Exactly. What do you do normally with a neighbor you don't approve of? Nothing. What do you think you can get away with when the neighbor is a sex offender? Sounds like a justification to commit crime huh? What jury would give you more than a slap on the wrist? Go ahead dude, fuck that guy up - the justice system says that it's ok.
Sure, children should perhaps have a greater range of protections than other groups of people under the law. We already recognize this by having different systems of incarceration for child criminals and recognize their offenses as different than those of adults.
However, the simple fact that children aren't created equal is ALSO already recognized under the law. Some children become magically transformed into adults by the justice system by the heinousness of their crimes, just like a child can go from state to state and magically gain or lose the ability to sign contracts or get married. With all these sorts of distinctions made unevenly from state to state and jury to jury, it's hard to see how a simple list of names without distinction serves any real purpose of the judicial system.
So, it remains as the only solution to why the things exist as some sort of placating gesture to appease the masses. Bread and circuses, with whatever positive benefit gained by informing citizens of the potential child molester moving into their midsts weighed against the negative possibilities of tacitly encouraging people to become criminals themselves in response to the sex offenders who may or not be child molesters (depending on the definitions used in the sex offense registry of the state). The fact of the matter is, the registries aren't defined as how the punishment is doled out. Perhaps if we defined the registries more thoroughly and removed the protection of law for the offenders it would make some sense. We could release the prisoners into society with the assumption that the greater weight of the sentencing was still awaiting them in a vengeful and legally righteous society. As offenders left prisons we could have school children wait outside the gates and stone them to death or something, as a learning device to teach them morality.
I'd have rather that if we were making these sorts of lists that we simply handed them out to an agency of some sort that was designed to deal with these special sorts of criminals, some subset of the parole board probably. I'd be just as happy to have my children protected by people trained to do so than the masses who learn their brand of morality from Hollywood. Furthermore, when teaching my children about my country I'd rather not have to explain things like unequal protection of the law or why I didn't ever want them throwing stones at people just because they turned up on a list published by bureaucrats.
Yeah, getting dead does awful things to people too. But since those crimes don't involve penises those guys get out in 10 years and can mow your lawn without drawing a lynch mob.
What the sex registries are saying is that crimes involving your genitals are intrinsically worse than murder except in those cases where murder draws the death penalty, since even a murderer that is released after serving multiple life sentences doesn't have to inform his neighbors. Worse, there is a blind equality to sex offense registries that are simply lists. The offender who was eighteen and had the fourteen year old girlfriend whose parents called him on the statutory rape charges (or sexual assault on a minor, depending on what state you live in) is listed right there with the serial rapist who was screwing all the first graders on their bus for five years.
I'd be fine with the thought that they'd just take everyone found guilty of sex offenses and shoot them in the back of the prison. They won't though, because they've an inkling that errors can be made in any sort of criminal case. Errors in most criminal cases naturally fix themselves after time, the criminals get out of jail and can live more or less normal lives. Removing the justice system from the picture and encouraging vigilante activism like the sex offender registries do is mind-boggling though, not only is our justice system set up so that guilt must be proven and not innocence it also assumes a sort of natural state of innocence returns to EVERY OTHER SORT OF CRIMINAL. This is obviously not the case, otherwise we wouldn't need three strikes laws and similar mechanisms to defeat repeat criminals. Why don't we have 'two strike" registries? Murderer registries? Heroin addict registries?
We might, but people don't find those crimes as sensationalized in their minds as rape. I imagine some people might rather have Ted Bundy and Charlie Manson over for dinner than a rapist, that doesn't track in the human cost scenario to me but I understand it would happen. I've had to deal with enough rape victims now though that I'm pretty sure that however fucked up the rape made them I'd still rather not have traded the rape for a corpse. You don't always, but can, get over rape. That means that there's something seriously fucked up with having sex offense registries and not murderer registries. But if we allowed TWO registries, then in ten years we'd have twelve registries and people who got caught a decade ago smoking a joint would be burned alive by their neighbors for being filthy drug dealers.
Laws and government follow an ethical gravity, given a chance to they tend to want to flow into a natural state of totalitariansim because of the perfect order. That's why people like me are always bitching about the slippery slope. If you want sex offenders ass-raped for punishment, then make sure that it's part of the sentence. I'd certainly rather have a precise extreme punishment dealt by the state (since thanks to the death penalty, extreme punishment really should include an awful lot) than trust the fringe elements of the public to make uninformed illegal punishments on people thanks to some sort of tacit governmental sanction.
