And why shouldn't I be an Anonymous Coward? You may be a/. newbie, but I know better than to argue with a troll while logged in.
Pinko and commmie go together like bread and jam. Calling someone a pinko commie is standard. It means something like a communist sympathizer rather than a communist.
Anyway, RMS is clearly a commmunist. When I called you an RMS-lover, I meant in terms of the pinko stuff that is posted on the GNU philosophy pages. I could care less about his stance on microkernels.
Libertarians think they have all the answers, but they are so naive. Their anarchistic paradise would in fact be a dystopia. The crippling of law enforcement would allow criminals to prosper, the economy would suck, and entertainment media would be amateur schlock.
I was kidding about the IQ test. The logical fallacy is quite clear. Janis Ian said that her sales went up after she allowed free downloads from her website. Then she blames the RIAA for their suit against Verizon regarding P2P. That's a total non-sequitor. The RIAA isn't going to shut anyone down for sharing Janis Ian songs if they don't own the rights to them.
-a
Re:Was anyone actually paying attention here?
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NARAS vs. the RIAA
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· Score: 1
I'll take a stab at it.
A stab at propping up the fallacies rather than identifying them, I see.
1. "between the years 1991 and 2001, the average price of a CD went from $13.01 to $14.64, which is a 12.53 percent increase in price. The record companies raised prices precisely at the time costs were coming down. When a DVD costs $19.99 and includes the movie in multiple formats with bonus material and no hassle, and a CD costs $18.99 and comes with potential legal hassles, limits on fair use, and all the finger waving the RIAA can muster, the choice of which product to buy becomes clear." Sure, he states the *average* price of a CD is $14, because that's statistical and hard fact proof, but you go to a local chain store and over 60% of the CDs are going to be upwards of 16-18.99 each. Out of that, the artist only makes about.75 a cd or maybe a couple dollars, while the rest goes back into overhead. (for example, Alana Davis on her last release made.75 a CD until she sold at least 100 thousand. She told me that shortly after the record came out). That's why I buy all my CDs at shows where the cds are usually no more than $15, and the artist sees the profits directly.
Bad Argument 1: State a fact and then ignore it. I did a quick survey of Amazon.com and found that their top 5 hot CDs were selling for an average of $15.
Bad Argument 2: Make statements about CDs that are equally applicable to DVDs.
2. "despite President and CEO of the MPAA Jack Valenti's recent statements that the future is bleak. Not since the 1950s have so many movie tickets been sold. Meanwhile, movie sharing on the Internet is at an all-time high. The movie business isn't suffering because of activity on the Internet." So where *is* the fallacy? You're trying to claim Valenti's statement, I believe. Let me break it down a little for you. File sharing is at an all time high yet more movie tickets were bought this last year than any other. Valenti thinking the future is bleak just shows how offbase the upper brass are in organizations like the MPAA (lest we forget his argument against the VCR) *rolls eyes*. Valenti saying things as clueless as that is the exact proof that the Snyders were looking for and therefore very valid in the paper.
Bad Argument 1: Comparing movie sharing to movie tickets rother than DVD/Video sales/rentals.
Bad Argument 2: Saying that something is at an all-time high doesn't mean much unless you quantify how high that is. The all-time high of movie piracy is very low compared to music piracy.
3. " It's also been widely reported that the most downloaded album of all time was "The Eminem Show," by Eminem. It was downloaded so heavily that Interscope took the unusual step of releasing the album a week early due to the rampant online sharing of tracks from the album. Fast-forward to the end of 2002, and "The Eminem Show" is the best-selling album of the year. This seems to indicate the opposite of what the RIAA would have you believe. When people share MP3s, more music is sold, not less." If you know anything about that situation you know that's exactly true. I was listening to it before the cd came out due to p2p networks (and Foo Fighter's new one was out on IRC before it came out, and... you get the idea). Once it got so widespread, Interscope released it early. There's a poster they even put out that had the Em logo on it and then the Eminem Show and the normal release date, then printed over that "AMERICA COULDN'T WAIT" and the actual release date. I fail to see a 'fallacy' there. The proof is in the numbers.
Bad Argument 1: False causation. The Eminem album sold well because it was popular and it was also heavily pirated because it was popular. This is a correlation, not a causation.
-a
Re:Was anyone actually paying attention here?
on
NARAS vs. the RIAA
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately, I agree. This article read more like a laundry list of all the arguments ever made by the anti-RIAA crowd than an actual well-thought out, well-reasoned, logical position.
This piece really hits the mark in a very roundabout sort of way. RIAA wants to stop peer-to-peer through actions like its lawsuit against Verizon because those actions threaten their stranglehold on commercial music.
I dunno. That's pretty roundabout logic. What Janis Ian basically said was "I put up music that people can download for free off my website, but the RIAA wants to stop me by suing Verizon to force them to reveal the names of people who illegally share copyrighted files via P2P." Somehow I just don't follow. I know there's a logical fallacy in there, but what could it be?
-a
Was anyone actually paying attention here?
on
NARAS vs. the RIAA
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· Score: 1
Well that article was one of the bigger crocks of shit I've read in a while. It just goes to show that your logic doesn't need to make sense when you're telling people what you want to hear.
A prize to anyone who can spot the logical fallacies & deliberate distortions in the following excerpts:
1. "between the years 1991 and 2001, the average price of a CD went from $13.01 to $14.64, which is a 12.53 percent increase in price. The record companies raised prices precisely at the time costs were coming down. When a DVD costs $19.99 and includes the movie in multiple formats with bonus material and no hassle, and a CD costs $18.99 and comes with potential legal hassles, limits on fair use, and all the finger waving the RIAA can muster, the choice of which product to buy becomes clear."
2. "despite President and CEO of the MPAA Jack Valenti's recent statements that the future is bleak. Not since the 1950s have so many movie tickets been sold. Meanwhile, movie sharing on the Internet is at an all-time high. The movie business isn't suffering because of activity on the Internet."
3. " It's also been widely reported that the most downloaded album of all time was "The Eminem Show," by Eminem. It was downloaded so heavily that Interscope took the unusual step of releasing the album a week early due to the rampant online sharing of tracks from the album. Fast-forward to the end of 2002, and "The Eminem Show" is the best-selling album of the year. This seems to indicate the opposite of what the RIAA would have you believe. When people share MP3s, more music is sold, not less."
And that's just from the first third of the article (cuz I'm getting sick of this). Come on, people. These 3 paragraphs may seem convincing to people who don't have training in logic and statistics, but/. readers are supposed to be geeks. (Actually, only the third one really needs statistical reasoning; the other two should be obvious to anyone.)
When I hear Godel I think "undecidabilty" where a statement can be true or false and both systems are equally valid and self-consistant. I am aware that self refferential statements can lead to contradictions. I don't consciously attribute that grain of knowledge to Godel, though that could be the source.
Basically, what Godel's theorem boils down to is that systems which can contain self-referential statements will naturally contain both contradictions and undecidable statements. You may be able to eliminate one or the other by redefining the system, but you can't eliminate both.
What I'm trying to get at here is that you can't use reasoning like: "There are two options, X and Y. X is bad, therefore we should do Y." For one thing, sometimes you have to choose the lesser of two evils. Alternately, in the real world it is rare that X and Y are so black and white that you have to choose only one or the other.
Your reasoning about unconstitutional laws sounds dangerously close to that. I.e. If there is any possible way that the law can be abused then we can't have the law. "I think there is is difference between a wholly unconstitutional statue, and a statute that has substantial non-unconstitutional purposes:-)" As far as I know courts have no mechanism for treating them differently. They void the law and it is congress's responsiblility to accomplish their purpose in a constituitional manner with a new law.
I don't know exactly how this works, but what constitutes a single law anyway? If there is a giant bill and some rider is declared unconstitutional, does that invalidate the entire bill? I always thought that only the unconstitutional sections were voided. "When you circumvent copy protection, you show consciousness of guilt." It only shows guilt if you assume circumvention is wrong, and that is a circular argument to justify criminalizing it. LOL
You took my comment out of context. I said that when you defeat copy protection, you acknowledge that what you are doing might be illegal, whether or not you think it should be. Ok, so some religious fruitloop can play his records backwards checking for satanic messages. But (I assume) there are no DVD players that can play a DVD backwards. Do you feel justified in imprisioning this fruitloop if he decrypts a DVD he owns to play it backwards?
I have a couple of CDs with backwards satanic messages. I have to admit it's fun to check, but I wouldn't break down and cry if I didn't have that right. Copyright law is extremely effective against anyone who tries to use a work to make profit. There would still be profitable uses of works even if P2P was declared 100% legal.
Unlike many people, I don't think it's more wrong to violate copyright to make a profit than to swap tracks with strangers. I will admit I can't think of a constitutional solution that would satisfy the RIAA, but the right solution doesn't necessarily have to satisfy the RIAA. In any case it does not justify an unconstitutional solution.
I still think a 300 year old statement in the constitution is being misinterpreted. Also, keep in mind the fact that it was an amendment. The very fact that there is an amendment means that constitutions are not infallible.
Not that I actually believe that the first amendment was wrong, but people are always going on about the original purpose of copyright. I don't believe that anyone 300 years ago had the foresight to determine how copyright should work now. Any time technology advances some companies die off, others adapt and thrive, and entirely new ones are created. Assuming for a moment that P2P were declared 100% legal, it might wipe out the RIAA but it would not destroy the music industry.
That's what I call qualitative thinking when quantitative thinking was called for. If you take a $20 billion industry and reduce it to a $10 million industry then sure some people will still make money, just not very much. Sure, that happens in a lot of industries, but only when their product has become obsolete. Music is not obsolete.
