WCCO, WBZ, WCBS, et al should also disclose that by being owned by Viacom, they also share common ownership with Columbia Records, an RIAA member company.
There's nobody in media with clean hands in this mess...
Other than the fact that's suicidal. P2P swaping won't kill the music industry, but it will kill some of the no-longed-needed players in the music industry... those who made their money by controling the distrubition channels.
The RIAA owns no copyrights to songs. The member companies of the RIAA own the copyrights. Unless the RIAA has a power of attorney to make a commitment on behalf of its members, then you're confessing your sins to somebody who doesn't have the power to forgive you...
Things like "I give you everything I own" can't appear in an EULA, but things like "I give you permission to redirect all search requests I make to you." can...
The fact is, your mom was prompted with a yes/no prompt that had an EULA button, and without reading the EULA she clicked "yes". That is a binding agreement, and always will be or most of e-commerce is about to grind to a halt.
Read what you click "yes" to... it's the digital version of a handshake agreement. You might not understand what the sign behind the swindler says, but by shaking his hand you've agreed to the deal...
Yep... that's really all this ruling has to say, that it's okay to cover up one image with another. Making a web browser that doesn't reproduce the websites in the way the authors intended it is an absolutely legal thing to do. And IE has the perfect plug-in structure with which to do this... so it should be a trivial task.
I mean, you don't even have to put up white images, you can even go as far as to put up images that say the exact inverse to what the authors intended! How cool is that!
Now, somebody wanna sue WhenU about their spyware habits... we need a user group rather than a website operator for that.
The wrong plantiff was before the judge for that argument. U-Haul can't complain that users didn't know what they're getting when they install WhenU, users have to complain about that for themselves.
Here's the headline: As much as WhenU's invasive popups and banner ad coverups stink, you have a right to have software do whatever you want to the websites you view. You also have the right to agree to any EULA you want. So, if you install a program that has an EULA that says it's gonna kidnap your web browser, and you say yes, you're stuck with it.
U-Haul can't go to court and say that WhenU is interfering with their website when their program pops up competitor's ads when you visit U-Haul's site. U-Haul's site isn't being hacked, it's just that the user is using a program that supplies the ads. You're free to run any ad blocking, subtracting, or adding program you want. And WhenU isn't hacking anybody's machine, their EULA says what they're gonna do so no crying foul when they actually do it.
Yep, as dump as WhenU's program is, if you click "Yes" on an EULA you're presumed to have read it and presumed to understand it and presumed to have liked it. Let the browser beware, if you welcome a adbot onto your system, nobody's gonna save you from yourself.
This sounds like such a sucker deal that it shouldn't even be legal... afterall, a contract requires both sides to exchange value. You're offering a confession and an agreement not to do some legal things, and what exactly are they offering again... a promise not to sue from somebody who lacked the authority to sue?
The fact is, for all the news organizations reporting the RIAA's offer, I've seen very few report the EFF's response... apparently there's some segment of the population that needs to be rescued by Captain Obvious.
Yep, they'd love you to make it a whole lot easier to prove that you knew you were breaking the law by trotting out that agreement right next to logs that say you shared songs after signing it...
That's exactly the problem here. You're handing over a notarized confession complete with your home address as verified by ID to the RIAA, while it's the individual members of the RIAA whose content you've stolen. The RIAA doesn't have the authority to legal agreements binding upon each individual label... so even though the RIAA forgives you, Sony, AOL Time-Warner, et al. can still go after you, and they can use that "shamnesty" confession as all the proof they need.
With Vonage, you have to request 911 service. When you do that, you give them the address the phone will be primarily used at, and they verify the address and assign the local police # to it.
Which is actually isn't true 911 service, because 911 is supposed to connect you with the local call center of record with represents both police and fire services. In communities where the fire dispatcher's number doesn't match the police dispatcher's number, you've got a big problem... telling the police about a fire wastes valuable time in a life-or-death emergency.
