"Of course, when artists start getting payment from legal users that presume compensation for when the devices are used for piracy, they're more or less waiving their moral claim to any damages for piracy since they've already been paid for that." Not really. It depends how the law is written.
What we have a here is a case where morality and laws have fallen out of sync yet again...
The problem is that Europe is starting to develop a hare-trigger for banning US imports. Afterall, bird flu in one US state does not equate to bird flu being found from coast-to-coast. It'd be the equal of us declaring because a problem was found in Spain that we'd cut off imports of that item for all of Europe... the other countries would have a problem with that.
See, the EU is walking a fine line between being "The United States of Europe" and being distinct nations. When it's desirable to be many nations, like at the UN, they don't want to give up their individual seats, but they also don't want the USA sending enough people to fill 50 seats either. However, when its desirable to only be counted once, they insist on doing so as well.
The EU's a rather new entity on the world stage and therefore nobody's sure exactly what to do with it yet. The EU is of course looking for advantages wherever possible...
Unfortunately... that's never how the law works. Just because they've gotten a tax on recording media because of the possible pirate use doesn't mean the labels are not going to persue the pirates anyway.
Of course, all of this is being done in the name of the artist, despite the fact that they're not the ones actually getting this money.
One thing's that a bit unclear to me is who actually owes this money. Is it really Apple's responsiblity as the maker of the devices, or shouldn't it be the store's since they're the one who set the actual selling price?
Afterall, if the tax is due based on the sale price, any discounts would lower that price.
Well, it's the law, fair or unfair Apple needs to pay up. Of course, when artists start getting payment from legal users that presume compensation for when the devices are used for piracy, they're more or less waiving their moral claim to any damages for piracy since they've already been paid for that.
I think the problem is that the Internet is using all sorts of technologies that allow things to be misrepresented... the basic IP protocol was written in an era where every other host on the Internet could presumed to be somewhat friendly, since everyone was either part of the US Government or an academic who was affiliated with a univeristy. Any abusers of the Internet could be identified and thrown out.
Now, absolutely every weakness is being found and exploited. The Internet just wasn't designed for this...
Unfortunately, the open-source SSL systems contribute to this problem...
Most of them let you do a functionally okay SSL certificate without having to pay a root certificate authority. However, that means you're going to get the "sorta okay" certificate message poping up, with the user being told that the certificate is valid but there's no certifying authority behind it. As a result, the user is trained to click "Yes" to that box, and is conditioned to ignore such errors...
The "basic cable" model is being enforced by the content providers, not the signal distributors. They'd gladly package their channels like that, but every content provider insists that their channel be in the cheapest level of pay-channel service. That's why they have to have a "basic" tier that has 70 channels. You might only care about 10, but for every person it's a different 10 channels.
You can't get your 10 favorite channels for just $9.99... the owners of your 10 channels each have their own group of channels they all want to throw at you, and make you pay for them even if you never watch...
What happened was that MuchMusic USA was really Comcast's Rainbow Media division buying the rights to the Canadian MuchMusic channel's original programing, and then making a few original programs to cover up the holes left from when MuchMusic simulcasts some of the American MTV programs. (There is no MTV network in Canada.)
Last year, Comcast decided not to renew the agreement. MuchMusic USA therefore lost its brand idenity and the Canadian shows, and the resulting station became Fuse.
Comedy Central used to operate in a very funny place in corperate America. It all came from the history of the place.
See, in the early 90's, at about the same time, Viacom's MTV Networks created a channel called Ha! and Time Warner's HBO Networks created a channel called The Comedy Channel. The stations were more or less redundant to each other, and neither could get any traction at getting onto cable systems since digital cable hadn't come out yet and space was tight. The system owners were mostly waiting for one of the two to fold. As a result, the two stations merged into what became Comedy Central which was owned by an entity called Comedy Partners Inc. that was half owned by Time Warner and half owned by Viacom.