Don't forget that the RIAA already PAYS radio to give their music away for free.
That's kind of irrelevant, don't you think? They do that as a form of advertising. No one is going to advertise if they don't have a product. Television is broadcast free to the general public. It is absurd to lock the new digital broadcasts in DRM!
Not all TV is broadcast free to the general public. All the major networks are suffering severe damage from cable. That's why you see an increased focus on "cheap" shows, such as game shows and reality TV. When the courts ruled that time-shifting using VCRs was legal, it probably did some damage to broadcast TV, but not enough to cripple their profits. TIVO, on the other hand, has the potential to destroy broadcast TV (or at least move the ads to a box at the side of the screen). I never said repeal a law that doesn't catch all the guilty. If that happens then you add a new law to prevent it from happening again. If a law tries to imprison the innocent then you dump the law and pass a replacement that corrects the problem. No system is perfect, but that is a system that continualy corrects and improves itself.
That's the kind of system you mentioned earlier that is characteristic of N thinkers. My claim is that no system is perfect, so you have to maximize the benefits and reduce the drawbacks. Your proposal is based on reactionary thinking. I have no problem with a system that continually corrects itself, but you can't go around making major changes every time you spot an exception. That is a case of the idealist creating a cure that is worse than the problem. The general public has indicated they want P2P to be legal. Of course then there's the consideration of what the public needs. The public does not need DRM.
Well, something like 50% of the general public have indicated that they want P2P to be legal, highly biased towards teenagers, who don't have the right to vote.
Not that that's really the point. We don't live in this kind of pure democracy, where any decision that is supported by 51% of the population is valid. Otherwise, the have-nots could vote to reappropriate all the money from the haves, or the US could vote to annex Canada.
A tyranny of the majority is just as bad as a tyranny of the minority. Everyone is a member of some kind of minority group, which is why by protecting the interests of every minority group, the government also protects the interests of the minority. There's probably a reasonable solution, but the copyright industry has absolutely no interest in a reasonable solution. They want copyrights that never expire. They want to tax all recordable media. They want all sorts of NEW rights. They want to take all sorts of rights away from the public. They certainly have no intent to trading anything away for what they want. They have no intrest in any "copyright bargain" with the public.
I disagree. If there was a "copyright bargain", the public certainly hasn't held up its end. Small scale music piracy has been largely tolerated for the last 20 years, primarily because it wasn't doing enough harm to matter. Now, all of a sudden, the public has developed a mechanism for large scale music piracy, and they claim that this new weapon gives them the right to negotiate a better deal. I'm sorry, but that's extortion. The recording industry is simply going to the government and saying "We're being threatened with extortion. Give us the means to protect our property." The purpose of copyright is not to benefit copyright holders. The purpose of copyright is to benefit the public.
Whatever. Yeah, I mean that's theoretically the purpose of capitalism, but it's also the purpose of communism as well. I think that oft cited argument is a bit oversimplified. And if revoking the DMCA caused books and music to dissappear altogether that would be a problem, but I don't see that happening either. We could repeal copyright entirely (not a suggestion, just a point) and books would still be written, music would be made, and they would be available to everyone. Some of the creators would still even be able to make a living at it and others would do it for free.
And/. readers wonder why people call them communists:-) Everyone and his dog thinks he as an artiste. I know that poor starving artists often create works of greatness, but I don't see that as rationale for keeping them poor and starving. The benefit from creative works is the number created times their distribution and their usefulness. That value is maximized by LIMITED copyright protection, not by revoking copyright an not by DRM.
I dont' necessarily think that DRM is necessary. If we made unregulated P2P illegal, that would probably be enough. "the intent was placed there by the person who designed the algorithm" And if the author of DeCSS had no intent to violate copyright? Then what? And even if he did, the intent vanishes or changes the instant someone else uses it with a different intent.
No, the intent to illegally decrypt music. The algorithm contains this intent, regardless of how it is used. "[profiles] What bothers me is that this is all about dropping people into nice, well-defined pigeonholes." It is only a problem if you expect the pigeonholes to be well defined and to expect people to land in them cleanly:) The idealised system is boolean (err, boolean^4) making it relatively simple and manageable, but it applies to individuals in a very fuzzy manner. That's why I had alot of fuzzy-words like tend, may, usually, or reffering to a "classic" example.
I didn't mean that the categories were Boolean, since they obviously weren't (I was 55% N). However, the assumption that N is opposite S implies something. The point of the system, of course, is not to say that some people are better than others.
Your description of yourself matches up well with about 50% on the SN scale. I've seen that written as IXTP. You could think of it as skilled in both S and N, or as mastery of neither:)
I disagree. What I was trying to say was that I was naturally INTP, but I learned S as a skill. Even if I later became IXTP according to the test, I wstill fit the INTP profile and not the ISTP one. (I was a terrible engineer... I'm really not mechanically inclined at all.) I find horoscopes as silly as you do. Psycology-phd's have put some serious scientific analysis into it.
I don't dispute that these tests are probably good for something. (Career counselling, etc.) I hadn't heard of the romatic purpose before, which is what I thought sounded like horoscopes. (I actually had a girlfriend once who wanted to know my sign so her mother could determine if we were compatible.)
When I took the test before, it was actually the Keirsian Personality Sorter. They have the same categories, but the analysis is different. According to them, NFs are idealists and NTs are rationals. I once did a survey on a music-related mailing list and INTPs were actually the most common type (20%) even though they are only 1% of the population (although the test you referred me to said 4%). Of course, any Internet survey is going to have some bias. When I took the test before, my ambiguous trait was I/E, not N/S (although I also thought that was a flaw in the test). People ought to post these things in their personal ads:-) Come to think of it, I see the Keirsion website talks about compatibility as well. Is is easy to understand someone who is "111X" compared to yourself. It it sort of a mirror aspect that you have within yourself. I usualy use logic(T), but when I (F)eel I always (S)ense the emotion and tie it to the (E)xternal world. When an ESF uses logic(T) they do it the same was as me, (I)nternally and i(N)tuitively.
That's an interesting theory, and I wonder if it's true. I can't imagine that an EXF would use logic in the same way as me.
While math results can be supprizing or even counter-intuitive, I think the only math-meaning of "absurd" is "contradiction". Reductio ad contradiction a common and valid math proof. My contradiction was that congress cannot outlaw thinking.
I think you misunderstood my previous statement. I am fully aware what reductio ad absurdum means, but I pointed out that it isn't technically valid even for math proofs because of Godel's theorem. I guess you haven't heard of Godel's theorem, then. Basically, what it says is that any sufficiently powerful formal system will contain contradictions. Since the system naturally contains contradictions, you can't assume that reducing a statement to a contradiction implies that the statement is false. Reductio ad absurdum arguments can still be used in math, as long as you constrain yourself to a limited formal system that can't contain self-referential statements. However, there is no basis for applying reductio ad absurdum arguments to laws or social issues. One of us missunderstands the law here. It *is* a boolean decision. They have no power to re-write the law and they cannot ignore the law. Any time they are faced with an unconstitutionality they are required to strike down that law.
Well, there are actually two issues: what is the law, and what should be the law. Neither of them are Boolean issues. No law is perfect, and there is always the possibility of changing it. Also, most laws are open to discretion based on the circumstances, which is why some murderers get 7 years and others 25. "American Jurisprudence Volume 16 Section 177 -- An unconstitutional statute though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly null and void and ineffective for any purpose."
I think there is is difference between a wholly unconstitutional statue, and a statute that has substantial non-unconstitutional purposes:-) It was just a sarcastic suggestion. You said it was "probably" legal to read a disk backwards etc. I was rather dumbfounded that you would even consider the possibility of imprisoning someone for that.
And my comments aren't allowed to be tongue-in-cheek? I don't think the difficulty of something has any bearing on its legality. An act is no less illegal if you do it in a "difficult" manner,
I disagree. The difficulty of something shouldn't necessarily have any bearing on its legality, but it can. Anyway, I was saying that the illegal act may be more severe (not less) if it is difficult. (I won't say "more illegal", since that would probably trigger a rant.) State of mind can certainly have a bearing during both criminal and civil trials. When you circumvent copy protection, you show consciousness of guilt. Whether or not you agree with the law, you can no longer claim ignorance. If you want stronger copyright protection then chuck the DMCA and pass stonger laws against copyright violation.
Yeah, the general opinion on/. is that, whether or not copyright violation is legal, P2P networks should be allowed and anonymous, and ISPs shouldn't be forced to reveal the names of their users. In other words, while at least some people give lip service to copyright, they want to create a system in which it is completely unenforceable. "You can always foul [laws] up by postulating something that no one really wants to do." We have 300,000,000 people. People are going to do all sorts of unpredictable things - and they will often have good reasons for it. If it "fouls up the law" then you just imprisoned an innocent person or you let someone get away with a crime.
No system is perfect, but your solution doesn't make sense. If you had to abolish any law that can't catch all the guilty people or that occasionally catches an innocent person then we'd be living in anarchy. Surely you agree that an imperfect set of laws is preferable to anarchy?!
Here's where the reductio ad absurdum argument fails. In Boolean logic, you can say "if not X then ~X". But this is fuzzy logic. You can't say "X is not perfect, therefore ~X". It just doesn't follow. Incidentally, I don't think it is better for a thousand guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be imprisoned. I don't know where I would draw the line, but it isn't at 1,000. "doubt that you are allowed to OCR it. I double-doubt that it would be legal to give the book to a friend." No wonder you don't see a problem with DRM and DMCA. You are unaware what we lose. They revoke fair use rights, the right of first sale, library rights, and much more. You may "double-doubt it", but you have the right to give a book (or disk etc) to a friend, or even to sell it:
You took my comment out of context. You claimed that it would be legal to OCR the book and then give the book to a friend while keeping the OCR'ed copy. That is what I said I "double-doubted". Time shifting, backups, blind book readers, science, school book reports, making a mural from your DVD(grin), the list is of "fair uses" is essentially infinite. DRM+DMCA revokes all fair use rights.
