AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, and GEnie were there first. In the early 1990s, before the Internet became popular as it was today, being on to any of those four services was the geeky place to be.
Eventually, the Internet got the WWW, and eventually there was enough good content on the WWW that it became a better and less expensive way of doing things. GEnie was shutdown by GE, Prodigy converted itself into just another national ISP and after some ownership changes is now going by the name "SBC Yahoo", and CompuServe sold out to AOL and now looks more like an AOL clone than its former self.
AOL is a relic from a past era that somehow made it to a world where the Internet is king.
Has anybody thought how AOL and Time Warner stocks would have performed had the two not been married? AOL would be crashing to the point of near-zero, while Time Warner would still be hanging out with Viacom, News Corp., Disney, and the other content providers who have writen off most of their.com operations long long long ago.
The origninal Time Warner shareholders got the shaft, as they now have to absorb AOL's downfall, while the AOL shareholders got the nice liferaft ending up with shares of Time Warner instead of another useless tech stock. Time Warner's shareholders are not happy, and they want their company back now...
Let's face it: What you want is a cheaper alternative to CDs. Why would record labels want to give up their highly profitable and legally established right to sell CDs at $17 a pop in order to collect pennies in royalties off some Internet service
What it'd take is some CD pubisher willing to publish good music for $5 per CD, and making up the difference with volume because they end up selling many more copies at that price. The CD as a format is cheap enough to make that each disc could be profitably sold for $5 each. There's no need for a cheaper distribution media.
The problem is, once this anti-RIAA label makes its splash with quality albums for $5 each, all of the RIAA labels will flood the market with their products for $5 each. The upstart will have a hard time competing with its only distingishing feature being duplicated by everybody else, and not having the same publicity machine advantage as the RIAA labels. When the anti-RIAA label is wiped out, the price will then methodically go back on a path back to $17. Therefore, anybody with the money to launch an anti-RIAA label has no real incentive to do so.
The solution that'll work out in the end is one in which music artists will be paid more for going with that system instead of the existing system that the RIAA is working so hard to defend.
Yep, that's right. Artists won't work for free. You have to find some way to get artists to decide that they have a better chance of getting money from your system, rather than just trying to say that recorded music should be free. You've got to come up with some push distribution system for that free recorded music so that people will start following that artist's carrer, and also be inclined to part with their money in other ways so that the artist still gets paid.
So, there's your fatal flaw in your "attach ads to the ogg files" scheme... the advertisers are going to have to be willing to pay more than the artist is getting out of the RIAA life. That just isn't gonna happen, especially if you're just gonna drop the file into your Kazaa shared folder and expect other people to move it from there... the fact is nobody's gonna make the first download because they've never heard of the artist you're trying to promote. Nobody listens, the ad has no value.
It's going to take somebody with quite a lot of money, and willing to take a chance with that money, to get that done.
First of all, p2p is used for more then piracy. Its not the "sole intent" as many people like to pretend. Those who use P2P for legal uses are fine. Those who use P2P for illegal uses are in trouble, it's a bad sign that there's more in the second category than the first.
Yes pirating occurs.. but so does drug running on our roads.. does that make it the 'sole intent'. No of course not. The highways in the United States are used for legal activities that the government actually wants to occur far more often than drug running occurs. We do make an effort to arrest the drug dealers who use the highways that way. Besides, if the highways were being used by drug runners at the same percentage that illegal files are going over P2P, the government would likely have stopped maintaining the highways anyway.
Plus you are also not considering that waht you consider piracy only applies to YOUR country. many do not reconize copyrights, so its NOT, I repeat, NOT piracy there... Check the list of countries that don't enforce the simple (non-DMCA-like) copyright laws, and you'll notice that they're mostly countries that have problems with human rights as well. Since you're capable of posting on Slashdot and are refering to copyright-lawless lands as "there" rather than "here", I assume you are not living in such a country. If you'd rather their set of laws for its copyright feature, be willing to accept the rest of the package.