And let's not forget that this is nowhere close to E911 where you just hit the three little digits and the police know exactly where you're calling from, and if you don't speak to them they'll assume that something's peventing you from speaking and definitely send the cops out to make sure that nobody's dying or being held hostage. Landlines are tied to a fixed location to do E911. New cell phones are now being required to triangulate their positions using cell towers so they have at least some info that can be given about where the call is coming from. VoIP has nothing close to this... but if you're ever nearly dead and using all of your strength to hit 9-1-1, privacy really won't be important to you.
I think the key difference here is that a VoIP-to-VoIP link is very different from a VoIP-to-Phone link. When somebody like Vonage starts selling a VoIP link that connects to the phone network, they're really selling POTS-over-VoIP. They're just using a substitute last-mile connection technology, and saying it's cheaper because they're cutting out all of the regulatory mess such as E911 that the POTS providers have to deal with. But, POTS by any other connection technology is still POTS, so they deserve to get hit with the same regulatory burden.
If you're gonna start handing out phone numbers and connecting to the telephone network, you better be ready to comply with the same rules all the other phone companies play by.
ISDN also had an intrinsic mistake... it used to assume you needed to dial-into the network you wanted to communicate with because of course you wanted to disconnect from one data network and connect to another from time to time. It didn't consider that there'd be a popular network between networks that'd handle inter-network commincations called the Internet meaning that you only needed to connect to one network to get access to all of the resources you really wanted. DSL didn't make that same mistake, it assumes one constant connection...
VOiP users don't get access to 911 call centers though. So why should we have to pay for it? When I call 911 from my VOiP line, it goes directly to the police station, not the 911 call center.
Uhm, that's two problems. You should both be paying for 911 and GETTING 911 too. VoIP has problems with this all over the map... dialing 911 and getting an 911 call center isn't enough here. You've got to be able to dial 911 and get your 911 call center along with all of the metadata about your location that comes along with it. Even if you're not able to speak, E911 is designed to let you hit three little digits and get a police response to the physical location of that phoneline. Cell phones are getting close to offering that same service... if Vonage is going to claim that they offer a replacement for Ma Bell, they're gonna have to get their 911 response that good too.
Yes, but for the most part those protected industries are there because the USA would colapse without them... and in order to get their protection they have to promise to serve even the unprofitable territories too. See the monopoly phone carriers, US Postal Service, Amtrak, and if we're not careful the airlines...
So in your opinion I actually do owe someone a stamp for every email I send?
Nope, you just now owe 37 cents for every stamp you buy instead of the 22 cents it was for the same service when e-mail was first getting started. And no, you're not allowed to cut down your mailbox and stop partisipating in the postal system.
That's how the postal system is making up for the loss of e-mail, and it still gets to operate as a monopoly because we still need a postal relable postal system that reaches even the most rural routes for the same price.
(Note: This is why Paypal gets to screw their customers regularly, since they are not regulated as a bank)
And that's why the "old Paypal" got driven down to the point where eBay picked them up for a song, and essentially slapped Paypal's logo on their run-by-the-book Billpoint service.
In New York and several other places, Paypal was facing charges of operating a bank without a licence and breaking several banking rules while it was at it. There's a line between what a money transfer service like Western Union does, and what a bank does. Paypal started to behave like a bank, and then tried to complain when the law came and told it that if you quack like a bank you are a bank and have to follow a bank's regulations...
Every provider on the face of the earth have 10-10-$NUM code, from the winky-dink VoIP carrier to the big guys. A lot of them lead to VoIP carriers, but there's also a lot of them that just lead to unusual rate plans from AT&T, MCI, and Sprint that are simply marketed as the number rather than using a they company's name.
See, long distance has deregulated nicely, had has been since the 1980s. But that's not what we're talking about here, we're talking about local-loop service, and using VoIP to bypass that. It's all well and good, but when your VoIP long distance over your POTS connection fails, you can hit a 10-10 code and instantly switch over to a long distance any company that's still working... try doing that when your Vonage local loop isn't working...
Most cable TV / Broadband networks are powered by the local grid, with only about one hour worth of backup power on board. Besides, the cable network is no good for VoIP in a blackout without an UPS, POTS supplies enough power for a simple analog phone to work as part of the standard.