I find that to be a huge exageration. The courts have ruled that fair use does not generally require a perfect digital copy. "There have always been exceptions for the blind." The blind do NOT have an exception to use a bookreader. They don't need it. It's personal use and fair use.
I didn't say that. I just said there were exceptions. What I meant is that I think the blind get special access to books on tape. "Very likely, blind people would be issued special readers" Who is supposed to do this issuing? The government? DRM+DMCA are currently barring the blind from "accessing" "protected" content. The blind haven't been issued anything.
Probably because eBooks aren't significant enough to matter yet. If this was a real problem, it wouldn't take long for one of the disabled persons' advocacy groups to sue. E-books don't come with text-to-speach software or a "don't read aloud bit".
False. Here's a link to an eBook for sale. As you can see, there is a "don't read aloud" bit. "You have no good reason to want to run DeCSS" Sigh. The part that bugs the hell out of me (sorry, I've fought with other people over this and maybe I'm cranky) - what bugs me is the attitude that people need to justify doing something that they have a right to do!
Rights are mutable. You have fair use rights because the courts decided that they were the best compromise at the time. If you think laws should not be based on what people need (and want) to do, then I wholeheartedly disagree. Just how many examples do I have to list to prove that people can have perfectly good and legal reasons for circumventing DRM? It should only take one. Will you agree to oppose DMCA if I list 5? What if I list 10? 20? 50?? For every good reason I think of there will be a hundred good reasons I didn't think of.
I don't believe that one reason is enough because I don't have this naive belief that the judicial system has to be perfect. You can't please all of the people all of the time. The number of reasons doesn't matter so much as their total effect and whether there all alternatives. If the DMCA caused libraries and radio to disappear altogether, that would be a problem, but I don't see that happening. Giving blind people the right to read can be solved in other ways. I don't see the right to timeshifting or to make a backup as an inalienable rights. I think they were rights that were granted due to the particular circumstances that existed in the 70s. They are desirable, but they can also be repealed if the new circumstances do not support them. A non-conscious algorithm cannot contain an intent any more than a hacksaw can contain an intent.
The Chinese Room fallacy shows that what we call intelligence can exist in an algorithm, and I believe intent can exist in an algorithm too. Of course the intent was placed there by the person who designed the algorithm; it didn't just appear out of thin air. N vs S I find that pair the hardest to define. S's more physical/sensory oriented, but it takes different apects. The "classic" ISTP is a physical hacker, an engineer or mechanic. ES's might master physical performance - athletics or acting. S's will see all the subtle details of something. N's are more "connection" or system oriented. The classic INTP is a programmer. An ENT might might "engineer" social networks. N's may make deep analogies with hidden parallels. N's will see all the subtle connections or interactions between things.
What bothers me is that this is all about dropping people into nice, well-defined pigeonholes. Introversion and extroversion are clear opposites, but why can't I be sensing and intuitive? For some of the questions, neither answer seemed appealing, and for other questions, both did. As it turns out, I'm a good programmer and a good actor. I studied engineering, but I didn't particularly like it. And I spend a lot of my free time playing sports, even though I'm not particularly good at them.
I see subtle connections between things but I see those as qualitative links which need to be validated by quantitative evidence. Oftentimes a connection exists, but its effect is dwarfed by other factors. That's the danger of analogizing. N's tend to be more creative or innovative, but as often as not the "new" method is worse than the "usual" method. S's tend to get more consistant and reliable results, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
I definitely fit the INTP profile better than ISTP.( I am a programmer after all.) When I took the test before (about 5 years ago), I'm sure I was a clear N. But around the same time, I noticed the exact phenomenon you mentioned (the new method being worse than the old method) among idealists. That was a defining moment for me, as I developed a contempt for idealism and became a commited pragmatist/centrist. But I don't equate this with a shift to S. The way I see it, I made an intuitive decision to become a pragmatist.
It's the same thing with my commitment not to argue by analogy. It's not that I don't ever see things in terms of analogies, I just know that to do so would be counter-productive. If you are INTP your ideal mate is ESFP. 55% N is borderline, you might be ISTP and your ideal mate would be ENFP. Beware of ESFJ (or ENFJ if you are S) - that is attraction but long term it turns to conflict.
Ahh... the odd couple. It sounds like the psychologists have managed to come up with a form of scientific horoscopes. Someone should come up with a form of astrological signs to go along with each of these.
AES really hasn't been deployed that much in practice, however 3DES has been standard for quite some time. Cracking DES by differential techniques is non-trivial. The biggest problem is that it can be cracked by dedicated hardware costing only a few million dollars, or by a group of computers in a distributed system. And if you're using 40 bit DES then that's just completely worthless.
I didn't say it was a zero-sum game. But still, you didn't directly refute anything I said. Oil pretty much is a zero-sum game. Food production could go up (or variety could go down). There is only so much arable land available, certainly not enough for the whole world to eat as much meat as the average American currently does.
I mentioned India and China since they account for about 1/3rd of the world's population. There is absolutely no way that the average Indian or Chinese citizen produces as much pollution as the average American.
I don't think there is a single statement in your post that I believe, expect maybe the one about most developed countries not experiencing population growth.
There's no reason to think that the western standard of living has to go down for others to come up. Technology has exponentially increased the production capacity of the planet, and there are many areas that haven't even been explored. To think we are reaching capacity is extremely naive.
Technology may have vastly increased the production capacity, but it has also caused huge environmental damage. That's a warning that the the growth trend can't continue.
What goes up must come down. The fact that a trend has been increasing for many years does not mean that it can't reverse, and there are always boosters who defend the trend until (and past when) the bubble bursts. (remember the stock market, anyone?)
We have seen a huge population explosion over the last few decades. Are you aware that the anthropic principle predicts that a population explosion signals the impending end of the world? (or at least a dramatic reduction in population within the next 50 years.)
-a
Re:How's it feel to be a middle man?
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't see the doomsday scenerio you suggest, rather I see everybody competing on a more even basis and the worldwide standard of living improving.
Well sure, the worldwide standard of living goes up, but that means that the Western standard of living goes down. Take a look at how much the average American consumes (in terms of food, natural resources, etc) and pollutes. Can you imagine if every citizen of India and China did the same?
If you don't think it's us vs. them then you're being naive. No, the real winners will be the countries with oil. Mad Max, here we come!
[Reductio ad absurdum] applies to anything, so long as it is used properly. It's just easier to make an error when using it on social issues. A single false case will invalidate an entire math proof and a single unconstitutional case will invalidate an entire law.
Reductio ad absurdum isn't even technically valid for math proofs (due to Godel's theorem), but those cases are pretty easy to identify. However, pure math is a theoretical formal system and law is a practical one. In the real world, you have to make approximations, but since they are approximations you also can't take them as the gospel truth. As soon as you depart from the rigid world of theoretical mathematics, these absolutes begin to break down. Where would physics be without Newton's laws? And yet they are not literally true; you just need to know when not to use them.
There is an old saying that goes "when you are holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail," and it might explain why geeks (who are versed in Boolean logic) tend to see everything in terms of absolute right and wrong. But in the real world, there simply is no such thing. It amazes me that a whole sector of society's most intelligent members haven't figured that out yet. Laws are just approximations; they are not mathematical truths. If a single edge case is proved unconstitutional then that is an exception, not proof that the law is fatally flawed. "You can probably do all that non-DeCSS stuff if you want" Probably?? Oh my. Maybe we should outlaw math teachers too.
As I believe you commented earlier, "thanks for the strawman." I was going to dissagree, but I see you are right in that I phrased it carelessly. Everything I said is still valid though.
Huh? Some of your rebutals were based on a misinterpretation of my statements. I bet you rejected my last paragraph, but that's ok. DVD's and books are both digital anyway (ignoring any illustrations). A book is a sequence of discrete values (letters), just like a DVD.
To me, the key point is not whether something can be defined as digital in some theoretical manner. Once something is in digital form it is easily pirated. When it is in analog form, you first have to convert it into digital form. That's why digital media require stronger copy protection. Both books and disks can be cut up and put back together. Both books and disks can have their contents blotted out and overwritten (easy on a Read/Write disks, possible but a pain on Recordables or ROM). All methods change the contents, it doesn't matter if the media gets scrambled or not.
I don't believe that this analogy really has anything to do with the issue. Laws are designed to deal with thinks that people might conceivable want to do. You can always foul them up by postulating something that no one really wants to do. Your DeCSS example falls into this category as well, since it is not something anyone would want to do, except (through alien logic) to prove a point. Probably not, but I could keep the OCR scan I made and give the book to a friend.
I doubt that. I also doubt that you are allowed to OCR it, but I double-doubt that it would be legal to give the book to a friend. You seem to find intent important. DMCA says you can't circumvent even if you are blind and need to use a text-to-speach reader.
There have always been exceptions for the blind. Didn't you see that Seinfeld episode? Very likely, blind people would be issued special readers which are allowed to ignore the "don't read aloud" bit. Your mistake is in assuming that laws cannot have exceptions where needed. "it is also wrong to say that they[circumvention/violation] have nothing to do with each other." They are independant. You can (A)do neither, (B)do both, (C)just circumvent, or (D)just violate.
