If a company spends the time and money to give someone that expertise, it is unreasonable to allow that person to take it to a competitor.
The absence of the legitimacy would create a fair and balanced market for those skills. If your current company is not compensating you fairly you could go out to get the fair market value for your skills.
If we allow corporations to retain the upper hand in a non-compete agreement we will evolve to the point where the company provides for you food and housing--and that's it. There's no need to pay you if you'll be homeless the moment you leave.
"We give you an on site apartment and on site cafeteria. What more do you want?" --Manager
Do you not realize that, in the absence of relevant laws, the entity with the most money or resources wins?
This is always true. There is no doubt that the entity with the most money always wins. In a system without laws fewer people would be misled into thinking that they are protected and it would be easier to recruit support to resist the overwhelming power of large institutions.
It could do lots more if there weren't so many laws
There are 100 people in society. There are 2 brilliant people. There are 20 greedy people. There are 20 gullible people. There are 10 who are opposed. There are 48 apathetic people.
5 greedy people ambush 2 brilliant people. 5 greedy people convince 20 gullible people. 20 gullible people make lots of noise. 38 apathetic people distract 8 who are opposed to stop the noise. 5 greedy people, 20 gullible people, 10 apathetic people, and 2 who are opposed vote. 5 greedy people sit back, enjoy the show, and profit.
In a system of fewer laws the apathetic people would recognize the necessity of those who are opposed. They might even rescue the 2 brilliant people. As long as we have laws which give the illusion of justice the apathetic people remain apathetic.
2) Evidence (EG, a job offer from a competitor) that the non-compete agreement is the only thing keeping the employee from current employment
That's easy enough to get out of. In most professional industries job offers aren't seen until acceptable letters of reference have been furnished. The former employer doesn't have to say anything bad--they just don't say anything at all. No acceptable letters of reference means no job offer. No job offer means no liability for a noncompete.
As always the system is weighted in favor of screwing the individual.
The hard part is identifying all the assumptions we have to validate against
If I didn't personally initialize the variable then I must explicitly define, through validation, what type of information that variable is carrying. It's not that tough.
They assumed input wouldn't contain any, without realizing they were so assuming
I think the only thing that was assumed is that the input had been validated by the routine or program which generated it. We're faced with a quandry: validate everything and waste code redundantly re-validating input which _SHOULD_ have been validated or risk security flaws.
This leads to another argument in favor of open source: If the code is open source then a programmer can check that the variable was properly validated. Proprietary code probably causes massive migraines for programmers who have deadlines to meet and can't spend the next month re-validating every struct array that comes out of the kernel. Imagine having a program that displays the current time in the upper right hand corner... should you have to validate the time returned by "date" or "hwclock"? In open source you can ensure that those registers can't be hijacked. In proprietary code you can either spend time running a brute force fault test (hehehe... yeah right) or assume that the data will always contain what you think it will.
The government and corporations are building a society where privacy can be violated at will
I side with you but there's a legal squirrel in the whole business which comes from the 4th Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
...to be secure...against unreasonable...
I think the gov't and corporations are working together to redefine unreasonable. If everyone is subject to monitoring at all times, as evidenced by the universal acceptance of these usage agreements, then it's not unreasonable to be monitored.
Once everyone is subject to constant monitoring under the authority of the gov't then there's no longer any reason to question the validity or authenticity of evidence which the gov't brings against anyone. I forsee a society in which in may be your lottery luck to serve society as a prisoner, generating justification and revenue for the incarceration system, through no fault of your own. The evidence which convicts you will be collected through standard and reasonable monitoring.
If a Vonage conversation trapped a paedophile who was grooming children, that's a pretty darn good argument for handing over the evidence
It's a crappy argument since I have yet, in my 29 blessed years on this planet, to see evidence that a wiretap has tipped authorities off to someone that they hadn't already identified through conventional, less Big Brother style means. Once. All I'm asking is once. Show me _ONE TIME_ when spying on our own citizens has prevented a crime. There are hundreds of instances of investigation AFTER THE FACT but all of this spy vs. citizen junk is touted as PREVENTION.
To constantly invoke child molesters is nothing more than a crappy scare tactic. With as dishonest as the world is becoming I'm going to start selling child molester insurance. You pay me $1000/year and I'll give you a policy of $2 million if your kid gets snatched. C'mon, $1000 a year is a small price to pay for the security of your child.
but it's my understanding US contract law will not allow a clause such as "we can change this at anytime and you're bound by the new terms."
I think US contract law allows them to do anything they like as long as the majority of consumers are kept at a financial level that a challenge is simply impossible.
You know. Free market does not always work. Sometimes people do need to be protected from massive corporations
Let's work hard to dispel another illusion. We do _NOT_ need to be protected from massive corporations. What we need is for our politicians to _STOP_ protecting big corporations from us.
A technical difference of words, maybe, but it illustrates the fact that we do not function in a free market in the US. We have thousands and thousands of rules and regulations on our free market and all of those rules and regulations require a financial budget and a legal team to enforce. Our free market is thus skewed in favor of large corporations and against the interest of the individual citizens.
We need to collectively stand up and say(legislate) you can't do this and must do this
What we need is to _REMOVE_ all the protecting legislation which is supposed to protect us but, because of monetary fact, only protects corporations.
