The practice of shill bidding has been going on since forever, anytime anyone has ever sold anything for a negotiable price. One strategy is to place a phone call from a pub or café, ostensibly begging to borrow some money to purchase an item from a nearby antique shop or market stall which is claimed to be on offer at a price much lower than its true value (which is invariably mentioned, possibly along with the name of a potential purchaser) and about which the caller is clearly rather excited. Of course, the "caller" is part of the scam, in league with the seller; and fully expects to be overheard by someone, who then departs quietly and purchases the item (in reality worth very little and marked up) before the loan can be completed.
Of course, the scam only works because of the eavesdropper's greed -- they get so carried away by the thrill of listening in on a private phone call and discovering a little secret that they weren't supposed to know about, that they totally forget that it might not even be for real. You can't con an honest person.
Just remember, fools and their money are soon parted. Treat eBay just the same as any other form of gambling, and never spend more than you would be prepared to lose. If the bidding goes above what you wish to pay, walk away. If the seller does win their own item back, they will still have to pay the listing fees, plus PayPal's cut, which can provide some measure of disincentive against shill bidding..... but only if buyers keep their cool and don't get auction fever.
Then you'd have to increase taxes year-by-year to make up for this. And people would still think they'd been ripped off.
Like service ducts under the streets, compressed-air mains and a truly integrated transport infrastructure, it's just not going to happen because the transition would be (mis-)perceived as worse than the problem it would be solving. Maybe when we colonise another planet, we can get its population used to polynomial taxation along with all the other good stuff we will have to put in from day one when we build the new cities.
Wait..... so you're saying the ticket on the edge of the shelf says $20, but when you take the item to the till you get charged $22? That sounds mucked-up to me!
In the UK and the EU, the price it says on the ticket is the price you pay. You pay your sales tax (VAT) in the country where the item is purchased, and you don't have to pay any duty when you take the goods from one EU country to another.
All the same, tax bands are messy. They were originally invented as a bodge, so as to provide a rough approximation to a polynomial regression without requiring a computer to work out everyone's taxes. Since then, computers have become more plentiful. I propose that tax bands should be replaced by a "simple" (for a computer; and still do-able on paper, to enable checking) polynomial regression.
Unfortunately, this will make some people worse off and so probably is an automatic non-starter.
No; it's just the only country where the prizewinner is responsible for paying the taxes after they win, rather than the competition organiser having to pay them in advance.
Well, if GOTO is that harmful, why does every processor have an unconditional jump instruction? Come to think of it, they store different types of data in the same memory -- like the chef who cooks beans and peas in the same pot!
Yeah, but you have to admit..... that's getting on for as much effort as it takes to be a Distributor!
If you want something that you know isn't going to change much, and certainly never in a way that breaks anything, use Debian Stable -- and be prepared to build the odd package from source {it really isn't as bad as it's made out to be} if you have to have a massively up-to-date version of something. They have a more-than-King-size package repository.
One of the reasons I've resisted wireless for so long (apart from the fact that by the time I've even unwrapped my first wireless router, there will be a whole new standard out running at ten times the speed and the kit will be twenty pounds cheaper) is that you don't know what's on the end of it. A cable can be followed. RF can't. If someone wants to play silly buggers with a wired network, they've got to get physical access to your cables. But no wires means no traceability!
With a bit of readily available software, such as Linux and hostap, you can turn a laptop (or SFF mobo plus suitable battery; a 12V/8AH lead-acid is about the right size for a good day's phun while you're away doing other things) into a great wireless hacking tool (that looks just like a real live wireless router, not an ad-hoc connection). You can snarf logins, passwords and credit card details on their way to the real website without even having to stop with a fake error message. This works even if they're using SSL; you just have to accept incoming SSL requests, let them get decrypted on your machine, and pass them on to the real internet via SSL (classic MITM hack; Bob thinks you're Alice and Alice thinks you're Bob). Your certificate probably won't be recognised by their browser; but if you put in the name of the place where you're working your scam, they might just think it's perfectly normal because they're going through that place's gateway and accept it anyway. Other people's ignorance can be your best friend.