Okay, you are going to use some kind of wierd definition of independant. I would say that they are not causally related, but they are corellated, which mean to me that they are not independant. You have no good reason to want to run DeCSS unless you either want to a) pirate DVDs or b) watch them on Linux. If the Linux users were willing to run a non-OSS DVD player app, this whole argument would be over by now, but instead they turn it into a free speech issue. "John Searle's Chinese room" I never intened to indicate the computer was thinking in a conscious sense hehe. I meant to indicate it didn't matter if it was done with a computer or not.
I didn't think you were, but to me the fallacy of the Chinese Room argument shows the importance of intent in achieving a result, and it also shows how intent can be encoded in an algorithm even though the carrying out of that algorithm is merely a series of innocent steps. Incidentally, I agree that we will create conscious computers, and that we are merely biological machines. (I also believe that after we create intelligent machines, they will kill us.) BTW, my turn for an off-the-wall question:) Do you happen to know your personality profile? [recycles.org] I'm an INTP. I would speculate you are an ISTJ or ESTJ.
I was INTP last time I checked (about 4 years ago). I will check again. Yup, still INTP (although the N is only 55%).
I don't know the exact implications of N vs S and J vs P, but you obviously believe that I think quite a lot differently than you do. The way I see it, I am still a geek and a logical thinker, but I have rationally decided that Boolean logic does not apply in the real world and I use fuzzy logic instead.
If they want to make an industry of this, they'll have to get it through their heads that people won't put up with that. Especially not kids, with their shorter attention spans.
Based on my experience with kids, they'll like it so long as you make it so that they'll always win.
I wrote a reply yesterday, but/. got toasted by the slammer worm again and it was lost. I think I managed to reconstruct it pretty well.
You accuse me of putting words in your mouth, and yet I did no such thing. I merely made 3 statements of the form "*I* don't believe X." You're the one who automatically assumes that everything I say (particularly the 2nd one) is a verbatim refutation of something you said earlier, so you're the one misquoting me. When I want to put words in your mouth I will use either italics or quotes. Watch for that.
The statements I made about my beliefs are clearly opinions, and therefore they add no weight to my argument, although they do provide context. These are things I believe, so I will take them as lemmas. If you wish, you may agree with my lemmas and disagree with my conclusions or just disagree with my lemmas.
Your little thought experiment about doing DeCSS in your head is some kind of attempt at reductio ad absurdum. Unfortunately, reductio ad absurbum (like slippery slope) is an argument technique that works well in a mathematical context, but which doesn't apply to social issues. I think you objection is trivial enough that if you are capable of doing DeCSS using only thoughts then you should be allowed to do that. (Of course, you wouldn't be allowed to transcribe the results of your computation.) If you own a DVD you have the right read its contents and alter them any way you like. And that includes reading it backwards, or inverting all the bits, or treating it as one big number and calculating the square of that number, or even using the math equation known as DeCSS on it.
Legally, you don't. You can probably do all that non-DeCSS stuff if you want, for the simple reason that those are all meaningless exercises. As a general rule, silly, pointless acts tend to be legal. And if you want to claim I do not have that right then you are either going to have to say I do not have the right to cut up a book and rearrange the letters, or you are going to have to come up with a valid difference between that and scrambling (or descrabling) a DVD.
Personally, I prefer not to argue by analogy. Books and DVDs are more different than they are alike. The salient difference is that books are analog and DVDs are digital. You are trying to compare the physical medium of the book to the data on the DVD. If you want a fair comparison, you need to compare data to data or medium to medium.
A book is just the physical manifestation of the text. If you cut up the book and rearrange the letters, it would no longer be the same text. You wouldn't be allowed to rearrange the letters into the text of a different, copyrighted book. You also don't have the right to scan your book with OCR or give photocopies to your friends. Note that the digital equivalent of books (eBooks) contain copy protection technology. And also note that you are permitted to cut up the DVD with a pair of scissors and turn it into a mural. The DMCA does not outlaw copyright violation. It outlaws cicumvention which has absolutely nothing to do with copyright violation.
I disagree. Copyright violation may not be the same as circumvention, but it is also wrong to say that they have nothing to do with each other.
BTW, I'm interested. Have you heard of John Searle's Chinese room argument and do you agree with it?
That's nice in theory, but what you really get is a boom-bust cycle like we just saw. There is initially a surge of new jobs because the cost of entry is low, but these die off or are moved overseas because the margins are low. The "extra" money that you save by not buying Oracle evaporates because none of your competitors buy Oracle either.
Basing my logic on statistical reasoning, I think outsourcing is a fad, but moving jobs overseas is not. Aside from this, dominance of open source software will cause the most job losses, partly because it will shrink profit margins and partly because it will reduce the cost of entry for overseas companies.
I think it's a misnomer to say that bands rarely profit from album sales. Without albums, distribution, airplay, and promotion, they would never have had a career to begin with. Still, all these discussions on/. have revealed the fact that the bands are still probably getting a raw deal. If P2P use inspired those discussion then that's great, but two wrongs still don't make a right. Music piracy does little to help artists get a better deal from the labels in the future.
I don't really like branching off on analogies, but your magazine comparison is yet another red herring. The people who put magazines on the web are either freelancers who use their own material, or print publishers who republish articles they already own. It isn't a case of eZines publishing material they stole from someone else (except on/. when someone reposts the text because the site has been slashdotted). The problem with analogies is that you can choose a comparison that ignores the most salient issue. Like I said before, it all to do with who writes the material.
Frankly, your assertion that "obsolete" industries should "evolve or die" is ridiculous. We don't live in an anarchy. The government has the authority to shut down lucrative industries that are based on illegal acts (e.g. extortion, prostitution, slavery). You seem to forget that the primary product of the music industry is music, not CDs, and music is not obsolete. Ultimatly, the legal system and the government are supposed to look out for the needs of the people.
Oh, and music industry workers, executives, talent and shareholders aren't people too? Protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority is just as important as protecting the majority from the tyranny of the minority.
I'm a programmer too, but I don't believe that we have to throw all IP laws out the window because we have machines that can duplicate things. And I don't believe that all national laws go out the window just because we have a network that crosses borders.
How they managed to read the key is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. I didn't look how they did it, since that would probably be illegal. I was under the impression that the CD key was stored on the disc, encrypted with all the master keys and that they disassembled the software to find the algorithm and the master key.
Whatever the case, it is clear to me that they cracked the algorithm intentionally. There was no idiot savant who happened to be able to play DVDs in his head. I think of the crime in terms of intent, you think only of a series of innocent actions. But any crime could be reduced to a series of innocent actions.
I don't believe you have the right to access any information just because it's out there. Sometimes when your mommy tells you to keep your hand out of the cookie jar you just have to go along.
Well, we all just learned today about the No Electronic Theft (NET) act, so apparently file sharing falls under the legal definition of theft. But I don't really care what we call it, within reason. (e.g. I think the term "free software" comes pretty close to newspeak.)
If the opportunity cost of getting our freedoms taken away is few more sales of Billboard top 40 albums, then I'm all for piracy.
LOL... the "opportunity cost" of getting our freedoms taken away? (As opposed to just the cost.)
First they came for the music swappers and I did nothing; then they came for the movie swappers and I did nothing; then they came for the kiddie pr0n swappers and there I was.
-- Pete Townshend
Right. And both steps of the process - figuring out the algorithm and doing the decryption is nothing but pure thought. And the DMCA says it is a CRIME. It is a crime to think certain things. That is just so wrong.
It is theoretically possible that someone could figure out an algorithm by thought, but you can't guess a key by pure thought. That's what makes it a key.
I think you are trivializing the circumstances surrounding the issue. No one is going to be arrested for thinking certain thoughts. If they were then I would agree with you. It's easy to trivialize these things, but I think you have to consider the intent. Otherwise, people would be blowing up buildings with the excuse "all I did was press a button".
I pay about $35 or so. I'm curious if you're on digital cable or not.
Yeah, I'm on digital cable. My $70 includes basic cable & two extended packages (~60 channels) + movies and hockey. I'm also in Canada, which may skew the economics a bit.
Your solution is to make TV ads more interesting, which might work in theory, but I think it is an unstable equilibrium. You require the ads to be sufficiently interesting that people will watch them, but not so interesting that people will seek them out elsewhere (ala AdCritic). The SuperBowl is an interesting exception, since so many people watch it for the ads (but every day can't be Superbowl Sunday)
Keep in mind that major brands already try to make their ads as interesting as possible. Even so, advertising works by repetition so they have a vested interest in making you watch the ad more times than you care to. About half of TV advertising (by my estimate) is for local businesses who can't afford to spend $100k on an ad with a plot, so you lose half your revenue right off the bat.
The other half of ads are mostly vignettes anyway, but say you want to give them a running plot line. This would necessitate changing the ads more frequently, which would increase the cost. One additional factor is that vignette-style ads aren't particularly effective at building brand awareness. The makers are already sacrificing effectiveness in order to lure you into watching the ad. You know how news stations give you little teasers that provide no info whatsoever? Why not place ads in there where they actually give brief news stories? The idea here is to make the commercial time more rewarding.
There's plenty of that going on. Watch any talk show where they interview actors or discuss new products (e.g. the Today Show or the Tonight Show). You tune in for the entertainment, but the entertainment is always selling something. I have one more idea, but this one is arguably weaker. Lure people to the website of the TV show and get advertisements there.
They do this, but I don't think it will have enough of an effect. So yes you're right, assuming the industry stays the way it is. Truth be told, though, they were heading that way with or without Tivo.