I thought the onus was on the content providers to earn OUR money instead of on the public to earn the right to be trusted with it. After all, we only let people earn money from our valuable public domain at our discretion anyways. How about the content industries give a little back and prove that the dollar we give them won't be used to fuck us in the legislature with it first.
Not/.'ed yet, but this should forestall any complaints
The War On Copying
The communications industry is ready for an infusion of data, such as digital video, to drive it to recovery, but music, video, and other digital-content owners continue to keep a tight rein on their growing mass of IP (intellectual property) while waiting for a secure DRM (digital-rights-management) scheme to materialize. The complexity of DRM, however, makes it a nontrivial addition to a system, especially a consumer device with a low cost threshold.
Several standards are under development to define how to encrypt material and distribute it over public networks. Rather than define the policies themselves, they define a foundation framework that can support a variety of DRM policies. For example, the ISMA (Internet Streaming Media Alliance) 1.0 Encryption and Authentication spec, scheduled for approval this month, describes how to apply the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to content and packetize content for distribution in such a way as to prevent a late packet from disrupting the stream.
Intentionally, these specs do not define what keys you should use or how to manage particular rights. One reason for this omission is that the industry is unclear on how you should manage keys or express rights. Key management and expression of rights, however, is where DRM gets the most complex.
The TCP (Trusted Computing Platform) from the TCG (Trusted Computing Group) addresses key management by specifying a trusted module that applications can use to protect content. The module is actually a processing subsystem; all encryption and decryption happens on the module, so keys are never in the clear. However, to decrypt a 2-Mbyte/sec video stream, the module needs significant processing ability. The $4.25 (1 million) AT97SC3201 TPM from Atmel, for example, performs a 2048-bit RSA sign in 500 msec.
Support for TCP should appear in Microsoft's next version of Windows (formerly known by the code name "Palladium"). However, Microsoft has made public that it intends to introduce changes that will make the operating system incompatible with chips that follow the current version of the TCP spec.
Several proprietary DRM schemes are under development. Sony and Philips, among a plethora of hopefuls, have their own architectures. However, the lack of a consistent model for how to pay for content and use it will easily confuse users. Different business models that may restrict use to a single person or device or a specific time period will constrain the use of similar content, such as music files. Such flexibility is great for content owners but requires users to interact differently with every piece of content. Confusion will arise when users think they are buying one form of license and getting another. Buying and using content needs to be as easy as saying "I want it" and clicking on a button. It shouldn't mean deciding how you want it and having to read pages of small print to understand what you are buying.
Protection at all costs
Most companies mistakenly believe that content protection is about protecting content. Consider that renting a new video release for a single night costs $4 to $5, but renting an old video for five days costs $5. Most content makes the majority of its revenue in the first few weeks of release. Thus, content protection is really about protecting the release window.
Many companies mistakenly focus on the technology when trying to understand DRM and fail to consider the real social issues that managing content involves. For example, DRM schemes that tie content to a single PC fail to address the needs of, say, a child of divorced parents who lives in two homes. Even more common is the person who wants to play music at home, at work, in the car, on a portable player, and at a friend's house. The killer app for digital content is the connected home, yet most DRM schemes undermine consumers' ability to easily move content between
It's easier to avoid gas chambers by not being in Germany during WW2 though. Seriously, I've already been researching what it will take to relocate to New Zealand (a lot of money apparently) because of all this. I'm from Alabama, we've already got a good idea of what happens when people try to go against the government in any way - not to defend the motives, but the results were plain. I'm sure it would be easier to move to Canada, I just don't like snow.
If the girl had shared up thousands of digitized textbooks the publishing industry would be forced to do precisely the same thing.
Ok wait...Someone's forcing them to engage in protection scam methods now? And since when has the print industry attempted to curtail or place taxes upon personal printers in the way that blank cd media are taxed, proposed legislation making the use of a Xerox machine a felony jail time offense, or engaged in surveillance to determine whether or not someone was reading their book they purchased (for personal use only I'm sure) to a crowded room?