You might have an UPS for your computer, but would you like your local taxes to go up to make sure everyone in your city has one? Oh, wait, not everyone in your city even has a computer yet.......
Meanwhile, VoIP doesn't have a local framework of any reliablity. Let's face it, if VoIP caused the ILECs to go bankrupt, just who would provide phone service to the unprofitable communities in the Digital Divide?
Ma Bell wants to defend her investments in the last mile, but she had to make them with a gun to her head. ISPs haven't come close to finishing the last mile outside of metro areas...
It seems like people are forgetting why telecom regulation exists.
- The ILEC phone company has to provide POTS to everyone at the same price, they're not allowed to simply bypass a small town where they can't make a profit on concentrate only on the profitable cities.
- 911 always gets to the correct local authorites on a POTS line. Cell phones have had their problems with this, but they're being ordered to make it work now. You don't even need to have paid service to reach 911, any network that hears an emergency call request must handle it. They even have to drop a paying customer to make way for a 911 call if that has to happen. By comparision, VoIP sometimes has no clue what to do when you dial 911...
- POTS is required to have golden uptime standards by law. Yeah, when was the last time you picked up your phone and didn't get a dialtone? The ILEC has to build a super-reliable network, because we're so dependant on it. Afterall, when phone service is out the local police have have to do extra patrols to make up for the fact they've lost the 911 reporting system, that costs taxpayer money when that happens.
So, if you want to create a service that's going to replace POTS, you've got to be as good as POTS. We can't have Vonage come in and tell people it's okay to cancel their POTS lines and use them itstead unless Vonage is willing and able to totally replace all of the public-interest services that ILECs provide.
Let's face it, the ILECs don't provide 911 and their high reliablity standards just to be nice, they do that because we require them to by law. The least we can do to pay these companies back is promise that anybody who competes with them also has to jump through the same hoops...
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WCCO, WBZ, WCBS, et al should also disclose that by being owned by Viacom, they also share common ownership with Columbia Records, an RIAA member company.
There's nobody in media with clean hands in this mess...
Other than the fact that's suicidal. P2P swaping won't kill the music industry, but it will kill some of the no-longed-needed players in the music industry... those who made their money by controling the distrubition channels.
The RIAA owns no copyrights to songs. The member companies of the RIAA own the copyrights. Unless the RIAA has a power of attorney to make a commitment on behalf of its members, then you're confessing your sins to somebody who doesn't have the power to forgive you...
Things like "I give you everything I own" can't appear in an EULA, but things like "I give you permission to redirect all search requests I make to you." can...
The fact is, your mom was prompted with a yes/no prompt that had an EULA button, and without reading the EULA she clicked "yes". That is a binding agreement, and always will be or most of e-commerce is about to grind to a halt.
Read what you click "yes" to... it's the digital version of a handshake agreement. You might not understand what the sign behind the swindler says, but by shaking his hand you've agreed to the deal...
Yep, but that of course includes the sweetest flavor... the ad-free version.
Yep... that's really all this ruling has to say, that it's okay to cover up one image with another. Making a web browser that doesn't reproduce the websites in the way the authors intended it is an absolutely legal thing to do. And IE has the perfect plug-in structure with which to do this... so it should be a trivial task.
I mean, you don't even have to put up white images, you can even go as far as to put up images that say the exact inverse to what the authors intended! How cool is that!
Now, somebody wanna sue WhenU about their spyware habits... we need a user group rather than a website operator for that.
The wrong plantiff was before the judge for that argument. U-Haul can't complain that users didn't know what they're getting when they install WhenU, users have to complain about that for themselves.
Here's the headline: As much as WhenU's invasive popups and banner ad coverups stink, you have a right to have software do whatever you want to the websites you view. You also have the right to agree to any EULA you want. So, if you install a program that has an EULA that says it's gonna kidnap your web browser, and you say yes, you're stuck with it.