I think they were heading there a lot slower without TIVO. But the fact is, advertising by itsself can't support 60 TV channels in every home. A lot of people were clamouring for more TV choice but they didn't realize that their bill would go up, even if they didn't subscribe to the new channels.
the fault is their own. They've done a PITIFUL job of educating their audience. And since they haven't educated their customers, then attempts to make advertising more intrusive has resulted in people making $400 purchases in technologies like TiVo
I don't think there's anything they could have done. You can shame people into doing something, but it only usually works when there is a personal connection. In the privacy of their own home, people are going to skip ads. I owe you an apology. I made a rude assumption about what your response would be. I regret that now. I'm sorry man.
No problem. I try to keep things civil by simply ignoring flames.
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And why shouldn't I be an Anonymous Coward? You may be a /. newbie, but I know better than to argue with a troll while logged in.
Pinko and commmie go together like bread and jam. Calling someone a pinko commie is standard. It means something like a communist sympathizer rather than a communist.
Anyway, RMS is clearly a commmunist. When I called you an RMS-lover, I meant in terms of the pinko stuff that is posted on the GNU philosophy pages. I could care less about his stance on microkernels.
Libertarians think they have all the answers, but they are so naive. Their anarchistic paradise would in fact be a dystopia. The crippling of law enforcement would allow criminals to prosper, the economy would suck, and entertainment media would be amateur schlock.
I was kidding about the IQ test. The logical fallacy is quite clear. Janis Ian said that her sales went up after she allowed free downloads from her website. Then she blames the RIAA for their suit against Verizon regarding P2P. That's a total non-sequitor. The RIAA isn't going to shut anyone down for sharing Janis Ian songs if they don't own the rights to them.
-a
I'll take a stab at it.
A stab at propping up the fallacies rather than identifying them, I see.
1. "between the years 1991 and 2001, the average price of a CD went from $13.01 to $14.64, which is a 12.53 percent increase in price. The record companies raised prices precisely at the time costs were coming down. When a DVD costs $19.99 and includes the movie in multiple formats with bonus material and no hassle, and a CD costs $18.99 and comes with potential legal hassles, limits on fair use, and all the finger waving the RIAA can muster, the choice of which product to buy becomes clear."
Sure, he states the *average* price of a CD is $14, because that's statistical and hard fact proof, but you go to a local chain store and over 60% of the CDs are going to be upwards of 16-18.99 each. Out of that, the artist only makes about
Bad Argument 1: State a fact and then ignore it. I did a quick survey of Amazon.com and found that their top 5 hot CDs were selling for an average of $15.
Bad Argument 2: Make statements about CDs that are equally applicable to DVDs.
2. "despite President and CEO of the MPAA Jack Valenti's recent statements that the future is bleak. Not since the 1950s have so many movie tickets been sold. Meanwhile, movie sharing on the Internet is at an all-time high. The movie business isn't suffering because of activity on the Internet."
So where *is* the fallacy? You're trying to claim Valenti's statement, I believe. Let me break it down a little for you. File sharing is at an all time high yet more movie tickets were bought this last year than any other. Valenti thinking the future is bleak just shows how offbase the upper brass are in organizations like the MPAA (lest we forget his argument against the VCR) *rolls eyes*. Valenti saying things as clueless as that is the exact proof that the Snyders were looking for and therefore very valid in the paper.
Bad Argument 1: Comparing movie sharing to movie tickets rother than DVD/Video sales/rentals.
Bad Argument 2: Saying that something is at an all-time high doesn't mean much unless you quantify how high that is. The all-time high of movie piracy is very low compared to music piracy.
3. " It's also been widely reported that the most downloaded album of all time was "The Eminem Show," by Eminem. It was downloaded so heavily that Interscope took the unusual step of releasing the album a week early due to the rampant online sharing of tracks from the album. Fast-forward to the end of 2002, and "The Eminem Show" is the best-selling album of the year. This seems to indicate the opposite of what the RIAA would have you believe. When people share MP3s, more music is sold, not less."
If you know anything about that situation you know that's exactly true. I was listening to it before the cd came out due to p2p networks (and Foo Fighter's new one was out on IRC before it came out, and
Bad Argument 1: False causation. The Eminem album sold well because it was popular and it was also heavily pirated because it was popular. This is a correlation, not a causation.
-a
Unfortunately, I agree. This article read more like a laundry list of all the arguments ever made by the anti-RIAA crowd than an actual well-thought out, well-reasoned, logical position.
That was pretty much exactly what I was thinking.
No attempt at the logical fallacies?
-a
This piece really hits the mark in a very roundabout sort of way. RIAA wants to stop peer-to-peer through actions like its lawsuit against Verizon because those actions threaten their stranglehold on commercial music.
I dunno. That's pretty roundabout logic. What Janis Ian basically said was "I put up music that people can download for free off my website, but the RIAA wants to stop me by suing Verizon to force them to reveal the names of people who illegally share copyrighted files via P2P." Somehow I just don't follow. I know there's a logical fallacy in there, but what could it be?
-a
Well that article was one of the bigger crocks of shit I've read in a while. It just goes to show that your logic doesn't need to make sense when you're telling people what you want to hear.
/. readers are supposed to be geeks. (Actually, only the third one really needs statistical reasoning; the other two should be obvious to anyone.)
A prize to anyone who can spot the logical fallacies & deliberate distortions in the following excerpts:
1. "between the years 1991 and 2001, the average price of a CD went from $13.01 to $14.64, which is a 12.53 percent increase in price. The record companies raised prices precisely at the time costs were coming down. When a DVD costs $19.99 and includes the movie in multiple formats with bonus material and no hassle, and a CD costs $18.99 and comes with potential legal hassles, limits on fair use, and all the finger waving the RIAA can muster, the choice of which product to buy becomes clear."
2. "despite President and CEO of the MPAA Jack Valenti's recent statements that the future is bleak. Not since the 1950s have so many movie tickets been sold. Meanwhile, movie sharing on the Internet is at an all-time high. The movie business isn't suffering because of activity on the Internet."
3. " It's also been widely reported that the most downloaded album of all time was "The Eminem Show," by Eminem. It was downloaded so heavily that Interscope took the unusual step of releasing the album a week early due to the rampant online sharing of tracks from the album. Fast-forward to the end of 2002, and "The Eminem Show" is the best-selling album of the year. This seems to indicate the opposite of what the RIAA would have you believe. When people share MP3s, more music is sold, not less."
And that's just from the first third of the article (cuz I'm getting sick of this). Come on, people. These 3 paragraphs may seem convincing to people who don't have training in logic and statistics, but
My daily karma burn...
-a
When I hear Godel I think "undecidabilty" where a statement can be true or false and both systems are equally valid and self-consistant. I am aware that self refferential statements can lead to contradictions. I don't consciously attribute that grain of knowledge to Godel, though that could be the source.
Basically, what Godel's theorem boils down to is that systems which can contain self-referential statements will naturally contain both contradictions and undecidable statements. You may be able to eliminate one or the other by redefining the system, but you can't eliminate both.
What I'm trying to get at here is that you can't use reasoning like: "There are two options, X and Y. X is bad, therefore we should do Y." For one thing, sometimes you have to choose the lesser of two evils. Alternately, in the real world it is rare that X and Y are so black and white that you have to choose only one or the other.
Your reasoning about unconstitutional laws sounds dangerously close to that. I.e. If there is any possible way that the law can be abused then we can't have the law.
"I think there is is difference between a wholly unconstitutional statue, and a statute that has substantial non-unconstitutional purposes
As far as I know courts have no mechanism for treating them differently. They void the law and it is congress's responsiblility to accomplish their purpose in a constituitional manner with a new law.
I don't know exactly how this works, but what constitutes a single law anyway? If there is a giant bill and some rider is declared unconstitutional, does that invalidate the entire bill? I always thought that only the unconstitutional sections were voided.
"When you circumvent copy protection, you show consciousness of guilt."
It only shows guilt if you assume circumvention is wrong, and that is a circular argument to justify criminalizing it. LOL
You took my comment out of context. I said that when you defeat copy protection, you acknowledge that what you are doing might be illegal, whether or not you think it should be.
Ok, so some religious fruitloop can play his records backwards checking for satanic messages. But (I assume) there are no DVD players that can play a DVD backwards. Do you feel justified in imprisioning this fruitloop if he decrypts a DVD he owns to play it backwards?
I have a couple of CDs with backwards satanic messages. I have to admit it's fun to check, but I wouldn't break down and cry if I didn't have that right.
Copyright law is extremely effective against anyone who tries to use a work to make profit. There would still be profitable uses of works even if P2P was declared 100% legal.
Unlike many people, I don't think it's more wrong to violate copyright to make a profit than to swap tracks with strangers.
I will admit I can't think of a constitutional solution that would satisfy the RIAA, but the right solution doesn't necessarily have to satisfy the RIAA. In any case it does not justify an unconstitutional solution.
I still think a 300 year old statement in the constitution is being misinterpreted. Also, keep in mind the fact that it was an amendment. The very fact that there is an amendment means that constitutions are not infallible.
Not that I actually believe that the first amendment was wrong, but people are always going on about the original purpose of copyright. I don't believe that anyone 300 years ago had the foresight to determine how copyright should work now.
Any time technology advances some companies die off, others adapt and thrive, and entirely new ones are created. Assuming for a moment that P2P were declared 100% legal, it might wipe out the RIAA but it would not destroy the music industry.
That's what I call qualitative thinking when quantitative thinking was called for. If you take a $20 billion industry and reduce it to a $10 million industry then sure some people will still make money, just not very much. Sure, that happens in a lot of industries, but only when their product has become obsolete. Music is not obsolete.
Don't forget that the RIAA already PAYS radio to give their music away for free.
That's kind of irrelevant, don't you think? They do that as a form of advertising. No one is going to advertise if they don't have a product.