And since when has anyone stolen anything from the RIAA? COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. It's not theft, it has similar notions surrounding it, but theft involves physical objects. Just like you can't steal my words, but only plagarize them. If you 'stole' my words a million times you never make me lose them, you only decrease them in value by my lack of control. So how much is that control worth? I've variously read that the recording industry reports income after expenses somewhere from 13 billion to 200 billion dollars, great for them huh? But the college students in April were threatened with 98 billion dollars in damages. Even assuming that the kids had anywhere from 10% to 100% of the ENTIRE RIAA catalog of music available that's an awful lot of damages using any combination of 13 to 200 billion dollars per year. Therefore you have to assume that the control is somehow worth more than the actual income generated by the product, why? A potential profit markup? Where is it justified? Or does the markup exist only as a leverage token to play up the extortion angle? The $150k upper-limit marker used in lawsuit threats by the RIAA is patently ridiculous, if every copyright infringing song of a 1000 is worth $150k in damages then they're implying on the 'copyright infringement is theft' angle that they've lost $150,000,000 in profit because a teenage girl was sharing songs. Even at the lower limit it of $750 it would be $750,000. But wait, there's more - since this IS a civil suit there's no provision of innocence before guilt and that means that there's no onus on the RIAA to prove their case in front of her peers but only other lawyers and members of the legal profession. Everything, in fact, is aligned in favor of the industry lawyers while the people involved don't even get the use of public defenders to save on legal fees. The moral of this story is that it doesn't matter if you're innocent or guilty, the RIAA could rob you blind by simple legal tricks. It may not be your right to infringe upon their copyrights or not, but if they're allowed to progress the law to their advantage the way they are currently then it doesn't matter.
Basically it seems like you're saying that even if everyone had simply started turning on the radio instead of buying new cds, cutting profits dramatically, that the media industry would be forced to take some sort of radical action. I applaud that, but the actions they're forced to take shouldn't be based on overwhelming half-truths, deep pockets, and questionable ethics.
I just don't see how it is that you can justify away the girl's crime.
I'm not. I'm saying that the RIAA's methods and standard practices are similar enough to any protection racket that they should be on shaky legal ground themselves, except that a 200+ billion dollar industry gets uneven legal representation and legislation. A hundred and fifty years ago they'd be starting wars with Indians to make room for railroads, they're about in the same ethical classification.
It's essentially the same thing as you deciding not to press charges against a thief that you caught red-handed stealing stuff from your living room.
Bullshit. The thief in your living room is commiting a felony crime, where the copyright infringer is commiting a civil offense otherwise the police would be bringing charges not the copyright holder.
This is more along the lines of building a fence on a big corporation's property. It's illegal and you're going to lose any civil suit because it's illegal, but the big corporation with deep pockets has the potential to bury you with minimal impact upon itself and horrendous personal consequences to the individual. Even fighting the suit could bury you no matter your guilt or innocence, so the inclination is to resolve the whole thing out of court. When it becomes a formalized business practice though, of actively seeking out those illegal constructions and approaching the issue with formal payoffs then it's extortion. When the corporations artifically inflate the worth of the property that the fences would stand upon and use their political muscle to pass legislation justifying their behavior it is absolutely nothing different than the behavior of any organized crime culture. Just because they're beginning from a legitimate legal standpoint has no relevance on if their behavior is correct, just as the mere fact of guilt doesn't justify the government breaking the law in pursuit of bringing criminals to justice. Since the legal system is being neatly sidestepped by the looming threat of tremendous damage awards there isn't an opportunity for the normal assumptions of innocence and guilt to apply and I think it's clear that this is the intention of the RIAA cartel. Would it be more correct for a shop owner to request sexual favors for not calling the police on a shoplifter? Regardless of the illegal activity involved by the perpetrator it doesn't relieve the victim of the responsibility to act within not only the letter of the law but the spirit of the law.
The question is whether or not you want extortion to be an acceptable business practice.
Is it? I was under the impression that it was illegal no matter what, in a way that copyright infringement isn't. That is, extortion isn't a civil crime like copyright infringement.
What the RIAA is doing is not extortion.
"You have two choices, long legal fights with our armies of lawyers trying to outmaneuver you into paying the 12 billion dollars we're saying you owe us or pay a fee of two or three grand and make us go away." vs. "We'll break your daddy's legs if you don't get him to cover your bet." Sure sounds like extortion to me.
You may not agree with it, but distributing other people's copyrighted works is against the law.