One last word: Don't rush it. Leave awhile between snarfing the data and making use of it. That way, they're less likely to suspect you. If someone connected through a "free wi-fi" network one morning and got stuff bought on their card the same afternoon, they might remember the "free wi-fi" when trying to think what they'd done. If a couple of weeks elapse before you make your hit, it's less likely to come back on you. Oh, and getting stuff delivered to your own address is even stupider than answering the telephone in a house you're burgling!
If / when I ever get any wireless kit, I will change the name of my neighbours' unprotected router (currently set to the make and model name; a quick Google search revealed the default password) to "pWn3d", have my router emulate theirs but with suitably distorted graphics, and see what happens. Jut a shame I can't listen in on their call to tech support..... but I could, if I had what fone phreaks once referred to as a "Sky Blue Pink Box with Yellow Spots On". Oh, wait, such a thingalready exists!
Now we come to the Principle of Equivalence, which states: all means to the same end are equally valid.
And it's here we have a problem, because here the US Constitution specifies a means to a particular end (though elsewhere, it intimates that just because something is written a particular way in one place in the constitution, doesn't mean it shouldn't be read a different way; and its original architects understood that, because perceived inflexibility in case a situation occurred in future which was not considered at the time was used as an argument against a written constitution).
The Constitution is written as though "securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" were the only possible way to "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
The question that must be asked, in the light of the Principle of Equivalence, is this:
"Is there a better way to promote the progress of science and useful arts than by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries?"
The original idea of copyright was to encourage people to share what they create (thereby implying that they must actually create something); which is achieved by the apparently counter-intuitive method of allowing them not to share it for awhile. At the present moment, confusion between means and ends has led to a situation where some people think the idea of copyright is to make money for record companies. But D.W.E.T.C.O.T.
Now, it's fair if you share something with everybody on the same terms, and it's fair if you don't share it at all. What's not fair is setting different terms for different recipients; such as allowing only one record company to sell recordings of their work. I personally wouldn't have a problem with paying an artist the same amount as they get when the record company sells one of their albums, whenever I made myself a copy of said album. Really, the person who wrote and sang that song in the first place is the only irreplaceable element in the whole equation. The Services provided by the record labels (recording to CD, packaging and distributing) have diminished in Value as ordinary people have acquired the wherewithal to perform some of these functions for themselves without the assistance of intermediaries.
Distributing records is still, however, ultimately a Service which has Value. A recording artist must distribute records in order to earn money; however, they can delegate the responsibility for distribution to a third party. So the artist could pay the label to manufacture and ship records; the label would skim off a portion from each sale to cover their overheads and make a profit. Except, the artist probably doesn't have any money to pay for the initial outlay (recording, mastering, pressing and artwork); at least, not to begin with. But they will have, once the punters start buying records; so I am suggesting that an artist should be allowed to mortgage the rights in their work to finance the distribution of a record. There are already plenty of existing examples as to how this would work; basically, for as long as there is any money outstanding, the lender has lien over the collateral (for instance, if you are buying a house on a mortgage, you might need approval from your lender before doing anything which could affect its value). While the rights to the work are under mortgage, it's proper for the lender to be allowed to restrict other parties from distributing copies of the work. Once the loan is paid off, the rights revert to the artist, and the requirement for non-discriminatory licencing kicks in.
Jeez - I just bought an Xbox game in Norway - I want to play thos game on my Mac and my Wii I cannot. I DEMAND that Norway make ALL software run on all platforms.
You might be onto something. What you'd be more likely to succeed with, though, is demanding that console manufacturers allow running of third-party software (since vendor lock-in is, by definition, anti-competitive). If, say, you want to write software to run on Wii machines that people own, well, that's absolutely none of Nintendo's business and anything Nintendo do to try to stop you is illegal. It's already been ruled in the EU that DVD region coding is anti-competitive, which is why any DVD player you buy on the Continent will be multi-region (and, thanks to it having RGB outputs, will work fine on any set anywhere in the world). However, there's the slight problem that video games are not presently the sort of activity enjoyed by stuffy old judges. Of course (and quite appropriately, given what section we're in), death will eventually take care of that.
In the 1980s, the plethora of incompatible home computers, each unable to run software written for any of the others, was questioned. The consensus was that you should no more expect a cassette clearly labelled for the Commodore 64 to be usable with a Spectrum, than you should expect an 8-track cartridge to be playable on a turntable or a super 8 movie on a VHS recorder. In the end, The Market decided; a whole bunch of machines failed for want of software availability, and it was the Speccy, 64, Amstrad CPC and Beeb that won out, with a few Orics and Dragons hanging on around the fringes.