Television is broadcast free to the general public. It is absurd to lock the new digital broadcasts in DRM!
Not all TV is broadcast free to the general public. All the major networks are suffering severe damage from cable. That's why you see an increased focus on "cheap" shows, such as game shows and reality TV. When the courts ruled that time-shifting using VCRs was legal, it probably did some damage to broadcast TV, but not enough to cripple their profits. TIVO, on the other hand, has the potential to destroy broadcast TV (or at least move the ads to a box at the side of the screen).
I never said repeal a law that doesn't catch all the guilty. If that happens then you add a new law to prevent it from happening again. If a law tries to imprison the innocent then you dump the law and pass a replacement that corrects the problem. No system is perfect, but that is a system that continualy corrects and improves itself.
That's the kind of system you mentioned earlier that is characteristic of N thinkers. My claim is that no system is perfect, so you have to maximize the benefits and reduce the drawbacks. Your proposal is based on reactionary thinking. I have no problem with a system that continually corrects itself, but you can't go around making major changes every time you spot an exception. That is a case of the idealist creating a cure that is worse than the problem.
The general public has indicated they want P2P to be legal. Of course then there's the consideration of what the public needs. The public does not need DRM.
Well, something like 50% of the general public have indicated that they want P2P to be legal, highly biased towards teenagers, who don't have the right to vote.
Not that that's really the point. We don't live in this kind of pure democracy, where any decision that is supported by 51% of the population is valid. Otherwise, the have-nots could vote to reappropriate all the money from the haves, or the US could vote to annex Canada.
A tyranny of the majority is just as bad as a tyranny of the minority. Everyone is a member of some kind of minority group, which is why by protecting the interests of every minority group, the government also protects the interests of the minority.
There's probably a reasonable solution, but the copyright industry has absolutely no interest in a reasonable solution. They want copyrights that never expire. They want to tax all recordable media. They want all sorts of NEW rights. They want to take all sorts of rights away from the public. They certainly have no intent to trading anything away for what they want. They have no intrest in any "copyright bargain" with the public.
I disagree. If there was a "copyright bargain", the public certainly hasn't held up its end. Small scale music piracy has been largely tolerated for the last 20 years, primarily because it wasn't doing enough harm to matter. Now, all of a sudden, the public has developed a mechanism for large scale music piracy, and they claim that this new weapon gives them the right to negotiate a better deal. I'm sorry, but that's extortion. The recording industry is simply going to the government and saying "We're being threatened with extortion. Give us the means to protect our property."
The purpose of copyright is not to benefit copyright holders. The purpose of copyright is to benefit the public.
Whatever. Yeah, I mean that's theoretically the purpose of capitalism, but it's also the purpose of communism as well. I think that oft cited argument is a bit oversimplified.
And if revoking the DMCA caused books and music to dissappear altogether that would be a problem, but I don't see that happening either. We could repeal copyright entirely (not a suggestion, just a point) and books would still be written, music would be made, and they would be available to everyone. Some of the creators would still even be able to make a living at it and others would do it for free.
And
The benefit from creative works is the number created times their distribution and their usefulness. That value is maximized by LIMITED copyright protection, not by revoking copyright an not by DRM.
I dont' necessarily think that DRM is necessary. If we made unregulated P2P illegal, that would probably be enough.
"the intent was placed there by the person who designed the algorithm"
And if the author of DeCSS had no intent to violate copyright? Then what? And even if he did, the intent vanishes or changes the instant someone else uses it with a different intent.
No, the intent to illegally decrypt music. The algorithm contains this intent, regardless of how it is used.
"[profiles] What bothers me is that this is all about dropping people into nice, well-defined pigeonholes."
It is only a problem if you expect the pigeonholes to be well defined and to expect people to land in them cleanly
I didn't mean that the categories were Boolean, since they obviously weren't (I was 55% N). However, the assumption that N is opposite S implies something. The point of the system, of course, is not to say that some people are better than others.
Your description of yourself matches up well with about 50% on the SN scale. I've seen that written as IXTP. You could think of it as skilled in both S and N, or as mastery of neither
I disagree. What I was trying to say was that I was naturally INTP, but I learned S as a skill. Even if I later became IXTP according to the test, I wstill fit the INTP profile and not the ISTP one. (I was a terrible engineer... I'm really not mechanically inclined at all.)
I find horoscopes as silly as you do. Psycology-phd's have put some serious scientific analysis into it.
I don't dispute that these tests are probably good for something. (Career counselling, etc.) I hadn't heard of the romatic purpose before, which is what I thought sounded like horoscopes. (I actually had a girlfriend once who wanted to know my sign so her mother could determine if we were compatible.)
When I took the test before, it was actually the Keirsian Personality Sorter. They have the same categories, but the analysis is different. According to them, NFs are idealists and NTs are rationals. I once did a survey on a music-related mailing list and INTPs were actually the most common type (20%) even though they are only 1% of the population (although the test you referred me to said 4%). Of course, any Internet survey is going to have some bias. When I took the test before, my ambiguous trait was I/E, not N/S (although I also thought that was a flaw in the test). People ought to post these things in their personal ads
Is is easy to understand someone who is "111X" compared to yourself. It it sort of a mirror aspect that you have within yourself. I usualy use logic(T), but when I (F)eel I always (S)ense the emotion and tie it to the (E)xternal world. When an ESF uses logic(T) they do it the same was as me, (I)nternally and i(N)tuitively.
That's an interesting theory, and I wonder if it's true. I can't imagine that an EXF would use logic in the same way as me.
-a
While math results can be supprizing or even counter-intuitive, I think the only math-meaning of "absurd" is "contradiction". Reductio ad contradiction a common and valid math proof. My contradiction was that congress cannot outlaw thinking.
I think you misunderstood my previous statement. I am fully aware what reductio ad absurdum means, but I pointed out that it isn't technically valid even for math proofs because of Godel's theorem. I guess you haven't heard of Godel's theorem, then. Basically, what it says is that any sufficiently powerful formal system will contain contradictions. Since the system naturally contains contradictions, you can't assume that reducing a statement to a contradiction implies that the statement is false. Reductio ad absurdum arguments can still be used in math, as long as you constrain yourself to a limited formal system that can't contain self-referential statements. However, there is no basis for applying reductio ad absurdum arguments to laws or social issues.
One of us missunderstands the law here. It *is* a boolean decision. They have no power to re-write the law and they cannot ignore the law. Any time they are faced with an unconstitutionality they are required to strike down that law.
Well, there are actually two issues: what is the law, and what should be the law. Neither of them are Boolean issues. No law is perfect, and there is always the possibility of changing it. Also, most laws are open to discretion based on the circumstances, which is why some murderers get 7 years and others 25.
"American Jurisprudence Volume 16 Section 177 --
An unconstitutional statute though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly null and void and ineffective for any purpose."
I think there is is difference between a wholly unconstitutional statue, and a statute that has substantial non-unconstitutional purposes
It was just a sarcastic suggestion. You said it was "probably" legal to read a disk backwards etc. I was rather dumbfounded that you would even consider the possibility of imprisoning someone for that.
And my comments aren't allowed to be tongue-in-cheek?
I don't think the difficulty of something has any bearing on its legality. An act is no less illegal if you do it in a "difficult" manner,
I disagree. The difficulty of something shouldn't necessarily have any bearing on its legality, but it can. Anyway, I was saying that the illegal act may be more severe (not less) if it is difficult. (I won't say "more illegal", since that would probably trigger a rant.) State of mind can certainly have a bearing during both criminal and civil trials. When you circumvent copy protection, you show consciousness of guilt. Whether or not you agree with the law, you can no longer claim ignorance.
If you want stronger copyright protection then chuck the DMCA and pass stonger laws against copyright violation.
Yeah, the general opinion on
"You can always foul [laws] up by postulating something that no one really wants to do."
We have 300,000,000 people. People are going to do all sorts of unpredictable things - and they will often have good reasons for it. If it "fouls up the law" then you just imprisoned an innocent person or you let someone get away with a crime.
No system is perfect, but your solution doesn't make sense. If you had to abolish any law that can't catch all the guilty people or that occasionally catches an innocent person then we'd be living in anarchy. Surely you agree that an imperfect set of laws is preferable to anarchy?!
Here's where the reductio ad absurdum argument fails. In Boolean logic, you can say "if not X then ~X". But this is fuzzy logic. You can't say "X is not perfect, therefore ~X". It just doesn't follow. Incidentally, I don't think it is better for a thousand guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be imprisoned. I don't know where I would draw the line, but it isn't at 1,000.
"doubt that you are allowed to OCR it. I double-doubt that it would be legal to give the book to a friend."
No wonder you don't see a problem with DRM and DMCA. You are unaware what we lose. They revoke fair use rights, the right of first sale, library rights, and much more. You may "double-doubt it", but you have the right to give a book (or disk etc) to a friend, or even to sell it:
You took my comment out of context. You claimed that it would be legal to OCR the book and then give the book to a friend while keeping the OCR'ed copy. That is what I said I "double-doubted".
Time shifting, backups, blind book readers, science, school book reports, making a mural from your DVD(grin), the list is of "fair uses" is essentially infinite. DRM+DMCA revokes all fair use rights.
I find that to be a huge exageration. The courts have ruled that fair use does not generally require a perfect digital copy.
"There have always been exceptions for the blind."
The blind do NOT have an exception to use a bookreader. They don't need it. It's personal use and fair use.
I didn't say that. I just said there were exceptions. What I meant is that I think the blind get special access to books on tape.
"Very likely, blind people would be issued special readers"
Who is supposed to do this issuing? The government? DRM+DMCA are currently barring the blind from "accessing" "protected" content. The blind haven't been issued anything.