Try to spread the truth, not biased lies desgined to skew public opinion. A biased selection of facts designed to skew public opinion is what you practice.
Beautiful DMCA fearmongering... but this doesn't have anything to do with MP3s.
If you have a product that's legal in country A, but you market it to the citizens in country B where it's not, to the point that you attend a conference in country B to try to market your product, you are going to have a hard time leaving country B. Dmitry wasn't just a tourist, nor was he baited into this country by American authroities. Oh, BTW... Dmitry was freed, so maybe the courts can lead to the right result once in a while.
The rant on Scientology is totally out in left field. They publish books and qualify for copyright. Since their book isn't as old as the Bible, not's not in the public domain. Sorry, there's no exemption in the law for texts some people claim to be holy. Are you saying their books should not qualify for the same copyright protection as everybody else?
Misinformed ranting about a popular topic leads to a +5 around here? Come on mods, say it ain't so...
The problem is, they not only own the content, but they also own the "distribution channels" that control what content is pushed into the marketplace.
The RIAA's MP3 fear is not that they won't be able to make money off of MP3s, but that people other than the existing RIAA members can as well. What's more, it'd be possible for an artist to gain popularity without needing the help of an RIAA label's publicity machine, therefore the artist could make 100% of the money off of the recording, and not have to give the RIAA members any cut of the action.
That's why the RIAA is trying desperately to block the progress of 'net-based music distribution in any file format by anybody. The fact that some people are surcomming to illegally transfering music that the RIAA owns the copyright on just makes their illogical case easier to argue. What they want is for the music distribution system to stay as it is for as long as possible, because if we ever transition to an effective electronic system of any kind, they will be written out of the story.
Hey, it was posted by an Anon Cow... but what he says is true.
The fact is, Kazaa does nothing that the good ole WWW can't do with the use of a "Where are you?" CGI and a network of mirrors. The only point of the program is to obscure the identity of the server you're connecting to, and make servers of a hard to track transient nature so that the RIAA and other copyright owners can't come down and hammer the server owners so easily.
MP3 and P2P aren't illegal, but the way Napster, Kazaa, and the like have used those technologies for illegal purposes have made people think that there's nothing legal that can be done. That's damaging to the progress of absolutely everything on the 'net.
I'm not sure Kazaa being profitable is that good of a thing for the 'net in general.
Remember, Kazaa is a Spyware/Adware-filled program which brings along with it a lot of annoying programs that pop-up ads while users are browsing sites other than their own, redirect click-through commissions from sites other than their own, and spy on users when using programs other than their own.
Kazaa simply has no morals. They're not just stealing from the RIAA, but if you run a website they're stealing from you too. If you haven't noticed, they don't have much respect the laws of the U.S, Canada, Mexico, U.K... or anywhere else that says stealing is wrong.
Kazaa should just go away... the online world would be better off without them. Them being profitable is a very scary thing...
Let's go further than that... CS is geekier than IT when you look at what the two subfields really mean. Since most schools have now broken CS and IT into seperate majors, usually in seperate departments altogether, it make sense that girls are picking IT instead of CS, causing CS enrollment to show a loss.
Is there any region in the country that doesn't have access to twice-daily Simpsons reruns? Set a Tivo (or your homebrew PVR if you really have to) with a big enough HD up, and you'll have the entire collection of the Simpsons withing a couple months.
They're not asking for an action, they're asking an inaction. They're warning them that if they use WMD, and get caught, the US is gonna send them to an early meeting with their 72 virgins. If they wanna have any status in the post-Saddam Iraq, they should ignore Saddam's orders.
Yes, but if everybody did that, your USENET server would be crammed with people downloading it, slowing down your performance.
You might not need to move a TB, but NetFlix has to move more data than that through their system every day. It'd be impossible for them to afford that kind of bandwidth on the Internet, but the USPS has no problem giving them a reasonable price.