The question of this isn't whether or not copyright infringement is wrong, but if large corporations should be allowed to use legal finagling to commit extortion. You may not agree with it, but two wrongs don't make a right. That the justice system has let things like this slide in the past only serves to highlight the fact that this is indeed the acid test of the practice, and it's failing miserably. The US justice system was created to apply to all people equally no matter the differences in their lawyer-fu ability to bring money to bear upon a problem. It wasn't intended to let large corporations and people with extraordinary amounts of money to browbeat those with less money out of trials.
3)Large media corporations have enough financial incentives to "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" that good music doesn't have much of a chance when faced with not fitting into the tried and proven (and beaten to death) formulas that the music industry keeps time to.
Your "big star" not getting enough air time? Better shove back those album releases and see about hyping something with the networks. Is there a great band you've got a promo of that doesn't look "hip" or fit into tight leather pants? Better see if you can find something similar, but prettier. Oh, and see if you can't get someone to gloss over the "rough edges" or maybe even work in something a little more controversial. Maybe a sixteen year old girl in a porn video would work, as long as she can bring in the green.
I'm sure I'm exaggerating and being overly cynical. Of course I'm not saying that I'm better than the rest of Slashdot and then calling everyone elitist either, so at least I'm not being hypocritical.
Now if they could only use this data to somehow put out better music...
There's no incentive to put out better music though, when aggressively defending your cartel's monopoly gets you all the money that you need. And hey, let's face it: paying up a few million a year for lawyers and lobbyists to pass legislation and extort money from money poor students is chump change when you compare to the costs of changing their business model.
If telephones had never been broken up, would we have ever had cellphones today except maybe in Europe? A powerful media outlet company has even more and broader powers than other sorts of monopolies, because of better access and because they're business is controlling what people want and think. I truly don't think that the music industry is evil, but they're as inertia-bound as any other large incestuously linked series of codependent corporations. If suing customers and softcore porn Britney clones make shareholders happy then thats what we get.
RIAA Fast CD Burner Theory states that anyone with a CD Burner at over one-speed qualifies for magnification in reporting. Therefore, if all of the survey respondents had 40-speed CD burners then they'd qualify to be counted as 200,000 respondents and if they each had ten songs on their hard drive apiece then they'd naturally become then 'millions' that the RIAA needs to qualify their statements.
Good answers? Usually I like correct answers more, good answers might be a semantic construct on your part but it still fits the bill with my problems with the survey methods. When you survey people involved in (even low level) criminal activities and tell them that they're being monitored then they're going to behave better. It's like posting traffic cops on every street and then declaring that people are driving better because the cops observe that people are slowing down. As for their 'huge range', well Microsoft has a 'huge range' as well and that doesn't make it's methods proper or superior either even when they work perfectly well.
The problem is that you never know what is useful and what is trash. If space weren't an issue as much as bandwidth has become less of an issue then I'd say that the simple solution would be to store everything forever on the off chance that it MIGHT be useful if only as a reference for eventually smarter file systems that would take those 'useless' data as characteristic of things that should be sorted to the back of the line. If infinite storage and smart files would mean that not only would I not have to bother myself with having a copy of Britney Spears but that I also wouldn't ever subject myself to anything that reminded me of her except on a visual level...We're not there yet, but I can dream?
Well I suppose you could point fingers at the shoe and apparel companies that run sweatshops. Those guys don't even have the little kids on MTV Cribs showing off their rental bling bling while they show off their street creds by introducing everyone from the orphanage.
Dorms aren't about education either, but a lot of people would get irate paying huge tuition fees to live in tents while pursuing their degrees. Nothing says that colleges have to have parking, but colleges that want students to keep forking over the moolah better at least make some placating efforts to keep the kids from walking 10 miles in the snow.
What would you prefer as a parent, worrying that your kid will be the next bullseye from the RIAA for downloading the latest Snoppy Puffy-Cent album or knowing that they'll have a completely legal outlet to get what they might otherwise do illegally?
I like the idea of bars near the campuses for the same reason, kids are going to drink anyways so why not hope they drink and walk home rather than drive?
How about we scrap everything but the Constitution and start from there again? Then we can flush out the most offensive of offending problems by setting political salaries at standard government wages just like postmen and police officers, and make campaign finance reforms and corruption efforts to the point of making it an offence worthy of hand chopping to take more than 50 bucks from anyone. It's stupid and it wouldn't work and it will never happen, but the fact is that laws are perverted and exploited by corporations with special interest lobbies every day. You don't have a government of the People and by the People, the lawyers are completely in charge. I think that isn't such a problem, except that lawyer souls are adjusted more harshly for inflation and scarcity so the average lawyer is only allowed enough soul to be nice to puppies and their parents - and some not even that.