So, for much of the station's glory days, they had the resources of being owned by a big company, but when they screwed up it wasn't exactly clear which set of executives were suposed to yell at them. They could bash Viacom and get AOL/Time Warner to stand up for them, they could bash AOL and get Viacom to stand up for them. They basically had free domain to make fun of anything.
But, that changed last year when Time Warner who needed the cash sold their 50% interest to Viacom. Comedy Central got folded into the Viacom family, and that means they're now part of MTV Networks and get pulled into these silly megacompany things that they used to not have to be involved in... too bad.
Viacom just won't go for that. Their terms are their terms and they are NOT flexible at all with them. The signal providers must put all of Viacom's big-name channels in their lowest tier of pay-channel service, and pay the rates Viacom wants to charge per subscriber for them.
The distributors are not being given a line item veto. They must accept the entire package, or get none of it. Right now, Echostar's calling that bluff and buying none of it.
It's a standoff all right... the only questions are how long this will go on before somebody blinks, and which side will it be?
It's impossible to tell in advance what these contracts are going to be worth. In short, these people paid for any updates to Windows in 2004 or 2005 on the assumption that there would be one. Microsoft never promised one, but they hinted that Longhorn should be ready by then, and it's been Microsoft's habit to release a new OS every two or three years.
Well, sorry, no new release. Nobody promised one, they just assumed like fools that there'd be one. Ton of money wasted. Oops.
Thing is, how can Microsoft ever sell these subscriptions again to companies that paid and got nothing?
It's not that easy to dust with a windshield wiper. We're talking about mostly dirt here, not water.
So, while it seems simple to just brush it off, they'd need something more complex than a simple windshield wiper... and a moist cloth is just too tall an order for Mars:)
I disagree COMPLETELY. If your are not the subject of an investigation, or not sending/receiving money from someone who is, I think what you do with YOUR MONEY is no business of the government's.
Truthfully, PayPal isn't that good at insulating you from people you don't trust. As demonstrated too many times, somebody can input into their PayPal account with a credit card, send the money to you, then initiate a chargeback to the credit card which strips the money out of your account.
Its worth noting that they don't freeze just any account.
Of course, any fraudster is going to claim "I didn't do it!" and demand that PayPal send him his money immediately when he's found out and his account is frozen.
PayPal started as a very fast-and-loose operation in the early days of the Internet. Money transfer seems to be so simple an idea, but it's a highly regulated industry to prevent fraud and so that large transfers of money draw the attention of law enforcement just because that can help in the locating of drug dealers and terrorists... if somebody's moving thousands of dollars for no apparent reason, it at least deserves being looked into.
When eBay got involved, they started cleaning up some of PayPal's worst policies, but there's still a few more that need tweaking, and eBay has inherited a lot of trouble from the laws PayPal broke in the late 90s. I'm glad they're starting to settle these things...
I thought it was funny when MTV announced that videos like Britney Spears' Toxic would only be played during late night hours. The late night block is the only time when they might play videos all the way through anyway...
Depending on what model of reciever you're using, what you're experiencing is the "feature" in which your receiver will add any channel that starts a new stream that didn't use to be there, whether you subscribe to it or not. You like this when a 2nd ESPN channel pops up at number 210 in order to show you the other game that they're feeding to areas that were blacked out from the main game. (If you're not local to either game, you get to see both... pretty cool.) You of course don't like that when a shopping channel that only exists on weekends comes into being, every weekend it'll restart its stream and get added.
The workaround is simply to use a different list. Most recievers support more than one channel list, and it's only the one marked "Family" that has this feature. Just make another list your own and you'll be all set.
When local stations have opted-out of being on Dish Network, the response has been to make the local channel package in that area $1 cheaper for each missing network station.
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"Of course, when artists start getting payment from legal users that presume compensation for when the devices are used for piracy, they're more or less waiving their moral claim to any damages for piracy since they've already been paid for that." Not really. It depends how the law is written.
What we have a here is a case where morality and laws have fallen out of sync yet again...
Excellent. So we've just settled a lot of debates like gay marriage, the Patriot Act, DMCA, etc, etc.