No... Tivo's "plan B" is a rumor that if the central Tivo server should ever totally vaporize, Tivo devices would then forget about their need for subscription guide data, and instead behave like a normal VCR in a "gimme the channel number and time" format, and may even become Hollywood's worst nightmare by saving the data in an a standardized unencripted format with nothing preventing simple hacks to extract the video.
Basically, this would be the last act of a company that has already been bankrupted, so it'd have nothing left to lose from Hollywood lawsuits.
You know it's majority shareholders are the networks, right?
BUZZ!
It's true that General Electric, who owns NBC along with a whole lot of other things, is the largest shareholder, but that's only 1.78% of the company. Every other shareholder in the top ten is an investment bank or mutual fund company.
30 second skip really isn't a hack, it's closer to a video game cheat code. You enter the right sequence into your remote, and that rather useless "foward to end" button now means "forward 30 seconds".
This a case of Tivo going as close as they can to the line without being sued by Hollywood. If 30 second skip buttons are determined to be illegal, Tivo can drop the unsupported feature and nobody can say Tivo every promised it to anybody. On the other hand, it's there and you can use it for now.
Less useful than what ReplayTV is offering for file sharing.
However, ReplayTV is being sued over their not-so-Hollywood-friendly way of doing file sharing... and based on the outcome of that lawsuit they may be ordered to send out a software update that removes that feature.
On the other hand, should ReplayTV win the lawsuit... what stops Tivo from dropping their encryption system in a software update? It seems to me as if Tivo is letting ReplayTV take the risk of being the rulebreaker, so if the rule holds Tivo has done no wrong, but if the rule falls Tivo can take advantage almost immediately too.
NetFlix has more or less proven that the easiest way to transfer 3 hours of TV-quality video content is to put a DVD into a lightweight mailer and then put a 37 cent postage stamp on it. Using the mail is cheaper and faster than any internet-based solution to transfer that much data.
I really don't see net-based transfer of Tivo-recorded content to be a workable solution.
This is exactly why the working title of the WB's show is "Live from Tomorrow"... it's meant to be an SNL-like program that'll always be done live, and assumes that there's going to be no point in trying to rerun the show.
The idea is for this to be cheap entertainment, and to try to get ad dollars out of everyone who participates. (I.E... Selling the right to send the musical guest to record labels, since all the artist really is doing is promoting their album... selling the right to send the guest host to movie studios, since all that actor really is doing is promoting that movie, etc.) It's not clear if this is gonna work or not, the news headline is that the guy who backed Who Wants to be a Millionaire is willing to try.
BTW, the way this show is being set up is that the production company is actually going to pay the WB network for its airtime, rather than the WB paying for the show.
Game copyrights expire like anything else, but that'll be 95 years assuming Congress doesn't change the law in the next couple decades to add more years.
Also, even if Nintendo were to lose 100% of the SNES in US market to the pirates, that's not much at all to have lost compared to what they're making off the GameCube now.
Remember, the reason for DVD region codes is so that if a copyright-lawless region started pumping out auathorized copies of the locally available DVDs, those DVDs would be useless in an American Region 1 player. (So, that's the reason why the lawless land that is Antarctica gets its own DVD region...)
By keeping curent generation technology out of China, it's a lot harder for China to export anything that's useful to the US piracy market.
The other thing that slows GUIDE Plus+ adoption is that it's proprietary to the gills. Yeah, that's right, this guide data is coming through the PBS station in most cities, but it's not in plaintext and you can't legally buid a decoder of your own.
That's the real reason why cable systems and DirecTV work so hard at pushing hteir own guide data streams.