Whether or not their claims have basis or not, the proper framework for discussing their claims certainly is in copyright law rather than in charges of adultery. What SCO is doing is abusing the vagueries of copyright law perhaps, but that doesn't mean that it's any less the vehicle. But we all knew that copyright law was a bitch anyways since the corporations started buying legislation to screw with it right? Well, this is a consequence.
SCO's argument MUST be based on copyright law, what else can it be? It's like saying that the GPL has nothing to do with copyright, when in fact it has EVERYTHING to do with copyright.
The GPL is just a copyright contract for licensing and use. Contracts can be challenged in courts and argued, but SCO isn't really interested in that so much as the side-effects of inflating stock and extorting money. Whether they win or not, they've made money on the short term and perhaps gained long-term investment from people who can't help but hope that next they'll sue McDonalds after claiming to have invented significant portions of the hamburger.
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We should also have a list of all people with family members, since most people are victimized by people within their own families.
Exactly. What do you do normally with a neighbor you don't approve of? Nothing. What do you think you can get away with when the neighbor is a sex offender? Sounds like a justification to commit crime huh? What jury would give you more than a slap on the wrist? Go ahead dude, fuck that guy up - the justice system says that it's ok.
However, the simple fact that children aren't created equal is ALSO already recognized under the law. Some children become magically transformed into adults by the justice system by the heinousness of their crimes, just like a child can go from state to state and magically gain or lose the ability to sign contracts or get married. With all these sorts of distinctions made unevenly from state to state and jury to jury, it's hard to see how a simple list of names without distinction serves any real purpose of the judicial system.
So, it remains as the only solution to why the things exist as some sort of placating gesture to appease the masses. Bread and circuses, with whatever positive benefit gained by informing citizens of the potential child molester moving into their midsts weighed against the negative possibilities of tacitly encouraging people to become criminals themselves in response to the sex offenders who may or not be child molesters (depending on the definitions used in the sex offense registry of the state). The fact of the matter is, the registries aren't defined as how the punishment is doled out. Perhaps if we defined the registries more thoroughly and removed the protection of law for the offenders it would make some sense. We could release the prisoners into society with the assumption that the greater weight of the sentencing was still awaiting them in a vengeful and legally righteous society. As offenders left prisons we could have school children wait outside the gates and stone them to death or something, as a learning device to teach them morality.
I'd have rather that if we were making these sorts of lists that we simply handed them out to an agency of some sort that was designed to deal with these special sorts of criminals, some subset of the parole board probably. I'd be just as happy to have my children protected by people trained to do so than the masses who learn their brand of morality from Hollywood. Furthermore, when teaching my children about my country I'd rather not have to explain things like unequal protection of the law or why I didn't ever want them throwing stones at people just because they turned up on a list published by bureaucrats.
What the sex registries are saying is that crimes involving your genitals are intrinsically worse than murder except in those cases where murder draws the death penalty, since even a murderer that is released after serving multiple life sentences doesn't have to inform his neighbors. Worse, there is a blind equality to sex offense registries that are simply lists. The offender who was eighteen and had the fourteen year old girlfriend whose parents called him on the statutory rape charges (or sexual assault on a minor, depending on what state you live in) is listed right there with the serial rapist who was screwing all the first graders on their bus for five years.
I'd be fine with the thought that they'd just take everyone found guilty of sex offenses and shoot them in the back of the prison. They won't though, because they've an inkling that errors can be made in any sort of criminal case. Errors in most criminal cases naturally fix themselves after time, the criminals get out of jail and can live more or less normal lives. Removing the justice system from the picture and encouraging vigilante activism like the sex offender registries do is mind-boggling though, not only is our justice system set up so that guilt must be proven and not innocence it also assumes a sort of natural state of innocence returns to EVERY OTHER SORT OF CRIMINAL. This is obviously not the case, otherwise we wouldn't need three strikes laws and similar mechanisms to defeat repeat criminals. Why don't we have 'two strike" registries? Murderer registries? Heroin addict registries?