Probably because eBooks aren't significant enough to matter yet. If this was a real problem, it wouldn't take long for one of the disabled persons' advocacy groups to sue.
E-books don't come with text-to-speach software or a "don't read aloud bit".
False. Here's a link to an eBook for sale. As you can see, there is a "don't read aloud" bit.
"You have no good reason to want to run DeCSS"
Sigh. The part that bugs the hell out of me (sorry, I've fought with other people over this and maybe I'm cranky) - what bugs me is the attitude that people need to justify doing something that they have a right to do!
Rights are mutable. You have fair use rights because the courts decided that they were the best compromise at the time. If you think laws should not be based on what people need (and want) to do, then I wholeheartedly disagree.
Just how many examples do I have to list to prove that people can have perfectly good and legal reasons for circumventing DRM? It should only take one. Will you agree to oppose DMCA if I list 5? What if I list 10? 20? 50?? For every good reason I think of there will be a hundred good reasons I didn't think of.
I don't believe that one reason is enough because I don't have this naive belief that the judicial system has to be perfect. You can't please all of the people all of the time. The number of reasons doesn't matter so much as their total effect and whether there all alternatives. If the DMCA caused libraries and radio to disappear altogether, that would be a problem, but I don't see that happening. Giving blind people the right to read can be solved in other ways. I don't see the right to timeshifting or to make a backup as an inalienable rights. I think they were rights that were granted due to the particular circumstances that existed in the 70s. They are desirable, but they can also be repealed if the new circumstances do not support them.
A non-conscious algorithm cannot contain an intent any more than a hacksaw can contain an intent.
The Chinese Room fallacy shows that what we call intelligence can exist in an algorithm, and I believe intent can exist in an algorithm too. Of course the intent was placed there by the person who designed the algorithm; it didn't just appear out of thin air.
N vs S
I find that pair the hardest to define. S's more physical/sensory oriented, but it takes different apects. The "classic" ISTP is a physical hacker, an engineer or mechanic. ES's might master physical performance - athletics or acting. S's will see all the subtle details of something.
N's are more "connection" or system oriented. The classic INTP is a programmer. An ENT might might "engineer" social networks. N's may make deep analogies with hidden parallels. N's will see all the subtle connections or interactions between things.
What bothers me is that this is all about dropping people into nice, well-defined pigeonholes. Introversion and extroversion are clear opposites, but why can't I be sensing and intuitive? For some of the questions, neither answer seemed appealing, and for other questions, both did. As it turns out, I'm a good programmer and a good actor. I studied engineering, but I didn't particularly like it. And I spend a lot of my free time playing sports, even though I'm not particularly good at them.
I see subtle connections between things but I see those as qualitative links which need to be validated by quantitative evidence. Oftentimes a connection exists, but its effect is dwarfed by other factors. That's the danger of analogizing.
N's tend to be more creative or innovative, but as often as not the "new" method is worse than the "usual" method. S's tend to get more consistant and reliable results, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
I definitely fit the INTP profile better than ISTP.( I am a programmer after all.) When I took the test before (about 5 years ago), I'm sure I was a clear N. But around the same time, I noticed the exact phenomenon you mentioned (the new method being worse than the old method) among idealists. That was a defining moment for me, as I developed a contempt for idealism and became a commited pragmatist/centrist. But I don't equate this with a shift to S. The way I see it, I made an intuitive decision to become a pragmatist.
It's the same thing with my commitment not to argue by analogy. It's not that I don't ever see things in terms of analogies, I just know that to do so would be counter-productive.
If you are INTP your ideal mate is ESFP. 55% N is borderline, you might be ISTP and your ideal mate would be ENFP. Beware of ESFJ (or ENFJ if you are S) - that is attraction but long term it turns to conflict.
Ahh... the odd couple. It sounds like the psychologists have managed to come up with a form of scientific horoscopes. Someone should come up with a form of astrological signs to go along with each of these.
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AES really hasn't been deployed that much in practice, however 3DES has been standard for quite some time. Cracking DES by differential techniques is non-trivial. The biggest problem is that it can be cracked by dedicated hardware costing only a few million dollars, or by a group of computers in a distributed system. And if you're using 40 bit DES then that's just completely worthless.
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I didn't say it was a zero-sum game. But still, you didn't directly refute anything I said. Oil pretty much is a zero-sum game. Food production could go up (or variety could go down). There is only so much arable land available, certainly not enough for the whole world to eat as much meat as the average American currently does.
I mentioned India and China since they account for about 1/3rd of the world's population. There is absolutely no way that the average Indian or Chinese citizen produces as much pollution as the average American.
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I don't think there is a single statement in your post that I believe, expect maybe the one about most developed countries not experiencing population growth.
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There's no reason to think that the western standard of living has to go down for others to come up. Technology has exponentially increased the production capacity of the planet, and there are many areas that haven't even been explored. To think we are reaching capacity is extremely naive.
Technology may have vastly increased the production capacity, but it has also caused huge environmental damage. That's a warning that the the growth trend can't continue.
What goes up must come down. The fact that a trend has been increasing for many years does not mean that it can't reverse, and there are always boosters who defend the trend until (and past when) the bubble bursts. (remember the stock market, anyone?)
We have seen a huge population explosion over the last few decades. Are you aware that the anthropic principle predicts that a population explosion signals the impending end of the world? (or at least a dramatic reduction in population within the next 50 years.)
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I don't see the doomsday scenerio you suggest, rather I see everybody competing on a more even basis and the worldwide standard of living improving.
Well sure, the worldwide standard of living goes up, but that means that the Western standard of living goes down. Take a look at how much the average American consumes (in terms of food, natural resources, etc) and pollutes. Can you imagine if every citizen of India and China did the same?
If you don't think it's us vs. them then you're being naive. No, the real winners will be the countries with oil. Mad Max, here we come!
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[Reductio ad absurdum] applies to anything, so long as it is used properly. It's just easier to make an error when using it on social issues. A single false case will invalidate an entire math proof and a single unconstitutional case will invalidate an entire law.
Reductio ad absurdum isn't even technically valid for math proofs (due to Godel's theorem), but those cases are pretty easy to identify. However, pure math is a theoretical formal system and law is a practical one. In the real world, you have to make approximations, but since they are approximations you also can't take them as the gospel truth. As soon as you depart from the rigid world of theoretical mathematics, these absolutes begin to break down. Where would physics be without Newton's laws? And yet they are not literally true; you just need to know when not to use them.
There is an old saying that goes "when you are holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail," and it might explain why geeks (who are versed in Boolean logic) tend to see everything in terms of absolute right and wrong. But in the real world, there simply is no such thing. It amazes me that a whole sector of society's most intelligent members haven't figured that out yet. Laws are just approximations; they are not mathematical truths. If a single edge case is proved unconstitutional then that is an exception, not proof that the law is fatally flawed.
"You can probably do all that non-DeCSS stuff if you want"
Probably?? Oh my. Maybe we should outlaw math teachers too.
As I believe you commented earlier, "thanks for the strawman."
I was going to dissagree, but I see you are right in that I phrased it carelessly. Everything I said is still valid though.
Huh? Some of your rebutals were based on a misinterpretation of my statements.
I bet you rejected my last paragraph, but that's ok. DVD's and books are both digital anyway (ignoring any illustrations). A book is a sequence of discrete values (letters), just like a DVD.
To me, the key point is not whether something can be defined as digital in some theoretical manner. Once something is in digital form it is easily pirated. When it is in analog form, you first have to convert it into digital form. That's why digital media require stronger copy protection.
Both books and disks can be cut up and put back together. Both books and disks can have their contents blotted out and overwritten (easy on a Read/Write disks, possible but a pain on Recordables or ROM). All methods change the contents, it doesn't matter if the media gets scrambled or not.
I don't believe that this analogy really has anything to do with the issue. Laws are designed to deal with thinks that people might conceivable want to do. You can always foul them up by postulating something that no one really wants to do. Your DeCSS example falls into this category as well, since it is not something anyone would want to do, except (through alien logic) to prove a point.
Probably not, but I could keep the OCR scan I made and give the book to a friend.
I doubt that. I also doubt that you are allowed to OCR it, but I double-doubt that it would be legal to give the book to a friend.
You seem to find intent important. DMCA says you can't circumvent even if you are blind and need to use a text-to-speach reader.
There have always been exceptions for the blind. Didn't you see that Seinfeld episode? Very likely, blind people would be issued special readers which are allowed to ignore the "don't read aloud" bit. Your mistake is in assuming that laws cannot have exceptions where needed.
"it is also wrong to say that they[circumvention/violation] have nothing to do with each other."
They are independant. You can (A)do neither, (B)do both, (C)just circumvent, or (D)just violate.
Okay, you are going to use some kind of wierd definition of independant. I would say that they are not causally related, but they are corellated, which mean to me that they are not independant. You have no good reason to want to run DeCSS unless you either want to a) pirate DVDs or b) watch them on Linux. If the Linux users were willing to run a non-OSS DVD player app, this whole argument would be over by now, but instead they turn it into a free speech issue.
"John Searle's Chinese room"
I never intened to indicate the computer was thinking in a conscious sense hehe. I meant to indicate it didn't matter if it was done with a computer or not.
I didn't think you were, but to me the fallacy of the Chinese Room argument shows the importance of intent in achieving a result, and it also shows how intent can be encoded in an algorithm even though the carrying out of that algorithm is merely a series of innocent steps. Incidentally, I agree that we will create conscious computers, and that we are merely biological machines. (I also believe that after we create intelligent machines, they will kill us.)