Now, in some countries, "format shifting" is explicitly legal. In other words, if you own an album on CD or LP, you are allowed to make a copy of it on cassette or MP3. (In the UK, it's not actually legal, merely unprosecutable. Any court case relating to format-shifting would set a precedent, and neither outcome would be desirable.) Under such a doctrine, you probably would have a right to rewrite an Xbox game to run on another platform -- at your own expense, and for nobody's use but yours. (In the case of 8-bit home computers, such rewriting wouldn't have been altogether technically unfeasible for a programmer knowledgeable in both the source and target architectures. Anyone remember magazines with type-in listings, with the "conversion clues" sidebars? *sigh* They were great days.)
You can get Corn Flakes anywhere. You can get Music Anywhere. There is no restriction.
That's not strictly true. At the moment, music distributors have exclusive deals to represent performers. You can buy Kellogg's corn flakes, or you can buy corn flakes from other manufacturers. You can even flatten and toast your own maize kernels. But you can't buy Pink Floyd on any label except EMI. You can't buy Sheryl Crow on any label except A&M. You can't buy Shakira on any label except Sony. (I'd change all that: performers would mortgage the copyright in their songs to finance recording and distribution; the distributor would have lien over all copies of the first pressing, the size of which would be calculated to pay off the loan. Once the first pressing was all sold out and the initial loan paid off, the rights in the song revert to the performer, who then becomes free to pay the same company or any other company to distribute their music, and distributors would compete in the marketplace both for performers [effectively suppliers] and customers. If the rights in the song expire before the initial pressing is sold out, well, the distributor is up the same well-known waterway as anyone else who buys a large warehouse full of perishable goods and fails to punt them out in good time.)
That's the essential difference: if you are concerned to listen to a particular song or a particular performer, then music is not a competitive market in the same way as other "commodities".
Also, how would a DVD Jon-style effort to crack iTunes DRM be considered legitimate use of reasonable force in the exercise of one's statutory rights?
Because you have a statutory right to listen to music that you have purchased. If someone is requiring you to use forcible techniques (such as breaking DRM) in order to exercise that right then, provided you did not use more force than necessary, it's their problem if they get hurt. If someone lying in front of a bulldozer which you are contracted to drive, you can physically drag them out of the way (and so long as you weren't deliberately trying to harm them, then any injury they suffer is their fault) but you can't just drive over them (since that would be using more force than necessary).
Also, there's already a general perception in (at least British and European) law that life is, without exception, more important than property. A logical extension might be that false, "intellectual property" is less important than real, tangible property. But this is yet to be tested in the Courts.
But you can replace vehicle parts with "pattern" parts, made by a third party unaffiliated with the original manufacturer. There's nothing (except Market Forces) stopping me or anyone else making replacement radiator caps for Ford Fiestas if I want; nor designing a brand new car that uses the same radiator cap that Ford are already sourcing for the Fiesta. However, iTunes DRM -- more specifically, Apple's unwillingness to licence it -- means that nobody else can make a player which is compatible with iTunes music store. That is what Europeans call anti-competitive behaviour.
It's even possible that a DVD Jon (isn't he a Norwegian?) -style effort to crack iTunes DRM would be considered legitimate use of reasonable force in the exercise of one's statutory rights.
Well, actually, I got a sneak preview of the next Jean M Auel book. You will recall that Ayla has already invented flint and steel for making fire, horse riding, needles and dogs, and Jondalar has invented guns. In this new book, Jondalar invents Rock and Roll (but Ayla gets jealous and smashes his instrument when he starts "sharing Pleasures" with groupies) and Ayla invents the Courts and becomes the first lawyer. She successfully prosecutes the First Cave of the Lanzadonii for breach of patent when they start sewing with needles, and later goes on to represent a woman who cuts herself on a flint knife which was not properly labelled as sharp. Later in the book, she nearly loses a case brought by the S'Armunai Wolf Women, but the case turns around when she calls one of Jondalar's exes from the Sharamudoi as a surprise witness.