U-Haul can't go to court and say that WhenU is interfering with their website when their program pops up competitor's ads when you visit U-Haul's site. U-Haul's site isn't being hacked, it's just that the user is using a program that supplies the ads. You're free to run any ad blocking, subtracting, or adding program you want. And WhenU isn't hacking anybody's machine, their EULA says what they're gonna do so no crying foul when they actually do it.
Yep, as dump as WhenU's program is, if you click "Yes" on an EULA you're presumed to have read it and presumed to understand it and presumed to have liked it. Let the browser beware, if you welcome a adbot onto your system, nobody's gonna save you from yourself.
This sounds like such a sucker deal that it shouldn't even be legal... afterall, a contract requires both sides to exchange value. You're offering a confession and an agreement not to do some legal things, and what exactly are they offering again... a promise not to sue from somebody who lacked the authority to sue?
The fact is, for all the news organizations reporting the RIAA's offer, I've seen very few report the EFF's response... apparently there's some segment of the population that needs to be rescued by Captain Obvious.
Even if that clause wasn't there, a supoena trumps any privacy policy... this smells so much like a setup this isn't even funny.
Yep, they'd love you to make it a whole lot easier to prove that you knew you were breaking the law by trotting out that agreement right next to logs that say you shared songs after signing it...
That's exactly the problem here. You're handing over a notarized confession complete with your home address as verified by ID to the RIAA, while it's the individual members of the RIAA whose content you've stolen. The RIAA doesn't have the authority to legal agreements binding upon each individual label... so even though the RIAA forgives you, Sony, AOL Time-Warner, et al. can still go after you, and they can use that "shamnesty" confession as all the proof they need.
With Vonage, you have to request 911 service. When you do that, you give them the address the phone will be primarily used at, and they verify the address and assign the local police # to it.
Which is actually isn't true 911 service, because 911 is supposed to connect you with the local call center of record with represents both police and fire services. In communities where the fire dispatcher's number doesn't match the police dispatcher's number, you've got a big problem... telling the police about a fire wastes valuable time in a life-or-death emergency.
And let's not forget that this is nowhere close to E911 where you just hit the three little digits and the police know exactly where you're calling from, and if you don't speak to them they'll assume that something's peventing you from speaking and definitely send the cops out to make sure that nobody's dying or being held hostage. Landlines are tied to a fixed location to do E911. New cell phones are now being required to triangulate their positions using cell towers so they have at least some info that can be given about where the call is coming from. VoIP has nothing close to this... but if you're ever nearly dead and using all of your strength to hit 9-1-1, privacy really won't be important to you.
I think the key difference here is that a VoIP-to-VoIP link is very different from a VoIP-to-Phone link. When somebody like Vonage starts selling a VoIP link that connects to the phone network, they're really selling POTS-over-VoIP. They're just using a substitute last-mile connection technology, and saying it's cheaper because they're cutting out all of the regulatory mess such as E911 that the POTS providers have to deal with. But, POTS by any other connection technology is still POTS, so they deserve to get hit with the same regulatory burden.
If you're gonna start handing out phone numbers and connecting to the telephone network, you better be ready to comply with the same rules all the other phone companies play by.
ISDN also had an intrinsic mistake... it used to assume you needed to dial-into the network you wanted to communicate with because of course you wanted to disconnect from one data network and connect to another from time to time. It didn't consider that there'd be a popular network between networks that'd handle inter-network commincations called the Internet meaning that you only needed to connect to one network to get access to all of the resources you really wanted. DSL didn't make that same mistake, it assumes one constant connection...
VOiP users don't get access to 911 call centers though. So why should we have to pay for it? When I call 911 from my VOiP line, it goes directly to the police station, not the 911 call center.
Uhm, that's two problems. You should both be paying for 911 and GETTING 911 too. VoIP has problems with this all over the map... dialing 911 and getting an 911 call center isn't enough here. You've got to be able to dial 911 and get your 911 call center along with all of the metadata about your location that comes along with it. Even if you're not able to speak, E911 is designed to let you hit three little digits and get a police response to the physical location of that phoneline. Cell phones are getting close to offering that same service... if Vonage is going to claim that they offer a replacement for Ma Bell, they're gonna have to get their 911 response that good too.