When are we going to learn to incorporate bounds checking in to everything ?
I always validated my input, even when learning to program BASIC out of the C=64 User's Guide and the advanced Programmer's Reference Guide in my early teens before taking any formal classes in it. I don't think it's too much to ask for people who actually get paid to write this stuff to validate input, no matter where it comes from.
It seems to me that the recording industry only has one business model...
1. Take one good item
2. Bundle a lot of crap with it you don't want (now this includes video content)
3. Sell it at a high price that it totally unreasonable.
Microsoft, is that you?
'Cept MS never had that "one good item". They just had the "one item with superior market share". I guess, in terms of business, there's no difference.
Substitute "photocopier" for "printing press," which I think is a valid swap given that this analogy refers to the ability to copy intellectual property (specifically books), and you've got quite the contrary. Copyright law was invented as a direct consequence of the advent of the printing press
I think we're suffering from the imperfections of the metaphor. The printing press brought about new laws because it was an entirely new way of doing things. Before that there just wasn't any large scale sharing of printed material.
For over 20 years we've had dual cassette decks with the dub button and, yet, dual cassette stereos were never outlawed. The mechanism for easy dubbing was never outlawed and, when I was 12, I certainly didn't have to worry about the FBI breaking down my door to catch my collection of dubbed cassettes.
Why are P2P networks a new problem? They're not. This is entirely a political maneuver with no real value to society. The music industry is looking for ways to prop up the falling profit margins that every industry has been looking at since the bubble began to show weak points back in early '99. The easiest way to do that seems to be to threaten the customer base AND regulate behavior which is NOT criminal.
We don't tell artists what type of art they can produce. We don't legislate the language of speakers. We don't legislate a class of "bakery" that makes round bread illegal. We tried to tell teachers that evolution is illegal, but that just didn't work. I'm really peeved that these politicians are WASTING MY TAX DOLLARS trying to tell programmers that they can't write file-sharing apps.
Bitmunk is a service that is about providing a positive solution to the P2P dilemma, not a negative one. We want to stop the need for lawsuits, empower the artists, and protect the consumer's fair use rights.
Does it have a slogan with a play on "chipmunk" and "byte monk"?:-)
Can you imagine if you wrote a book, which you do for a living, then sold it to someone for $5... only to see them give it away to everyone else on the planet? What would you call that? Sharing or piracy?
First we should note that the advent of the photocopier has not necessitated huge laws regulating the sharing of books, has not made public libraries illegal, nor has it necessitated a huge increase in the price of books. It is because the quality of the original is far superior to the quality of the copy that this is not necessary. People will naturally gravitate towards the original and it is only the political power that lobbyists have which allows tag-alongs to steal from the real artists.
Let's say the book metaphor is applicable. Let's assume for a moment that the photocopier had spawned a huge industry in trading photocopied books or that the library had ensured that only a few dozen copies of a book would be sold per city. I would call your situation "stupidity". Do not expect to profit wildly from a $5 product if people can easily reproduce it or if it will be shared more than it is sold.
Now let's reapply this to the music industry. They are well aware that the product is easily copied and redistributed. Rather than taking an underhanded political approach and trying to make felons out of perfectly normal human beings they should take the path of least resistance: raise the price or produce a better product.
As another metaphor: the music industry must realize that it is McDonald's, not some exclusive chef in Paris. It profits from volume sales. It does not profit by attaching a surcharge to backyard grills and ground beef at the grocery store. In a system modeled by McDonald's the very prevalance of the backyard grill, while not directly benefitting McDonald's, keeps the public's appetite for a cheeseburger whet.
To come back to the music industry: P2P sharing keeps the public's appetite for pop music whet. Without easy music sharing the recording industry would need to reinvent a new genre every few years.
If a P2P network could offer them a means by which to distribute their work and get paid, then they wouldn't have to give away the rights to what they have created
I do understand and agree. I would like to add a personal note, however. Any artist who is spectacularly talented would naturally realize their maximum profit in any fair and honest system. Any bad artist shouldn't be rewarded for producing crappy music. Rather than attacking P2P networks, I think we should reform the system which puts talent like Joe Satriani at mid-scale and Britney Spears in the spotlight.
That's why a P2P network needs to give artists control. They need to give them the freedom to set their own prices and have their work distributed on a file sharing community of fans. Each time their work gets traded, they get paid the price they set. If their price is too high, they won't get traded, if its just right, they will make the money they deserve
I realize you're plugging your product here but I'm more than happy to help you.
Looking down the road, however: suppose you could usurp control from the large record labels and artists would flock to you. What would you do with existing P2P networks which allow 12-year olds to swap songs that were legitimately purchased on your network? Would you lobby to make them into felons?
Maybe the REALITY that entertainment is only a multitrillion dollar industry due to political lobbying and social engineering is about to come out. From the earliest times people enjoy being entertained, they like being entertained, but when it comes to paying for it they'd just as soon take a nap. Only the wealthiest levels of society would get so bored as to need to pay for court entertainers.
2. Sharing is piracy, IF you're "sharing" something that doesn't belong to you and you don't have permission to share it.