We might, but people don't find those crimes as sensationalized in their minds as rape. I imagine some people might rather have Ted Bundy and Charlie Manson over for dinner than a rapist, that doesn't track in the human cost scenario to me but I understand it would happen. I've had to deal with enough rape victims now though that I'm pretty sure that however fucked up the rape made them I'd still rather not have traded the rape for a corpse. You don't always, but can, get over rape. That means that there's something seriously fucked up with having sex offense registries and not murderer registries. But if we allowed TWO registries, then in ten years we'd have twelve registries and people who got caught a decade ago smoking a joint would be burned alive by their neighbors for being filthy drug dealers.
Laws and government follow an ethical gravity, given a chance to they tend to want to flow into a natural state of totalitariansim because of the perfect order. That's why people like me are always bitching about the slippery slope. If you want sex offenders ass-raped for punishment, then make sure that it's part of the sentence. I'd certainly rather have a precise extreme punishment dealt by the state (since thanks to the death penalty, extreme punishment really should include an awful lot) than trust the fringe elements of the public to make uninformed illegal punishments on people thanks to some sort of tacit governmental sanction.
I thought the onus was on the content providers to earn OUR money instead of on the public to earn the right to be trusted with it. After all, we only let people earn money from our valuable public domain at our discretion anyways. How about the content industries give a little back and prove that the dollar we give them won't be used to fuck us in the legislature with it first.
The War On Copying
The communications industry is ready for an infusion of data, such as digital video, to drive it to recovery, but music, video, and other digital-content owners continue to keep a tight rein on their growing mass of IP (intellectual property) while waiting for a secure DRM (digital-rights-management) scheme to materialize. The complexity of DRM, however, makes it a nontrivial addition to a system, especially a consumer device with a low cost threshold.
Several standards are under development to define how to encrypt material and distribute it over public networks. Rather than define the policies themselves, they define a foundation framework that can support a variety of DRM policies. For example, the ISMA (Internet Streaming Media Alliance) 1.0 Encryption and Authentication spec, scheduled for approval this month, describes how to apply the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to content and packetize content for distribution in such a way as to prevent a late packet from disrupting the stream.
Intentionally, these specs do not define what keys you should use or how to manage particular rights. One reason for this omission is that the industry is unclear on how you should manage keys or express rights. Key management and expression of rights, however, is where DRM gets the most complex.
The TCP (Trusted Computing Platform) from the TCG (Trusted Computing Group) addresses key management by specifying a trusted module that applications can use to protect content. The module is actually a processing subsystem; all encryption and decryption happens on the module, so keys are never in the clear. However, to decrypt a 2-Mbyte/sec video stream, the module needs significant processing ability. The $4.25 (1 million) AT97SC3201 TPM from Atmel, for example, performs a 2048-bit RSA sign in 500 msec.
Support for TCP should appear in Microsoft's next version of Windows (formerly known by the code name "Palladium"). However, Microsoft has made public that it intends to introduce changes that will make the operating system incompatible with chips that follow the current version of the TCP spec.
Several proprietary DRM schemes are under development. Sony and Philips, among a plethora of hopefuls, have their own architectures. However, the lack of a consistent model for how to pay for content and use it will easily confuse users. Different business models that may restrict use to a single person or device or a specific time period will constrain the use of similar content, such as music files. Such flexibility is great for content owners but requires users to interact differently with every piece of content. Confusion will arise when users think they are buying one form of license and getting another. Buying and using content needs to be as easy as saying "I want it" and clicking on a button. It shouldn't mean deciding how you want it and having to read pages of small print to understand what you are buying.
Protection at all costs
Most companies mistakenly believe that content protection is about protecting content. Consider that renting a new video release for a single night costs $4 to $5, but renting an old video for five days costs $5. Most content makes the majority of its revenue in the first few weeks of release. Thus, content protection is really about protecting the release window.
Many companies mistakenly focus on the technology when trying to understand DRM and fail to consider the real social issues that managing content involves. For example, DRM schemes that tie content to a single PC fail to address the needs of, say, a child of divorced parents who lives in two homes. Even more common is the person who wants to play music at home, at work, in the car, on a portable player, and at a friend's house. The killer app for digital content is the connected home, yet most DRM schemes undermine consumers' ability to easily move content between
Right, but I'm from Florida. Maryland might as well be Finland as far as my norms are concerned.