Slashdot Mirror
AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, and GEnie were there first. In the early 1990s, before the Internet became popular as it was today, being on to any of those four services was the geeky place to be. Eventually, the Internet got the WWW, and eventually there was enough good content on the WWW that it became a better and less expensive way of doing things. GEnie was shutdown by GE, Prodigy converted itself into just another national ISP and after some ownership changes is now going by the name "SBC Yahoo", and CompuServe sold out to AOL and now looks more like an AOL clone than its former self. AOL is a relic from a past era that somehow made it to a world where the Internet is king.
Has anybody thought how AOL and Time Warner stocks would have performed had the two not been married? AOL would be crashing to the point of near-zero, while Time Warner would still be hanging out with Viacom, News Corp., Disney, and the other content providers who have writen off most of their .com operations long long long ago.
The origninal Time Warner shareholders got the shaft, as they now have to absorb AOL's downfall, while the AOL shareholders got the nice liferaft ending up with shares of Time Warner instead of another useless tech stock. Time Warner's shareholders are not happy, and they want their company back now...
Let's face it: What you want is a cheaper alternative to CDs. Why would record labels want to give up their highly profitable and legally established right to sell CDs at $17 a pop in order to collect pennies in royalties off some Internet service
What it'd take is some CD pubisher willing to publish good music for $5 per CD, and making up the difference with volume because they end up selling many more copies at that price. The CD as a format is cheap enough to make that each disc could be profitably sold for $5 each. There's no need for a cheaper distribution media.
The problem is, once this anti-RIAA label makes its splash with quality albums for $5 each, all of the RIAA labels will flood the market with their products for $5 each. The upstart will have a hard time competing with its only distingishing feature being duplicated by everybody else, and not having the same publicity machine advantage as the RIAA labels. When the anti-RIAA label is wiped out, the price will then methodically go back on a path back to $17. Therefore, anybody with the money to launch an anti-RIAA label has no real incentive to do so.
The solution that'll work out in the end is one in which music artists will be paid more for going with that system instead of the existing system that the RIAA is working so hard to defend.
Yep, that's right. Artists won't work for free. You have to find some way to get artists to decide that they have a better chance of getting money from your system, rather than just trying to say that recorded music should be free. You've got to come up with some push distribution system for that free recorded music so that people will start following that artist's carrer, and also be inclined to part with their money in other ways so that the artist still gets paid.
So, there's your fatal flaw in your "attach ads to the ogg files" scheme... the advertisers are going to have to be willing to pay more than the artist is getting out of the RIAA life. That just isn't gonna happen, especially if you're just gonna drop the file into your Kazaa shared folder and expect other people to move it from there... the fact is nobody's gonna make the first download because they've never heard of the artist you're trying to promote. Nobody listens, the ad has no value.
It's going to take somebody with quite a lot of money, and willing to take a chance with that money, to get that done.
First of all, p2p is used for more then piracy. Its not the "sole intent" as many people like to pretend.
Those who use P2P for legal uses are fine. Those who use P2P for illegal uses are in trouble, it's a bad sign that there's more in the second category than the first.
Yes pirating occurs.. but so does drug running on our roads.. does that make it the 'sole intent'. No of course not.
The highways in the United States are used for legal activities that the government actually wants to occur far more often than drug running occurs. We do make an effort to arrest the drug dealers who use the highways that way. Besides, if the highways were being used by drug runners at the same percentage that illegal files are going over P2P, the government would likely have stopped maintaining the highways anyway.
Plus you are also not considering that waht you consider piracy only applies to YOUR country. many do not reconize copyrights, so its NOT, I repeat, NOT piracy there...
Check the list of countries that don't enforce the simple (non-DMCA-like) copyright laws, and you'll notice that they're mostly countries that have problems with human rights as well. Since you're capable of posting on Slashdot and are refering to copyright-lawless lands as "there" rather than "here", I assume you are not living in such a country. If you'd rather their set of laws for its copyright feature, be willing to accept the rest of the package.
Try to spread the truth, not biased lies desgined to skew public opinion.
A biased selection of facts designed to skew public opinion is what you practice.