I have to reiterate: If I bought it then it belongs to me. Permission to share is implicit in the sale and no amount of legal jargon can change this natural REALITY. It is as simple as that. If the seller is unhappy about the sale price after the sale that does not make me a criminal. "Distribution right" does nothing to protect the individual artists because, invariably, the artist signed all rights away to a company. I cannot be made to feel sorry for corporations which are ripping those artists off.
When you buy a song or CD, you've got the one copy you purchased
I reiterate: face REALITY. The reality is that if a person physically possesses an object and can physically copy it then they can physically distribute it.
without the creator's permission. The content isn't now made yours, a single copy of it is; the content belongs to its creator
If it had anything to do with the creator's permission I might be persuaded to lean with you. Since corporations make it standard policy to strip all rights away from the original creator this has no influence on my opinion.
The problem is when you take your one, legally purchased copy, and reproduce it -- and start giving it away without the creator's permission.
Creator's permission, or CEO's permission, or marketing department's permission, or majority shareholder's permission? I reiterate: if it was about the original creator then I'll lean with you. I have not _ONCE_ seen a law protecting the original creator from the opportunistic greed of large corporations. This greed serves to benefit, by twice the lion's share, the controlling shareholders, VPs, CEOs, and directors who put the least amount of effort into creating the product. How is this right?
Every law which has been crafted to protect the individual creators has invariably been twisted and used primarily to benefit a corporation. At the surface this is not bad since a benefit to a corporation is theoretically a benefit to all employees. In REALITY this is nothing short of obfuscated thievery as the upper end of the corporate ladder can do something that no one else can do: set their own salary and take the largest share of the overall profit. How does this benefit the artist? My heart goes out to the artists. My heart does not go out to the tag-alongs who profit.
You make a very good point in that if you purchase music and its DRM'd for instance, then its very much like a rental
Since there is no REALITY in distribution right a licensing agreement which forbids redistribution is, for all practical purposes, a rental of the material. A violation of a rental agreement is a civil matter which requires the owner to retain legal counsel and build a case. Why is no one else suspicious of the redefinition to turn the violation of a rental agreement into a felony the prosecution of which is funded by the taxpayers?
We see the FBI warning every time we watch a movie at home. Why is this a felony other than by political maneuvers of the large corporations who work to primarily benefit, not the performing artists, but those at the top of the corporate ladder? There are terms of use, resembling a rental agreement, which are then called an in-home viewing license and somehow actions which constitute nothing more than the violation of a rental agreement become a felony.
The dishonesty has become too obvious to ignore.
That's why we need a P2P network that empowers the independent artist
Unless we give in to overwhelming oversight of the computing industry, which I cannot advocate, this is not, and never will be, a technologically exclusive possibility. There is no amount of TCPA, or DRM, or encryption, or legal jargon which will stop people from sharing something which has been SOLD to them. In light of this fact we need to
but that doesn't mean that you can take someone else's recording of that song and sell it without reimbursing them
I agree. P2P networks aren't selling anything. If there was sale and profit involved for the third party then I would call it piracy. Sharing is _NOT_ piracy, no matter how many years down the road of delerium our society is.
to simply take something from someone else and give it away without their permission. Don't you agree?
I agree. That's why I bought it from them. If they're unhappy with the sale price after the sale that does not make me a criminal. It means they're unhappy with the sale price. They're free to adjust that price. Instead they've chosen to go through the underhanded political rigamarole of turning a "sale" into a "rental" and a "rental agreement" into a "licensing agreement" to make it a felony. I don't agree with that on any moral, ethical, legal, personal, or social level.
Life has taught me that whining and complaining that I'm not being fairly compensated for my intellectual contributions results in no benefit for me. The only reason why large corporations get away with it is because greed and politics have a controlling upper hand. I feel strongly that it's time for the corporations to learn the same lesson I did: quit whining and complaining and learn to FACE REALITY. Reality is that there is no such thing as "distribution right". Once you put something out on the table it's open game for anyone who can hear/read/see/touch/copy it. If a person physically has possession of something, and that person can physically copy it, then they can physically distribute it. That's REALITY.
Corporations certainly play a role -- in marketing artists, etc... but artists are certainly getting ripped off
As a scientist I felt strongly that my employer, a large pharmaceutical company, was ripping me off. There is no way to quantify intellectual contribution and, as such, project heads can get away with murder. If the projects go well it is through their managerial efforts. If the projects go poorly it is the fault of the incompetent associates beneath them. Every law that's supposedly passed to protect my rights to my intellectual property is a fraud: in reality is protects the profits of the company which are, by and large, soaked up by the upper end of the corporate ladder. I have no illusions that laws against P2P networks will ever profit individual artists. For every law that exists to protect artistic or intellectual property there are a thousand talented artists and scientists who are still living in poverty and a handful of controlling shareholders who are laughing to the bank on a daily basis. My heart strings aren't that easily fooled.
But at the same time, they are making it harder for the artist to survive. If the artist is already getting ripped off for every sale of their music, don't you think its even worse when their music gets traded for free?