It's easier to avoid gas chambers by not being in Germany during WW2 though. Seriously, I've already been researching what it will take to relocate to New Zealand (a lot of money apparently) because of all this. I'm from Alabama, we've already got a good idea of what happens when people try to go against the government in any way - not to defend the motives, but the results were plain. I'm sure it would be easier to move to Canada, I just don't like snow.
Hmmmm. Lip reading, the next weird thing we could teach our machines to do.
And since when has anyone stolen anything from the RIAA? COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. It's not theft, it has similar notions surrounding it, but theft involves physical objects. Just like you can't steal my words, but only plagarize them. If you 'stole' my words a million times you never make me lose them, you only decrease them in value by my lack of control. So how much is that control worth? I've variously read that the recording industry reports income after expenses somewhere from 13 billion to 200 billion dollars, great for them huh? But the college students in April were threatened with 98 billion dollars in damages. Even assuming that the kids had anywhere from 10% to 100% of the ENTIRE RIAA catalog of music available that's an awful lot of damages using any combination of 13 to 200 billion dollars per year. Therefore you have to assume that the control is somehow worth more than the actual income generated by the product, why? A potential profit markup? Where is it justified? Or does the markup exist only as a leverage token to play up the extortion angle? The $150k upper-limit marker used in lawsuit threats by the RIAA is patently ridiculous, if every copyright infringing song of a 1000 is worth $150k in damages then they're implying on the 'copyright infringement is theft' angle that they've lost $150,000,000 in profit because a teenage girl was sharing songs. Even at the lower limit it of $750 it would be $750,000. But wait, there's more - since this IS a civil suit there's no provision of innocence before guilt and that means that there's no onus on the RIAA to prove their case in front of her peers but only other lawyers and members of the legal profession. Everything, in fact, is aligned in favor of the industry lawyers while the people involved don't even get the use of public defenders to save on legal fees. The moral of this story is that it doesn't matter if you're innocent or guilty, the RIAA could rob you blind by simple legal tricks. It may not be your right to infringe upon their copyrights or not, but if they're allowed to progress the law to their advantage the way they are currently then it doesn't matter.
Basically it seems like you're saying that even if everyone had simply started turning on the radio instead of buying new cds, cutting profits dramatically, that the media industry would be forced to take some sort of radical action. I applaud that, but the actions they're forced to take shouldn't be based on overwhelming half-truths, deep pockets, and questionable ethics.
This is more along the lines of building a fence on a big corporation's property. It's illegal and you're going to lose any civil suit because it's illegal, but the big corporation with deep pockets has the potential to bury you with minimal impact upon itself and horrendous personal consequences to the individual. Even fighting the suit could bury you no matter your guilt or innocence, so the inclination is to resolve the whole thing out of court. When it becomes a formalized business practice though, of actively seeking out those illegal constructions and approaching the issue with formal payoffs then it's extortion. When the corporations artifically inflate the worth of the property that the fences would stand upon and use their political muscle to pass legislation justifying their behavior it is absolutely nothing different than the behavior of any organized crime culture. Just because they're beginning from a legitimate legal standpoint has no relevance on if their behavior is correct, just as the mere fact of guilt doesn't justify the government breaking the law in pursuit of bringing criminals to justice. Since the legal system is being neatly sidestepped by the looming threat of tremendous damage awards there isn't an opportunity for the normal assumptions of innocence and guilt to apply and I think it's clear that this is the intention of the RIAA cartel. Would it be more correct for a shop owner to request sexual favors for not calling the police on a shoplifter? Regardless of the illegal activity involved by the perpetrator it doesn't relieve the victim of the responsibility to act within not only the letter of the law but the spirit of the law.
Is it? I was under the impression that it was illegal no matter what, in a way that copyright infringement isn't. That is, extortion isn't a civil crime like copyright infringement.
"You have two choices, long legal fights with our armies of lawyers trying to outmaneuver you into paying the 12 billion dollars we're saying you owe us or pay a fee of two or three grand and make us go away."
vs.
"We'll break your daddy's legs if you don't get him to cover your bet."
Sure sounds like extortion to me.
The question of this isn't whether or not copyright infringement is wrong, but if large corporations should be allowed to use legal finagling to commit extortion. You may not agree with it, but two wrongs don't make a right. That the justice system has let things like this slide in the past only serves to highlight the fact that this is indeed the acid test of the practice, and it's failing miserably. The US justice system was created to apply to all people equally no matter the differences in their lawyer-fu ability to bring money to bear upon a problem. It wasn't intended to let large corporations and people with extraordinary amounts of money to browbeat those with less money out of trials.