After all, the law is the law.
Whatever is the current law is the current law and has to be followed. However, the law is always subject to change...
The problem is that Europe is starting to develop a hare-trigger for banning US imports. Afterall, bird flu in one US state does not equate to bird flu being found from coast-to-coast. It'd be the equal of us declaring because a problem was found in Spain that we'd cut off imports of that item for all of Europe... the other countries would have a problem with that.
See, the EU is walking a fine line between being "The United States of Europe" and being distinct nations. When it's desirable to be many nations, like at the UN, they don't want to give up their individual seats, but they also don't want the USA sending enough people to fill 50 seats either. However, when its desirable to only be counted once, they insist on doing so as well.
The EU's a rather new entity on the world stage and therefore nobody's sure exactly what to do with it yet. The EU is of course looking for advantages wherever possible...
Unfortunately... that's never how the law works. Just because they've gotten a tax on recording media because of the possible pirate use doesn't mean the labels are not going to persue the pirates anyway.
Of course, all of this is being done in the name of the artist, despite the fact that they're not the ones actually getting this money.
Or, maybe more viable, what if we call it a computer part? Does the French law say every HD must be taxed whether it's used for music or data?
One thing's that a bit unclear to me is who actually owes this money. Is it really Apple's responsiblity as the maker of the devices, or shouldn't it be the store's since they're the one who set the actual selling price?
Afterall, if the tax is due based on the sale price, any discounts would lower that price.
Well, it's the law, fair or unfair Apple needs to pay up. Of course, when artists start getting payment from legal users that presume compensation for when the devices are used for piracy, they're more or less waiving their moral claim to any damages for piracy since they've already been paid for that.
I think the problem is that the Internet is using all sorts of technologies that allow things to be misrepresented... the basic IP protocol was written in an era where every other host on the Internet could presumed to be somewhat friendly, since everyone was either part of the US Government or an academic who was affiliated with a univeristy. Any abusers of the Internet could be identified and thrown out.
Now, absolutely every weakness is being found and exploited. The Internet just wasn't designed for this...
Or worse yet... the people who have the root passwords to the server walk off with the data with no hacking needed.
Unfortunately, the open-source SSL systems contribute to this problem...
Most of them let you do a functionally okay SSL certificate without having to pay a root certificate authority. However, that means you're going to get the "sorta okay" certificate message poping up, with the user being told that the certificate is valid but there's no certifying authority behind it. As a result, the user is trained to click "Yes" to that box, and is conditioned to ignore such errors...
The "basic cable" model is being enforced by the content providers, not the signal distributors. They'd gladly package their channels like that, but every content provider insists that their channel be in the cheapest level of pay-channel service. That's why they have to have a "basic" tier that has 70 channels. You might only care about 10, but for every person it's a different 10 channels.
You can't get your 10 favorite channels for just $9.99... the owners of your 10 channels each have their own group of channels they all want to throw at you, and make you pay for them even if you never watch...
What happened was that MuchMusic USA was really Comcast's Rainbow Media division buying the rights to the Canadian MuchMusic channel's original programing, and then making a few original programs to cover up the holes left from when MuchMusic simulcasts some of the American MTV programs. (There is no MTV network in Canada.)
Last year, Comcast decided not to renew the agreement. MuchMusic USA therefore lost its brand idenity and the Canadian shows, and the resulting station became Fuse.
Comedy Central used to operate in a very funny place in corperate America. It all came from the history of the place.
See, in the early 90's, at about the same time, Viacom's MTV Networks created a channel called Ha! and Time Warner's HBO Networks created a channel called The Comedy Channel. The stations were more or less redundant to each other, and neither could get any traction at getting onto cable systems since digital cable hadn't come out yet and space was tight. The system owners were mostly waiting for one of the two to fold. As a result, the two stations merged into what became Comedy Central which was owned by an entity called Comedy Partners Inc. that was half owned by Time Warner and half owned by Viacom.