Free trade can result in an invite to a venue which may never have bought the CD. I've seen the studies which show that sharing = lost sales. I've seen the studies which show that sharing != lost sales. I've seen the studies that show that sharing = more effective advertising. Which one's are flawed? Which ones are subsidized by special interests? I can't say for certain. All I know is that sharing has never hurt honest people.
Things need to change -- artists need to get fairly reimbursed and consumers need to be able to share music legally. Both of these things can happen on a P2P network
100% agree. The change needs to come at the root of the problem: greed and graft between corporations and politicians and the opportunistic stripping of ownership rights from the {scientist,artist} by corporations.
When it comes to intellectual property, you're talking about content, not what medium its printed on
I've never believed in intellectual property because of the selective enforcement and abuse inherent in the system. For example: My math book is copyrighted, yet I can teach calculus freely (assuming the student has the ability). Karaoke is legal. Time Life books may publish a series on home improvement, but I can freely learn the trade from anyone who's read them.
I feel strongly that too much profit from the sale of CDs (indeed, all intellectual property) goes to CEOs/VPs/directors and not to the originating inventor (be it artists, scientists, tinkerers, whoever). Is the content the property of the CEO/VP/director/controlling shareholder? No. In many cases the controlling shareholder couldn't tap a rhythm with a spoon, couldn't design their way out of a paper bag, or couldn't prove the existence of their own poop-chute. Do they profit? Yes. In many cases they profit more fantastically than the originator. At least file-sharers aren't leeching from someone else's creativity--they're not charging.
If the politicians could stay out of these things the systems would eventually streamline themselves. Artists may not ever get rich but they will always survive: they make a PRODUCT (be it entertainment, amusement, teaching, medicine, a better mouse-trap, whatever). They will find ways to distribute that product which meets the level of their ambition. The end goal of keeping politicians out of these systems would be to shave off the tag-alongs, the CEOs, VPs, directors, shareholders who reap enormous amounts of profit from the efforts of the artists.
If the record companies are so worried about after-market distribution cutting into their profit then they should take the path of least resistance: raise the price. Then we will gain a clear concept of how important their artifical system is. If that means that I can't afford anymore CDs, so be it. Society would probably be better for it. Maybe more people will start to see that, of the sale of a $15 CD or a $100 pill, almost nothing of that goes back to the originator.
Artists will still play at nightclubs. Production line workers will work on a different production line. The only bad outcome of my approach is that there won't be anymore free profit for the tag-alongs.
but anybody who says Bob Dylan should never have gotten a paycheck is an asshole
No one ever said <artist> shouldn't get paid. More appropriately, let's look at who pays him and who tags along.
Right now <artist> gets paid by <record label> who dispenses that money from revenue collected from consumers. The consumers are, in general, more than happy to pay <artist>. The issue most consumers have is that the vast majority of their payment doesn't go to <artist> or <production plant worker> but rather, the majority of the money ends up in <CEO/VP/director>'s pocket.
As long as we can tell the politicians to stay out of it, the system will streamline itself and artists will once again continue to profit. They make the product. <CEO/VP/director> will eventually be left to figure out something useful to do in society.
If we could ever get the politicians to stay out of it.
What's ridiculous is the concept of distribution rights. If I physically have possession of something then I can distribute it. The problem here is that our society is so far down the long road of delerium that most people actually buy into this crap.
If I can make it, I can distribute it. The media industry needs to learn to live with reality. If redistribution is such a big problem they should charge more for the initial product.
FACE REALITY.
YOU are to blame for the kind of nonsense at the top of this article. YOU are the one that these slashbots should be tearing into
I can't help it that the media industry is incapable of dealing with the reality of the universe. I certainly can't help it that people in positions of power are influenced by money interests.
The fact remains that controlling "distribution rights" is every bit as tangible as controlling which way the wind blows. The sooner society gets back to facing this natural fact, the sooner we'll see an end to this nonsense.
you should be legally capable of using p2p systems to rip off companies
No one's ripping off a company. They sold the product. The product now belongs to the consumer who bought it who is free to share it because they own the product.
Wait, you say, the product hasn't been sold, but rather licensed? How is "licensing" any different from "renting"? A violation of a rental agreement is a civil matter which requires the owner to retain legal counsel and build a case and is covered by existing law. A violation of a rental agreement is _NOT_ a felony, the prosecution of which is taxpayer funded, and is _NOT_ something which requires the generation of new laws to make entire segments of the IT industry illegal.
Instead of 'whatever' you could also solve the problem. Go to the desktop properties, advanced, displays. You will see pictures of a monitor and a tv set. One of them is primary and the other one is secondary. Switch them, and the DVD will show on the TV, but asa black area on the monitor
> "We're not trying to swing our arm around a whole bunch of people to get new revenue."
When I read that, I had a recollection of a particular pair of managers that I had while working for a big pharmaceutical company in Chicago: "We're not just trying to bust your chops. We're really trying to help you."
Slashdot Mirror
the hope that someone is gullible enough to abide them
becomes
the hope that someone is poor enough not to be able to challenge them
If a company spends the time and money to give someone that expertise, it is unreasonable to allow that person to take it to a competitor.
The absence of the legitimacy would create a fair and balanced market for those skills. If your current company is not compensating you fairly you could go out to get the fair market value for your skills.