Beautiful DMCA fearmongering... but this doesn't have anything to do with MP3s.
If you have a product that's legal in country A, but you market it to the citizens in country B where it's not, to the point that you attend a conference in country B to try to market your product, you are going to have a hard time leaving country B. Dmitry wasn't just a tourist, nor was he baited into this country by American authroities. Oh, BTW... Dmitry was freed, so maybe the courts can lead to the right result once in a while.
The rant on Scientology is totally out in left field. They publish books and qualify for copyright. Since their book isn't as old as the Bible, not's not in the public domain. Sorry, there's no exemption in the law for texts some people claim to be holy. Are you saying their books should not qualify for the same copyright protection as everybody else?
Misinformed ranting about a popular topic leads to a +5 around here? Come on mods, say it ain't so...
The problem is, they not only own the content, but they also own the "distribution channels" that control what content is pushed into the marketplace.
The RIAA's MP3 fear is not that they won't be able to make money off of MP3s, but that people other than the existing RIAA members can as well. What's more, it'd be possible for an artist to gain popularity without needing the help of an RIAA label's publicity machine, therefore the artist could make 100% of the money off of the recording, and not have to give the RIAA members any cut of the action.
That's why the RIAA is trying desperately to block the progress of 'net-based music distribution in any file format by anybody. The fact that some people are surcomming to illegally transfering music that the RIAA owns the copyright on just makes their illogical case easier to argue. What they want is for the music distribution system to stay as it is for as long as possible, because if we ever transition to an effective electronic system of any kind, they will be written out of the story.
Hey, it was posted by an Anon Cow... but what he says is true.
The fact is, Kazaa does nothing that the good ole WWW can't do with the use of a "Where are you?" CGI and a network of mirrors. The only point of the program is to obscure the identity of the server you're connecting to, and make servers of a hard to track transient nature so that the RIAA and other copyright owners can't come down and hammer the server owners so easily.
MP3 and P2P aren't illegal, but the way Napster, Kazaa, and the like have used those technologies for illegal purposes have made people think that there's nothing legal that can be done. That's damaging to the progress of absolutely everything on the 'net.
I'm not sure Kazaa being profitable is that good of a thing for the 'net in general.
Remember, Kazaa is a Spyware/Adware-filled program which brings along with it a lot of annoying programs that pop-up ads while users are browsing sites other than their own, redirect click-through commissions from sites other than their own, and spy on users when using programs other than their own.
Kazaa simply has no morals. They're not just stealing from the RIAA, but if you run a website they're stealing from you too. If you haven't noticed, they don't have much respect the laws of the U.S, Canada, Mexico, U.K... or anywhere else that says stealing is wrong.
Kazaa should just go away... the online world would be better off without them. Them being profitable is a very scary thing...
Too bad we can't mod artcles down as -1 Redundant...
Let's go further than that... CS is geekier than IT when you look at what the two subfields really mean. Since most schools have now broken CS and IT into seperate majors, usually in seperate departments altogether, it make sense that girls are picking IT instead of CS, causing CS enrollment to show a loss.
Is there any region in the country that doesn't have access to twice-daily Simpsons reruns? Set a Tivo (or your homebrew PVR if you really have to) with a big enough HD up, and you'll have the entire collection of the Simpsons withing a couple months.
They're not asking for an action, they're asking an inaction. They're warning them that if they use WMD, and get caught, the US is gonna send them to an early meeting with their 72 virgins. If they wanna have any status in the post-Saddam Iraq, they should ignore Saddam's orders.
Yes, but if everybody did that, your USENET server would be crammed with people downloading it, slowing down your performance.
You might not need to move a TB, but NetFlix has to move more data than that through their system every day. It'd be impossible for them to afford that kind of bandwidth on the Internet, but the USPS has no problem giving them a reasonable price.