BTW, my turn for an off-the-wall question
Do you happen to know your personality profile? [recycles.org] I'm an INTP. I would speculate you are an ISTJ or ESTJ.
I was INTP last time I checked (about 4 years ago). I will check again. Yup, still INTP (although the N is only 55%).
I don't know the exact implications of N vs S and J vs P, but you obviously believe that I think quite a lot differently than you do. The way I see it, I am still a geek and a logical thinker, but I have rationally decided that Boolean logic does not apply in the real world and I use fuzzy logic instead.
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I don't know what keyboard layout you're using, but I can't figure out how the hell you accidentally typed that.
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If they want to make an industry of this, they'll have to get it through their heads that people won't put up with that. Especially not kids, with their shorter attention spans.
Based on my experience with kids, they'll like it so long as you make it so that they'll always win.
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I wrote a reply yesterday, but /. got toasted by the slammer worm again and it was lost. I think I managed to reconstruct it pretty well.
You accuse me of putting words in your mouth, and yet I did no such thing. I merely made 3 statements of the form "*I* don't believe X." You're the one who automatically assumes that everything I say (particularly the 2nd one) is a verbatim refutation of something you said earlier, so you're the one misquoting me. When I want to put words in your mouth I will use either italics or quotes. Watch for that.
The statements I made about my beliefs are clearly opinions, and therefore they add no weight to my argument, although they do provide context. These are things I believe, so I will take them as lemmas. If you wish, you may agree with my lemmas and disagree with my conclusions or just disagree with my lemmas.
Your little thought experiment about doing DeCSS in your head is some kind of attempt at reductio ad absurdum. Unfortunately, reductio ad absurbum (like slippery slope) is an argument technique that works well in a mathematical context, but which doesn't apply to social issues. I think you objection is trivial enough that if you are capable of doing DeCSS using only thoughts then you should be allowed to do that. (Of course, you wouldn't be allowed to transcribe the results of your computation.)
If you own a DVD you have the right read its contents and alter them any way you like. And that includes reading it backwards, or inverting all the bits, or treating it as one big number and calculating the square of that number, or even using the math equation known as DeCSS on it.
Legally, you don't. You can probably do all that non-DeCSS stuff if you want, for the simple reason that those are all meaningless exercises. As a general rule, silly, pointless acts tend to be legal.
And if you want to claim I do not have that right then you are either going to have to say I do not have the right to cut up a book and rearrange the letters, or you are going to have to come up with a valid difference between that and scrambling (or descrabling) a DVD.
Personally, I prefer not to argue by analogy. Books and DVDs are more different than they are alike. The salient difference is that books are analog and DVDs are digital. You are trying to compare the physical medium of the book to the data on the DVD. If you want a fair comparison, you need to compare data to data or medium to medium.
A book is just the physical manifestation of the text. If you cut up the book and rearrange the letters, it would no longer be the same text. You wouldn't be allowed to rearrange the letters into the text of a different, copyrighted book. You also don't have the right to scan your book with OCR or give photocopies to your friends. Note that the digital equivalent of books (eBooks) contain copy protection technology. And also note that you are permitted to cut up the DVD with a pair of scissors and turn it into a mural.
The DMCA does not outlaw copyright violation. It outlaws cicumvention which has absolutely nothing to do with copyright violation.
I disagree. Copyright violation may not be the same as circumvention, but it is also wrong to say that they have nothing to do with each other.
BTW, I'm interested. Have you heard of John Searle's Chinese room argument and do you agree with it?
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That's nice in theory, but what you really get is a boom-bust cycle like we just saw. There is initially a surge of new jobs because the cost of entry is low, but these die off or are moved overseas because the margins are low. The "extra" money that you save by not buying Oracle evaporates because none of your competitors buy Oracle either.
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Basing my logic on statistical reasoning, I think outsourcing is a fad, but moving jobs overseas is not. Aside from this, dominance of open source software will cause the most job losses, partly because it will shrink profit margins and partly because it will reduce the cost of entry for overseas companies.
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I think it's a misnomer to say that bands rarely profit from album sales. Without albums, distribution, airplay, and promotion, they would never have had a career to begin with. Still, all these discussions on /. have revealed the fact that the bands are still probably getting a raw deal. If P2P use inspired those discussion then that's great, but two wrongs still don't make a right. Music piracy does little to help artists get a better deal from the labels in the future.
/. when someone reposts the text because the site has been slashdotted). The problem with analogies is that you can choose a comparison that ignores the most salient issue. Like I said before, it all to do with who writes the material.
I don't really like branching off on analogies, but your magazine comparison is yet another red herring. The people who put magazines on the web are either freelancers who use their own material, or print publishers who republish articles they already own. It isn't a case of eZines publishing material they stole from someone else (except on
Frankly, your assertion that "obsolete" industries should "evolve or die" is ridiculous. We don't live in an anarchy. The government has the authority to shut down lucrative industries that are based on illegal acts (e.g. extortion, prostitution, slavery). You seem to forget that the primary product of the music industry is music, not CDs, and music is not obsolete.
Ultimatly, the legal system and the government are supposed to look out for the needs of the people.
Oh, and music industry workers, executives, talent and shareholders aren't people too? Protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority is just as important as protecting the majority from the tyranny of the minority.
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I'm a programmer too, but I don't believe that we have to throw all IP laws out the window because we have machines that can duplicate things. And I don't believe that all national laws go out the window just because we have a network that crosses borders.
How they managed to read the key is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. I didn't look how they did it, since that would probably be illegal. I was under the impression that the CD key was stored on the disc, encrypted with all the master keys and that they disassembled the software to find the algorithm and the master key.
Whatever the case, it is clear to me that they cracked the algorithm intentionally. There was no idiot savant who happened to be able to play DVDs in his head. I think of the crime in terms of intent, you think only of a series of innocent actions. But any crime could be reduced to a series of innocent actions.
I don't believe you have the right to access any information just because it's out there. Sometimes when your mommy tells you to keep your hand out of the cookie jar you just have to go along.
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How would you feel if the post office went after e-mail just because it cost them money? How is this any different?
I think that would be pretty obvious to most people after about 10 seconds thought.
HINT: it has something to do with who writes the letter/music.
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Well, we all just learned today about the No Electronic Theft (NET) act, so apparently file sharing falls under the legal definition of theft. But I don't really care what we call it, within reason. (e.g. I think the term "free software" comes pretty close to newspeak.)
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If the opportunity cost of getting our freedoms taken away is few more sales of Billboard top 40 albums, then I'm all for piracy.
LOL... the "opportunity cost" of getting our freedoms taken away? (As opposed to just the cost.)
First they came for the music swappers and I did nothing; then they came for the movie swappers and I did nothing; then they came for the kiddie pr0n swappers and there I was.
-- Pete Townshend
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Right. And both steps of the process - figuring out the algorithm and doing the decryption is nothing but pure thought. And the DMCA says it is a CRIME. It is a crime to think certain things. That is just so wrong.
It is theoretically possible that someone could figure out an algorithm by thought, but you can't guess a key by pure thought. That's what makes it a key.
I think you are trivializing the circumstances surrounding the issue. No one is going to be arrested for thinking certain thoughts. If they were then I would agree with you. It's easy to trivialize these things, but I think you have to consider the intent. Otherwise, people would be blowing up buildings with the excuse "all I did was press a button".
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I pay about $35 or so. I'm curious if you're on digital cable or not.
Yeah, I'm on digital cable. My $70 includes basic cable & two extended packages (~60 channels) + movies and hockey. I'm also in Canada, which may skew the economics a bit.
Your solution is to make TV ads more interesting, which might work in theory, but I think it is an unstable equilibrium. You require the ads to be sufficiently interesting that people will watch them, but not so interesting that people will seek them out elsewhere (ala AdCritic). The SuperBowl is an interesting exception, since so many people watch it for the ads (but every day can't be Superbowl Sunday)
Keep in mind that major brands already try to make their ads as interesting as possible. Even so, advertising works by repetition so they have a vested interest in making you watch the ad more times than you care to. About half of TV advertising (by my estimate) is for local businesses who can't afford to spend $100k on an ad with a plot, so you lose half your revenue right off the bat.
The other half of ads are mostly vignettes anyway, but say you want to give them a running plot line. This would necessitate changing the ads more frequently, which would increase the cost. One additional factor is that vignette-style ads aren't particularly effective at building brand awareness. The makers are already sacrificing effectiveness in order to lure you into watching the ad.
You know how news stations give you little teasers that provide no info whatsoever? Why not place ads in there where they actually give brief news stories? The idea here is to make the commercial time more rewarding.
There's plenty of that going on. Watch any talk show where they interview actors or discuss new products (e.g. the Today Show or the Tonight Show). You tune in for the entertainment, but the entertainment is always selling something.
I have one more idea, but this one is arguably weaker. Lure people to the website of the TV show and get advertisements there.
They do this, but I don't think it will have enough of an effect.
So yes you're right, assuming the industry stays the way it is. Truth be told, though, they were heading that way with or without Tivo.
I think they were heading there a lot slower without TIVO. But the fact is, advertising by itsself can't support 60 TV channels in every home. A lot of people were clamouring for more TV choice but they didn't realize that their bill would go up, even if they didn't subscribe to the new channels.
the fault is their own. They've done a PITIFUL job of educating their audience. And since they haven't educated their customers, then attempts to make advertising more intrusive has resulted in people making $400 purchases in technologies like TiVo
I don't think there's anything they could have done. You can shame people into doing something, but it only usually works when there is a personal connection. In the privacy of their own home, people are going to skip ads.
I owe you an apology. I made a rude assumption about what your response would be. I regret that now. I'm sorry man.
No problem. I try to keep things civil by simply ignoring flames.
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