If we allow corporations to retain the upper hand in a non-compete agreement we will evolve to the point where the company provides for you food and housing--and that's it. There's no need to pay you if you'll be homeless the moment you leave.
"We give you an on site apartment and on site cafeteria. What more do you want?" --Manager
Do you not realize that, in the absence of relevant laws, the entity with the most money or resources wins?
This is always true. There is no doubt that the entity with the most money always wins. In a system without laws fewer people would be misled into thinking that they are protected and it would be easier to recruit support to resist the overwhelming power of large institutions.
It could do lots more if there weren't so many laws
There are 100 people in society.
There are 2 brilliant people.
There are 20 greedy people.
There are 20 gullible people.
There are 10 who are opposed.
There are 48 apathetic people.
5 greedy people ambush 2 brilliant people.
5 greedy people convince 20 gullible people.
20 gullible people make lots of noise.
38 apathetic people distract 8 who are opposed to stop the noise.
5 greedy people, 20 gullible people, 10 apathetic people, and 2 who are opposed vote.
5 greedy people sit back, enjoy the show, and profit.
In a system of fewer laws the apathetic people would recognize the necessity of those who are opposed. They might even rescue the 2 brilliant people. As long as we have laws which give the illusion of justice the apathetic people remain apathetic.
2) Evidence (EG, a job offer from a competitor) that the non-compete agreement is the only thing keeping the employee from current employment
That's easy enough to get out of. In most professional industries job offers aren't seen until acceptable letters of reference have been furnished. The former employer doesn't have to say anything bad--they just don't say anything at all. No acceptable letters of reference means no job offer. No job offer means no liability for a noncompete.
As always the system is weighted in favor of screwing the individual.
The hard part is identifying all the assumptions we have to validate against
If I didn't personally initialize the variable then I must explicitly define, through validation, what type of information that variable is carrying. It's not that tough.
They assumed input wouldn't contain any, without realizing they were so assuming
I think the only thing that was assumed is that the input had been validated by the routine or program which generated it. We're faced with a quandry: validate everything and waste code redundantly re-validating input which _SHOULD_ have been validated or risk security flaws.
This leads to another argument in favor of open source: If the code is open source then a programmer can check that the variable was properly validated. Proprietary code probably causes massive migraines for programmers who have deadlines to meet and can't spend the next month re-validating every struct array that comes out of the kernel. Imagine having a program that displays the current time in the upper right hand corner... should you have to validate the time returned by "date" or "hwclock"? In open source you can ensure that those registers can't be hijacked. In proprietary code you can either spend time running a brute force fault test (hehehe... yeah right) or assume that the data will always contain what you think it will.
I side with you but there's a legal squirrel in the whole business which comes from the 4th Amendment
I think the gov't and corporations are working together to redefine unreasonable. If everyone is subject to monitoring at all times, as evidenced by the universal acceptance of these usage agreements, then it's not unreasonable to be monitored.
Once everyone is subject to constant monitoring under the authority of the gov't then there's no longer any reason to question the validity or authenticity of evidence which the gov't brings against anyone. I forsee a society in which in may be your lottery luck to serve society as a prisoner, generating justification and revenue for the incarceration system, through no fault of your own. The evidence which convicts you will be collected through standard and reasonable monitoring.
If a Vonage conversation trapped a paedophile who was grooming children, that's a pretty darn good argument for handing over the evidence
It's a crappy argument since I have yet, in my 29 blessed years on this planet, to see evidence that a wiretap has tipped authorities off to someone that they hadn't already identified through conventional, less Big Brother style means. Once. All I'm asking is once. Show me _ONE TIME_ when spying on our own citizens has prevented a crime. There are hundreds of instances of investigation AFTER THE FACT but all of this spy vs. citizen junk is touted as PREVENTION.
To constantly invoke child molesters is nothing more than a crappy scare tactic. With as dishonest as the world is becoming I'm going to start selling child molester insurance. You pay me $1000/year and I'll give you a policy of $2 million if your kid gets snatched. C'mon, $1000 a year is a small price to pay for the security of your child.
but it's my understanding US contract law will not allow a clause such as "we can change this at anytime and you're bound by the new terms."
I think US contract law allows them to do anything they like as long as the majority of consumers are kept at a financial level that a challenge is simply impossible.
You know. Free market does not always work. Sometimes people do need to be protected from massive corporations
Let's work hard to dispel another illusion. We do _NOT_ need to be protected from massive corporations. What we need is for our politicians to _STOP_ protecting big corporations from us.
A technical difference of words, maybe, but it illustrates the fact that we do not function in a free market in the US. We have thousands and thousands of rules and regulations on our free market and all of those rules and regulations require a financial budget and a legal team to enforce. Our free market is thus skewed in favor of large corporations and against the interest of the individual citizens.
We need to collectively stand up and say(legislate) you can't do this and must do this
What we need is to _REMOVE_ all the protecting legislation which is supposed to protect us but, because of monetary fact, only protects corporations.
When are we going to learn to incorporate bounds checking in to everything ?
I always validated my input, even when learning to program BASIC out of the C=64 User's Guide and the advanced Programmer's Reference Guide in my early teens before taking any formal classes in it. I don't think it's too much to ask for people who actually get paid to write this stuff to validate input, no matter where it comes from.