No... Tivo's "plan B" is a rumor that if the central Tivo server should ever totally vaporize, Tivo devices would then forget about their need for subscription guide data, and instead behave like a normal VCR in a "gimme the channel number and time" format, and may even become Hollywood's worst nightmare by saving the data in an a standardized unencripted format with nothing preventing simple hacks to extract the video.
Basically, this would be the last act of a company that has already been bankrupted, so it'd have nothing left to lose from Hollywood lawsuits.
You know it's majority shareholders are the networks, right?
BUZZ!
It's true that General Electric, who owns NBC along with a whole lot of other things, is the largest shareholder, but that's only 1.78% of the company. Every other shareholder in the top ten is an investment bank or mutual fund company.
Don't trust me? look it up for yourself.
The networks do not control Tivo. A clear majority of the company is in the hands of non-network interests. Tivo has no majority owner.
The thing is, disc-based technology is also being revised, so the USPS will also be increasing its data capacity over the years as well.
When you have a TB worth of data to move, I don't think the 'net will ever catch up to the speed of a van.
30 second skip really isn't a hack, it's closer to a video game cheat code. You enter the right sequence into your remote, and that rather useless "foward to end" button now means "forward 30 seconds".
This a case of Tivo going as close as they can to the line without being sued by Hollywood. If 30 second skip buttons are determined to be illegal, Tivo can drop the unsupported feature and nobody can say Tivo every promised it to anybody. On the other hand, it's there and you can use it for now.
Less useful than what ReplayTV is offering for file sharing.
However, ReplayTV is being sued over their not-so-Hollywood-friendly way of doing file sharing... and based on the outcome of that lawsuit they may be ordered to send out a software update that removes that feature.
On the other hand, should ReplayTV win the lawsuit... what stops Tivo from dropping their encryption system in a software update? It seems to me as if Tivo is letting ReplayTV take the risk of being the rulebreaker, so if the rule holds Tivo has done no wrong, but if the rule falls Tivo can take advantage almost immediately too.
NetFlix has more or less proven that the easiest way to transfer 3 hours of TV-quality video content is to put a DVD into a lightweight mailer and then put a 37 cent postage stamp on it. Using the mail is cheaper and faster than any internet-based solution to transfer that much data.
I really don't see net-based transfer of Tivo-recorded content to be a workable solution.
This is exactly why the working title of the WB's show is "Live from Tomorrow"... it's meant to be an SNL-like program that'll always be done live, and assumes that there's going to be no point in trying to rerun the show.
The idea is for this to be cheap entertainment, and to try to get ad dollars out of everyone who participates. (I.E... Selling the right to send the musical guest to record labels, since all the artist really is doing is promoting their album... selling the right to send the guest host to movie studios, since all that actor really is doing is promoting that movie, etc.) It's not clear if this is gonna work or not, the news headline is that the guy who backed Who Wants to be a Millionaire is willing to try.
BTW, the way this show is being set up is that the production company is actually going to pay the WB network for its airtime, rather than the WB paying for the show.
Isn't every title mentioned in the parent post a game that came from somebody other that Nintendo in the first place?
Game copyrights expire like anything else, but that'll be 95 years assuming Congress doesn't change the law in the next couple decades to add more years.
Also, even if Nintendo were to lose 100% of the SNES in US market to the pirates, that's not much at all to have lost compared to what they're making off the GameCube now.
Remember, the reason for DVD region codes is so that if a copyright-lawless region started pumping out auathorized copies of the locally available DVDs, those DVDs would be useless in an American Region 1 player. (So, that's the reason why the lawless land that is Antarctica gets its own DVD region...)
By keeping curent generation technology out of China, it's a lot harder for China to export anything that's useful to the US piracy market.
The other thing that slows GUIDE Plus+ adoption is that it's proprietary to the gills. Yeah, that's right, this guide data is coming through the PBS station in most cities, but it's not in plaintext and you can't legally buid a decoder of your own.
That's the real reason why cable systems and DirecTV work so hard at pushing hteir own guide data streams.