Yes, but for the most part those protected industries are there because the USA would colapse without them... and in order to get their protection they have to promise to serve even the unprofitable territories too. See the monopoly phone carriers, US Postal Service, Amtrak, and if we're not careful the airlines...
So in your opinion I actually do owe someone a stamp for every email I send?
Nope, you just now owe 37 cents for every stamp you buy instead of the 22 cents it was for the same service when e-mail was first getting started. And no, you're not allowed to cut down your mailbox and stop partisipating in the postal system.
That's how the postal system is making up for the loss of e-mail, and it still gets to operate as a monopoly because we still need a postal relable postal system that reaches even the most rural routes for the same price.
(Note: This is why Paypal gets to screw their customers regularly, since they are not regulated as a bank)
And that's why the "old Paypal" got driven down to the point where eBay picked them up for a song, and essentially slapped Paypal's logo on their run-by-the-book Billpoint service.
In New York and several other places, Paypal was facing charges of operating a bank without a licence and breaking several banking rules while it was at it. There's a line between what a money transfer service like Western Union does, and what a bank does. Paypal started to behave like a bank, and then tried to complain when the law came and told it that if you quack like a bank you are a bank and have to follow a bank's regulations...
Every provider on the face of the earth have 10-10-$NUM code, from the winky-dink VoIP carrier to the big guys. A lot of them lead to VoIP carriers, but there's also a lot of them that just lead to unusual rate plans from AT&T, MCI, and Sprint that are simply marketed as the number rather than using a they company's name.
See, long distance has deregulated nicely, had has been since the 1980s. But that's not what we're talking about here, we're talking about local-loop service, and using VoIP to bypass that. It's all well and good, but when your VoIP long distance over your POTS connection fails, you can hit a 10-10 code and instantly switch over to a long distance any company that's still working... try doing that when your Vonage local loop isn't working...
Most cable TV / Broadband networks are powered by the local grid, with only about one hour worth of backup power on board. Besides, the cable network is no good for VoIP in a blackout without an UPS, POTS supplies enough power for a simple analog phone to work as part of the standard.
You might have an UPS for your computer, but would you like your local taxes to go up to make sure everyone in your city has one? Oh, wait, not everyone in your city even has a computer yet.......
Meanwhile, VoIP doesn't have a local framework of any reliablity. Let's face it, if VoIP caused the ILECs to go bankrupt, just who would provide phone service to the unprofitable communities in the Digital Divide?
Ma Bell wants to defend her investments in the last mile, but she had to make them with a gun to her head. ISPs haven't come close to finishing the last mile outside of metro areas...
It seems like people are forgetting why telecom regulation exists.
- The ILEC phone company has to provide POTS to everyone at the same price, they're not allowed to simply bypass a small town where they can't make a profit on concentrate only on the profitable cities.
- 911 always gets to the correct local authorites on a POTS line. Cell phones have had their problems with this, but they're being ordered to make it work now. You don't even need to have paid service to reach 911, any network that hears an emergency call request must handle it. They even have to drop a paying customer to make way for a 911 call if that has to happen. By comparision, VoIP sometimes has no clue what to do when you dial 911...
- POTS is required to have golden uptime standards by law. Yeah, when was the last time you picked up your phone and didn't get a dialtone? The ILEC has to build a super-reliable network, because we're so dependant on it. Afterall, when phone service is out the local police have have to do extra patrols to make up for the fact they've lost the 911 reporting system, that costs taxpayer money when that happens.
So, if you want to create a service that's going to replace POTS, you've got to be as good as POTS. We can't have Vonage come in and tell people it's okay to cancel their POTS lines and use them itstead unless Vonage is willing and able to totally replace all of the public-interest services that ILECs provide.
Let's face it, the ILECs don't provide 911 and their high reliablity standards just to be nice, they do that because we require them to by law. The least we can do to pay these companies back is promise that anybody who competes with them also has to jump through the same hoops...