You hush! You shut your filthy trap!
Neal Pert is the best rhythm master of all time.
French noun pet, "fart," developed regularly from the Latin noun pditum, from the Indo-European root *pezd-, "fart."
My mother would sh_t. So is "fart" a truly academically acceptable term, or is it still slang for "flatulence"?
It seems to me that the recording industry only has one business model ...
1. Take one good item
2. Bundle a lot of crap with it you don't want (now this includes video content)
3. Sell it at a high price that it totally unreasonable.
Microsoft, is that you?
'Cept MS never had that "one good item". They just had the "one item with superior market share". I guess, in terms of business, there's no difference.
Substitute "photocopier" for "printing press," which I think is a valid swap given that this analogy refers to the ability to copy intellectual property (specifically books), and you've got quite the contrary. Copyright law was invented as a direct consequence of the advent of the printing press
:-)
I think we're suffering from the imperfections of the metaphor. The printing press brought about new laws because it was an entirely new way of doing things. Before that there just wasn't any large scale sharing of printed material.
For over 20 years we've had dual cassette decks with the dub button and, yet, dual cassette stereos were never outlawed. The mechanism for easy dubbing was never outlawed and, when I was 12, I certainly didn't have to worry about the FBI breaking down my door to catch my collection of dubbed cassettes.
Why are P2P networks a new problem? They're not. This is entirely a political maneuver with no real value to society. The music industry is looking for ways to prop up the falling profit margins that every industry has been looking at since the bubble began to show weak points back in early '99. The easiest way to do that seems to be to threaten the customer base AND regulate behavior which is NOT criminal.
We don't tell artists what type of art they can produce. We don't legislate the language of speakers. We don't legislate a class of "bakery" that makes round bread illegal. We tried to tell teachers that evolution is illegal, but that just didn't work. I'm really peeved that these politicians are WASTING MY TAX DOLLARS trying to tell programmers that they can't write file-sharing apps.
Bitmunk is a service that is about providing a positive solution to the P2P dilemma, not a negative one. We want to stop the need for lawsuits, empower the artists, and protect the consumer's fair use rights.
Does it have a slogan with a play on "chipmunk" and "byte monk"?
Can you imagine if you wrote a book, which you do for a living, then sold it to someone for $5 ... only to see them give it away to everyone else on the planet? What would you call that? Sharing or piracy?
First we should note that the advent of the photocopier has not necessitated huge laws regulating the sharing of books, has not made public libraries illegal, nor has it necessitated a huge increase in the price of books. It is because the quality of the original is far superior to the quality of the copy that this is not necessary. People will naturally gravitate towards the original and it is only the political power that lobbyists have which allows tag-alongs to steal from the real artists.
Let's say the book metaphor is applicable. Let's assume for a moment that the photocopier had spawned a huge industry in trading photocopied books or that the library had ensured that only a few dozen copies of a book would be sold per city. I would call your situation "stupidity". Do not expect to profit wildly from a $5 product if people can easily reproduce it or if it will be shared more than it is sold.
Now let's reapply this to the music industry. They are well aware that the product is easily copied and redistributed. Rather than taking an underhanded political approach and trying to make felons out of perfectly normal human beings they should take the path of least resistance: raise the price or produce a better product.
As another metaphor: the music industry must realize that it is McDonald's, not some exclusive chef in Paris. It profits from volume sales. It does not profit by attaching a surcharge to backyard grills and ground beef at the grocery store. In a system modeled by McDonald's the very prevalance of the backyard grill, while not directly benefitting McDonald's, keeps the public's appetite for a cheeseburger whet.
To come back to the music industry: P2P sharing keeps the public's appetite for pop music whet. Without easy music sharing the recording industry would need to reinvent a new genre every few years.
If a P2P network could offer them a means by which to distribute their work and get paid, then they wouldn't have to give away the rights to what they have created
I do understand and agree. I would like to add a personal note, however. Any artist who is spectacularly talented would naturally realize their maximum profit in any fair and honest system. Any bad artist shouldn't be rewarded for producing crappy music. Rather than attacking P2P networks, I think we should reform the system which puts talent like Joe Satriani at mid-scale and Britney Spears in the spotlight.
That's why a P2P network needs to give artists control. They need to give them the freedom to set their own prices and have their work distributed on a file sharing community of fans. Each time their work gets traded, they get paid the price they set. If their price is too high, they won't get traded, if its just right, they will make the money they deserve
I realize you're plugging your product here but I'm more than happy to help you.
Looking down the road, however: suppose you could usurp control from the large record labels and artists would flock to you. What would you do with existing P2P networks which allow 12-year olds to swap songs that were legitimately purchased on your network? Would you lobby to make them into felons?
Maybe the REALITY that entertainment is only a multitrillion dollar industry due to political lobbying and social engineering is about to come out. From the earliest times people enjoy being entertained, they like being entertained, but when it comes to paying for it they'd just as soon take a nap. Only the wealthiest levels of society would get so bored as to need to pay for court entertainers.
2. Sharing is piracy, IF you're "sharing" something that doesn't belong to you and you don't have permission to share it.