Extortion used to be an indicator of organized crime too, now I guess it's just business as usual. Pathetic.
Your "big star" not getting enough air time? Better shove back those album releases and see about hyping something with the networks. Is there a great band you've got a promo of that doesn't look "hip" or fit into tight leather pants? Better see if you can find something similar, but prettier. Oh, and see if you can't get someone to gloss over the "rough edges" or maybe even work in something a little more controversial. Maybe a sixteen year old girl in a porn video would work, as long as she can bring in the green.
I'm sure I'm exaggerating and being overly cynical. Of course I'm not saying that I'm better than the rest of Slashdot and then calling everyone elitist either, so at least I'm not being hypocritical.
If telephones had never been broken up, would we have ever had cellphones today except maybe in Europe? A powerful media outlet company has even more and broader powers than other sorts of monopolies, because of better access and because they're business is controlling what people want and think. I truly don't think that the music industry is evil, but they're as inertia-bound as any other large incestuously linked series of codependent corporations. If suing customers and softcore porn Britney clones make shareholders happy then thats what we get.
RIAA Fast CD Burner Theory states that anyone with a CD Burner at over one-speed qualifies for magnification in reporting. Therefore, if all of the survey respondents had 40-speed CD burners then they'd qualify to be counted as 200,000 respondents and if they each had ten songs on their hard drive apiece then they'd naturally become then 'millions' that the RIAA needs to qualify their statements.
Good answers? Usually I like correct answers more, good answers might be a semantic construct on your part but it still fits the bill with my problems with the survey methods. When you survey people involved in (even low level) criminal activities and tell them that they're being monitored then they're going to behave better. It's like posting traffic cops on every street and then declaring that people are driving better because the cops observe that people are slowing down. As for their 'huge range', well Microsoft has a 'huge range' as well and that doesn't make it's methods proper or superior either even when they work perfectly well.
The problem is that you never know what is useful and what is trash. If space weren't an issue as much as bandwidth has become less of an issue then I'd say that the simple solution would be to store everything forever on the off chance that it MIGHT be useful if only as a reference for eventually smarter file systems that would take those 'useless' data as characteristic of things that should be sorted to the back of the line. If infinite storage and smart files would mean that not only would I not have to bother myself with having a copy of Britney Spears but that I also wouldn't ever subject myself to anything that reminded me of her except on a visual level...We're not there yet, but I can dream?
Well I suppose you could point fingers at the shoe and apparel companies that run sweatshops. Those guys don't even have the little kids on MTV Cribs showing off their rental bling bling while they show off their street creds by introducing everyone from the orphanage.
What would you prefer as a parent, worrying that your kid will be the next bullseye from the RIAA for downloading the latest Snoppy Puffy-Cent album or knowing that they'll have a completely legal outlet to get what they might otherwise do illegally?
I like the idea of bars near the campuses for the same reason, kids are going to drink anyways so why not hope they drink and walk home rather than drive?
How about we scrap everything but the Constitution and start from there again? Then we can flush out the most offensive of offending problems by setting political salaries at standard government wages just like postmen and police officers, and make campaign finance reforms and corruption efforts to the point of making it an offence worthy of hand chopping to take more than 50 bucks from anyone. It's stupid and it wouldn't work and it will never happen, but the fact is that laws are perverted and exploited by corporations with special interest lobbies every day. You don't have a government of the People and by the People, the lawyers are completely in charge. I think that isn't such a problem, except that lawyer souls are adjusted more harshly for inflation and scarcity so the average lawyer is only allowed enough soul to be nice to puppies and their parents - and some not even that.
Whether or not their claims have basis or not, the proper framework for discussing their claims certainly is in copyright law rather than in charges of adultery. What SCO is doing is abusing the vagueries of copyright law perhaps, but that doesn't mean that it's any less the vehicle. But we all knew that copyright law was a bitch anyways since the corporations started buying legislation to screw with it right? Well, this is a consequence.
The GPL is just a copyright contract for licensing and use. Contracts can be challenged in courts and argued, but SCO isn't really interested in that so much as the side-effects of inflating stock and extorting money. Whether they win or not, they've made money on the short term and perhaps gained long-term investment from people who can't help but hope that next they'll sue McDonalds after claiming to have invented significant portions of the hamburger.