I am also living in Germany and I have DSL service.
The above poster is basically correct. The DSL line and ISP are sold separately. The DSL line costs 25 Euros/month, and the ISP cost ranges from 9.95 Euros/month for 2 GB bandwidth (addtional bandwidth is billed at ~15 Euros per GB) to 29.95 Euros/month for flat rate service.
This is all for 768kbit/sec downstrean annd 128 kbit upstream.
IF you subscribe to one of the metered bandwidth services, you also have the option in most places of upgrading to 1500kbit/sec downstream for about 5 Euros/month. There is currently no flat rate pricing for this speed.
T-online, the ISP run by Deutsche Telekom, is only really comptitive flat rate service.
Other providers, such as 1&1 offer better pricing on the metered service.
I am on the flat rate program, because my family here spends a lot of time videoconferencing with friends and family back home, plus we subscribe to some premium broadband video services.
The service is fairly reliable. We have had the service for about 10 months, and only have had one 2-day period where the service was not available. We also didn't have any installation problems. Our order was completed within 2 weeks. I have heard from other people that it can take months for the installation in some cases.
I am really disappointed with this decision, but not because Disney gets to keep Mickey locked up.
In the past, copyroghts had to be renewed in order to get the full term. The American people would have really benefitted from the requirement to renew copyrights.
The main advantage this would give us is that people or corporations that really want to protect their IP can protect it, but the stuff that is no longer widely marketable would end up being freed.
In my opinion, this would have given us the best of both worlds: companies or people who can make money off their property are allowed to, while the rest of us would be allowed to mine the rich layers of no longer commercially viable material.
As one poster pointed out already, what happens to the Katzenjammer Kids?
I have always been fascinated by early films and cartoons, for example, and I hate to think that we might lose many of these films because our government will not allow the the type of low-budget or even volunteer effort that would be needed to make this happen!
I think that the preservationists of "Old Time Radio" are a great example of how this would work. Radio plays were not protected by copyright until the 1960s. Because of this, there is a ton of public domain material available from the "Golden Age of Radio" that provides a lot of insight into US culture at that time. Broadcasts from the years of WWII are particularly interesting because the entertainment itself was often part of the war effort. If these works were still protected under copyright, it is likely that no one would be able to profit from them reasonably, and therefore the public probably wouldn't have access.
I'm not worried about Mickey, because Disney will take care of him, at least as long as they can keep squeezing dimes out of him. But there is a lot of stuff out there that should be protected (from decay, that is), and the copyright holders may not care enough (or be financially able) to save them! I think that's the real problem, and we might have been able to fix it if the Supreme Court had ruled differently.
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I am also living in Germany and I have DSL service.
The above poster is basically correct. The DSL line and ISP are sold separately. The DSL line costs 25 Euros/month, and the ISP cost ranges from 9.95 Euros/month for 2 GB bandwidth (addtional bandwidth is billed at ~15 Euros per GB) to 29.95 Euros/month for flat rate service.
This is all for 768kbit/sec downstrean annd 128 kbit upstream.
IF you subscribe to one of the metered bandwidth services, you also have the option in most places of upgrading to 1500kbit/sec downstream for about 5 Euros/month. There is currently no flat rate pricing for this speed.
T-online, the ISP run by Deutsche Telekom, is only really comptitive flat rate service.
Other providers, such as 1&1 offer better pricing on the metered service.
I am on the flat rate program, because my family here spends a lot of time videoconferencing with friends and family back home, plus we subscribe to some premium broadband video services.
The service is fairly reliable. We have had the service for about 10 months, and only have had one 2-day period where the service was not available. We also didn't have any installation problems. Our order was completed within 2 weeks. I have heard from other people that it can take months for the installation in some cases.
I am really disappointed with this decision, but not because Disney gets to keep Mickey locked up.
In the past, copyroghts had to be renewed in order to get the full term. The American people would have really benefitted from the requirement to renew copyrights.
The main advantage this would give us is that people or corporations that really want to protect their IP can protect it, but the stuff that is no longer widely marketable would end up being freed.
In my opinion, this would have given us the best of both worlds: companies or people who can make money off their property are allowed to, while the rest of us would be allowed to mine the rich layers of no longer commercially viable material.
As one poster pointed out already, what happens to the Katzenjammer Kids?
I have always been fascinated by early films and cartoons, for example, and I hate to think that we might lose many of these films because our government will not allow the the type of low-budget or even volunteer effort that would be needed to make this happen!
I think that the preservationists of "Old Time Radio" are a great example of how this would work. Radio plays were not protected by copyright until the 1960s. Because of this, there is a ton of public domain material available from the "Golden Age of Radio" that provides a lot of insight into US culture at that time. Broadcasts from the years of WWII are particularly interesting because the entertainment itself was often part of the war effort. If these works were still protected under copyright, it is likely that no one would be able to profit from them reasonably, and therefore the public probably wouldn't have access.
I'm not worried about Mickey, because Disney will take care of him, at least as long as they can keep squeezing dimes out of him. But there is a lot of stuff out there that should be protected (from decay, that is), and the copyright holders may not care enough (or be financially able) to save them! I think that's the real problem, and we might have been able to fix it if the Supreme Court had ruled differently.