I have to reiterate: If I bought it then it belongs to me. Permission to share is implicit in the sale and no amount of legal jargon can change this natural REALITY. It is as simple as that. If the seller is unhappy about the sale price after the sale that does not make me a criminal. "Distribution right" does nothing to protect the individual artists because, invariably, the artist signed all rights away to a company. I cannot be made to feel sorry for corporations which are ripping those artists off.
When you buy a song or CD, you've got the one copy you purchased
I reiterate: face REALITY. The reality is that if a person physically possesses an object and can physically copy it then they can physically distribute it.
without the creator's permission. The content isn't now made yours, a single copy of it is; the content belongs to its creator
If it had anything to do with the creator's permission I might be persuaded to lean with you. Since corporations make it standard policy to strip all rights away from the original creator this has no influence on my opinion.
The problem is when you take your one, legally purchased copy, and reproduce it -- and start giving it away without the creator's permission.
Creator's permission, or CEO's permission, or marketing department's permission, or majority shareholder's permission? I reiterate: if it was about the original creator then I'll lean with you. I have not _ONCE_ seen a law protecting the original creator from the opportunistic greed of large corporations. This greed serves to benefit, by twice the lion's share, the controlling shareholders, VPs, CEOs, and directors who put the least amount of effort into creating the product. How is this right?
Every law which has been crafted to protect the individual creators has invariably been twisted and used primarily to benefit a corporation. At the surface this is not bad since a benefit to a corporation is theoretically a benefit to all employees. In REALITY this is nothing short of obfuscated thievery as the upper end of the corporate ladder can do something that no one else can do: set their own salary and take the largest share of the overall profit. How does this benefit the artist? My heart goes out to the artists. My heart does not go out to the tag-alongs who profit.
You make a very good point in that if you purchase music and its DRM'd for instance, then its very much like a rental
Since there is no REALITY in distribution right a licensing agreement which forbids redistribution is, for all practical purposes, a rental of the material. A violation of a rental agreement is a civil matter which requires the owner to retain legal counsel and build a case. Why is no one else suspicious of the redefinition to turn the violation of a rental agreement into a felony the prosecution of which is funded by the taxpayers?
We see the FBI warning every time we watch a movie at home. Why is this a felony other than by political maneuvers of the large corporations who work to primarily benefit, not the performing artists, but those at the top of the corporate ladder? There are terms of use, resembling a rental agreement, which are then called an in-home viewing license and somehow actions which constitute nothing more than the violation of a rental agreement become a felony.
The dishonesty has become too obvious to ignore.
That's why we need a P2P network that empowers the independent artist
Unless we give in to overwhelming oversight of the computing industry, which I cannot advocate, this is not, and never will be, a technologically exclusive possibility. There is no amount of TCPA, or DRM, or encryption, or legal jargon which will stop people from sharing something which has been SOLD to them. In light of this fact we need to
but that doesn't mean that you can take someone else's recording of that song and sell it without reimbursing them
... but artists are certainly getting ripped off
I agree. P2P networks aren't selling anything. If there was sale and profit involved for the third party then I would call it piracy. Sharing is _NOT_ piracy, no matter how many years down the road of delerium our society is.
to simply take something from someone else and give it away without their permission. Don't you agree?
I agree. That's why I bought it from them. If they're unhappy with the sale price after the sale that does not make me a criminal. It means they're unhappy with the sale price. They're free to adjust that price. Instead they've chosen to go through the underhanded political rigamarole of turning a "sale" into a "rental" and a "rental agreement" into a "licensing agreement" to make it a felony. I don't agree with that on any moral, ethical, legal, personal, or social level.
Life has taught me that whining and complaining that I'm not being fairly compensated for my intellectual contributions results in no benefit for me. The only reason why large corporations get away with it is because greed and politics have a controlling upper hand. I feel strongly that it's time for the corporations to learn the same lesson I did: quit whining and complaining and learn to FACE REALITY. Reality is that there is no such thing as "distribution right". Once you put something out on the table it's open game for anyone who can hear/read/see/touch/copy it. If a person physically has possession of something, and that person can physically copy it, then they can physically distribute it. That's REALITY.
Corporations certainly play a role -- in marketing artists, etc
As a scientist I felt strongly that my employer, a large pharmaceutical company, was ripping me off. There is no way to quantify intellectual contribution and, as such, project heads can get away with murder. If the projects go well it is through their managerial efforts. If the projects go poorly it is the fault of the incompetent associates beneath them. Every law that's supposedly passed to protect my rights to my intellectual property is a fraud: in reality is protects the profits of the company which are, by and large, soaked up by the upper end of the corporate ladder. I have no illusions that laws against P2P networks will ever profit individual artists. For every law that exists to protect artistic or intellectual property there are a thousand talented artists and scientists who are still living in poverty and a handful of controlling shareholders who are laughing to the bank on a daily basis. My heart strings aren't that easily fooled.
But at the same time, they are making it harder for the artist to survive. If the artist is already getting ripped off for every sale of their music, don't you think its even worse when their music gets traded for free?
Free trade can result in an invite to a venue which may never have bought the CD. I've seen the studies which show that sharing = lost sales. I've seen the studies which show that sharing != lost sales. I've seen the studies that show that sharing = more effective advertising. Which one's are flawed? Which ones are subsidized by special interests? I can't say for certain. All I know is that sharing has never hurt honest people.