So, for much of the station's glory days, they had the resources of being owned by a big company, but when they screwed up it wasn't exactly clear which set of executives were suposed to yell at them. They could bash Viacom and get AOL/Time Warner to stand up for them, they could bash AOL and get Viacom to stand up for them. They basically had free domain to make fun of anything.
But, that changed last year when Time Warner who needed the cash sold their 50% interest to Viacom. Comedy Central got folded into the Viacom family, and that means they're now part of MTV Networks and get pulled into these silly megacompany things that they used to not have to be involved in... too bad.
You must be new here. Viacom is evil, but CBS and Comedy Central are cool when the put on shows we like to watch.
The fact that Viacom, CBS and Comedy Central are all the same entity is something that is very confusing to the average Slashdot poster...
Viacom just won't go for that. Their terms are their terms and they are NOT flexible at all with them. The signal providers must put all of Viacom's big-name channels in their lowest tier of pay-channel service, and pay the rates Viacom wants to charge per subscriber for them.
The distributors are not being given a line item veto. They must accept the entire package, or get none of it. Right now, Echostar's calling that bluff and buying none of it.
It's a standoff all right... the only questions are how long this will go on before somebody blinks, and which side will it be?
It's impossible to tell in advance what these contracts are going to be worth. In short, these people paid for any updates to Windows in 2004 or 2005 on the assumption that there would be one. Microsoft never promised one, but they hinted that Longhorn should be ready by then, and it's been Microsoft's habit to release a new OS every two or three years.
Well, sorry, no new release. Nobody promised one, they just assumed like fools that there'd be one. Ton of money wasted. Oops.
Thing is, how can Microsoft ever sell these subscriptions again to companies that paid and got nothing?
It's not that easy to dust with a windshield wiper. We're talking about mostly dirt here, not water.
:)
So, while it seems simple to just brush it off, they'd need something more complex than a simple windshield wiper... and a moist cloth is just too tall an order for Mars
I disagree COMPLETELY. If your are not the subject of an investigation, or not sending/receiving money from someone who is, I think what you do with YOUR MONEY is no business of the government's.
Have you done your taxes yet?
Truthfully, PayPal isn't that good at insulating you from people you don't trust. As demonstrated too many times, somebody can input into their PayPal account with a credit card, send the money to you, then initiate a chargeback to the credit card which strips the money out of your account.
Such is the danger with credit cards... CC transactions can be reversed, cash doesn't allow that.
Its worth noting that they don't freeze just any account.
Of course, any fraudster is going to claim "I didn't do it!" and demand that PayPal send him his money immediately when he's found out and his account is frozen.
PayPal started as a very fast-and-loose operation in the early days of the Internet. Money transfer seems to be so simple an idea, but it's a highly regulated industry to prevent fraud and so that large transfers of money draw the attention of law enforcement just because that can help in the locating of drug dealers and terrorists... if somebody's moving thousands of dollars for no apparent reason, it at least deserves being looked into.
When eBay got involved, they started cleaning up some of PayPal's worst policies, but there's still a few more that need tweaking, and eBay has inherited a lot of trouble from the laws PayPal broke in the late 90s. I'm glad they're starting to settle these things...
I thought it was funny when MTV announced that videos like Britney Spears' Toxic would only be played during late night hours. The late night block is the only time when they might play videos all the way through anyway...
Depending on what model of reciever you're using, what you're experiencing is the "feature" in which your receiver will add any channel that starts a new stream that didn't use to be there, whether you subscribe to it or not. You like this when a 2nd ESPN channel pops up at number 210 in order to show you the other game that they're feeding to areas that were blacked out from the main game. (If you're not local to either game, you get to see both... pretty cool.) You of course don't like that when a shopping channel that only exists on weekends comes into being, every weekend it'll restart its stream and get added.
The workaround is simply to use a different list. Most recievers support more than one channel list, and it's only the one marked "Family" that has this feature. Just make another list your own and you'll be all set.
When local stations have opted-out of being on Dish Network, the response has been to make the local channel package in that area $1 cheaper for each missing network station.
No idea what they'll do for something this big...