored by viewers like you.
a. I define karaoke as a parody, and im sure others would agree with me.
While it's true that few people would enjoy ripping karaoke versions of Garth Brooks for their IPods, it certainly isn't legal parody.
b. Do tribute bands pay licensing fee's?
Absolutely! But that money goes to a different set of agencies, primarily Harry Fox.
c. Karaoke tracks are never performed by the original artists, why are they getting royaltees for music they do not produce?
That's an ambiguous statement. You might've meant that your singers are volunteers who give permission to stream their singing, but there's still the instrumental track you're infringing on. Those instrumentals may or may not be by the first people to publish that song, but even cover bands are original in some respect. (A first generation copy is "more original" than ones copied from it, etc)
As to why the big-name performers get more money than the band who actually made the karaoke CDs, that's a valid objection. It's really just a matter of bookkeeping overhead- it would be too hard for you to submit a list of all songs you've streamed over the year, so they just average it out and assume your playlist mirrors the Billboard 200. For more info, jwz wrote a complete article. (It's on webcasting, which you're still doing, even though you overlay other peoples' vocals)
I'm one of only 2 in the world doing this.
There is no such thing as "legality through obscurity". Sure, the rareness of the activity means you are unlikely to be the target of a lawsuit, but it doesn't mean you can honestly describe your site as a "legal use" for statistical analysis of a protocol.