Things need to change -- artists need to get fairly reimbursed and consumers need to be able to share music legally. Both of these things can happen on a P2P network
100% agree. The change needs to come at the root of the problem: greed and graft between corporations and politicians and the opportunistic stripping of ownership rights from the {scientist,artist} by corporations.
I don't have any mod points but I'll add my karma to make this thread grow.
+1: Insightful
+1: Funny
+1: Underrated
When it comes to intellectual property, you're talking about content, not what medium its printed on
I've never believed in intellectual property because of the selective enforcement and abuse inherent in the system. For example: My math book is copyrighted, yet I can teach calculus freely (assuming the student has the ability). Karaoke is legal. Time Life books may publish a series on home improvement, but I can freely learn the trade from anyone who's read them.
I feel strongly that too much profit from the sale of CDs (indeed, all intellectual property) goes to CEOs/VPs/directors and not to the originating inventor (be it artists, scientists, tinkerers, whoever). Is the content the property of the CEO/VP/director/controlling shareholder? No. In many cases the controlling shareholder couldn't tap a rhythm with a spoon, couldn't design their way out of a paper bag, or couldn't prove the existence of their own poop-chute. Do they profit? Yes. In many cases they profit more fantastically than the originator. At least file-sharers aren't leeching from someone else's creativity--they're not charging.
If the politicians could stay out of these things the systems would eventually streamline themselves. Artists may not ever get rich but they will always survive: they make a PRODUCT (be it entertainment, amusement, teaching, medicine, a better mouse-trap, whatever). They will find ways to distribute that product which meets the level of their ambition. The end goal of keeping politicians out of these systems would be to shave off the tag-alongs, the CEOs, VPs, directors, shareholders who reap enormous amounts of profit from the efforts of the artists.
If the record companies are so worried about after-market distribution cutting into their profit then they should take the path of least resistance: raise the price. Then we will gain a clear concept of how important their artifical system is. If that means that I can't afford anymore CDs, so be it. Society would probably be better for it. Maybe more people will start to see that, of the sale of a $15 CD or a $100 pill, almost nothing of that goes back to the originator.
Artists will still play at nightclubs. Production line workers will work on a different production line. The only bad outcome of my approach is that there won't be anymore free profit for the tag-alongs.
but anybody who says Bob Dylan should never have gotten a paycheck is an asshole
No one ever said <artist> shouldn't get paid. More appropriately, let's look at who pays him and who tags along.
Right now <artist> gets paid by <record label> who dispenses that money from revenue collected from consumers. The consumers are, in general, more than happy to pay <artist>. The issue most consumers have is that the vast majority of their payment doesn't go to <artist> or <production plant worker> but rather, the majority of the money ends up in <CEO/VP/director>'s pocket.
As long as we can tell the politicians to stay out of it, the system will streamline itself and artists will once again continue to profit. They make the product. <CEO/VP/director> will eventually be left to figure out something useful to do in society.
If we could ever get the politicians to stay out of it.
because you did NOT buy distribution rights
What's ridiculous is the concept of distribution rights. If I physically have possession of something then I can distribute it. The problem here is that our society is so far down the long road of delerium that most people actually buy into this crap.
If I can make it, I can distribute it. The media industry needs to learn to live with reality. If redistribution is such a big problem they should charge more for the initial product.
FACE REALITY.
YOU are to blame for the kind of nonsense at the top of this article. YOU are the one that these slashbots should be tearing into
I can't help it that the media industry is incapable of dealing with the reality of the universe. I certainly can't help it that people in positions of power are influenced by money interests.
The fact remains that controlling "distribution rights" is every bit as tangible as controlling which way the wind blows. The sooner society gets back to facing this natural fact, the sooner we'll see an end to this nonsense.
you should be legally capable of using p2p systems to rip off companies
No one's ripping off a company. They sold the product. The product now belongs to the consumer who bought it who is free to share it because they own the product.
Wait, you say, the product hasn't been sold, but rather licensed? How is "licensing" any different from "renting"? A violation of a rental agreement is a civil matter which requires the owner to retain legal counsel and build a case and is covered by existing law. A violation of a rental agreement is _NOT_ a felony, the prosecution of which is taxpayer funded, and is _NOT_ something which requires the generation of new laws to make entire segments of the IT industry illegal.
Instead of 'whatever' you could also solve the problem. Go to the desktop properties, advanced, displays. You will see pictures of a monitor and a tv set. One of them is primary and the other one is secondary. Switch them, and the DVD will show on the TV, but asa black area on the monitor
Been there, done that. No dice.
Thanks anyway.
"overly robust geezer that makes a living walking behind the elephant with a shovel."
One has to wonder if lawyers will begin to sue Hollywood for slander do to similar lines, such as the one in the movie "Amistad".
"dung-scraper"
> "We're not trying to swing our arm around a whole bunch of people to get new revenue."
When I read that, I had a recollection of a particular pair of managers that I had while working for a big pharmaceutical company in Chicago: "We're not just trying to bust your chops. We're really trying to help you."
Uh-huh... suuuuuuuuuuuuure.