Indeed. If someone buys a CD player, they'll think it sounds better than the vinyl LP's they've been playing through the same amp and speakers for years. If someone buys a HDTV, they'll think the ordinary pictures on BBC and ITV look better. And if someone buys a computer with a 64-bit processor in it, they'll think their 32-bit applications are running faster and better.
For more than 90% of the market it's a perception thing, pure and simple. Those who take advantage of the real tangible benefits of new technology are a minority.
More importantly, your name would have been silently added to some count of Satisfied Windows Customers, and pointed to whenever MS want to make a point about how many people are deliriously happy staying with Windows. There's no obvious way to de-register a Windows purchase if you intend to scrap it.
Firstly, you can't use quantum encryption to get a message into the human brain because we don't have quantum sense organs. You could modulate the quantum-encrypted message onto a non-quantum carrier, but that makes it every bit as hackable as a non-quantum-encrypted message. (And anyway, the quantum communication process is inherently unreliable. It can never give better than 50% efficiency and is really only good for semi-secure key exchange. I say semi-secure because you still require a non-quantum backchannel to verify the key you exchanged over the quantum channel; and a MITM attack is not impossible, just supremely difficult and highly dependent on luck.) Secondly, what about cinemas? All the content being shown on one screen must be encrypted against the same key if everyone present is going to be able to view it. What about live concerts? The unencrypted material most definitely exists in the most eminently hacker-friendly form. And thirdly, implanting a different private key in every individual's brain would cost more than making the content it was supposed to protect in the first place. Sounds like you've been staring so long at a means that you've forgotten what the end was supposed to have been.
The public aren't going even to begin to fall for this. Even if some content providers do go down this route, somebody somewhere is going to realise the benefit of what I call the "newspaper method" (almost every newsagent's shop has a photocopier, but nobody uses these to "pirate" newspapers because it's cheaper just to buy one) and release unprotected content at a price which is low enough to make copying economically unfeasible. Once customers suss out that they're paying more for the packaging than the contents that they can get cheaper elsewhere, you'd better get used to what a person looks like from behind; 'cause that's the only angle you'll be seeing them from.
Now, go back to wanking over your science fiction pamphlets (and this time, lock the door in case your mother walks in). And log in next time you want to have a serious discussion.
A player which worked by directly stimulating the brain sounds as though it would be very much a person-to-person variable..... even assuming it was possible to create such an interface in the first place, it ought to be just as hackable as anything else. Even if you never manage to recover a visible image, you only have to record the sensory-stimulation signals {whatever form they may take} and reproduce them with sufficient fidelity. Remember: a digital recording is an unchangeable list of numbers, nothing more and nothing less. A replay device has two "blocks": one for retrieving the numbers from the storage medium, and another for converting the numbers into sensory data. If you can feed the same sequence of numbers into the second block, you will get the same effect.
If you have a HDTV set with a cathode-ray tube, you can use this to decrypt your signal. Get the red, green and blue intensities from the electron gun grids and you can get the position of the beam from the scan coil drives. This should be enough information to be going on with. You can (assuming the beam is scanning normally, which is a fair assumption) create a sync signal in sympathy with the starts of each horizontal line and vertical field. Then just adjust the RGB voltage levels to match the RGB inputs found on all modern sets, and feed the decrypted picture to another television or monitor. As soon as you have got hold of some unencrypted form of the movie, no matter how good the original protection may have been, it's worthless. You can make as many copies as you like of your unprotected version.
Are you seriously arguing that the public would rather watch flip-book sketches of a popular movie made by someone who has seen it, rather than see the movie for themselves??
The public have been accepting egregious degradation from audio and video cassettes for years. The film E.T. was probably the most pirated in its day; it wasn't released on video for something like ten years, so there were a lot of dodgy camcorder copies (and such camcorders as existed in the early 1980s were enormous) about. But a flickery rendition with people walking about and making noises is better than nothing.
I don't know whether your example of "flip-book sketches" is at all realistic.
Yes, but DRM is mathematically incapable of ever working. It's not the case that "something just needs to be invented". There's nothing anyone could invent that would make DRM work, just like there's nothing anyone could invent that would make water not wet.
To put it simply, if a recording can be viewed, it can be copied. And experience has already shown how the public will put up with a hell of a lot of degradation rather than pay for content.
No; but by letting people know that it is illegal, you're ensuring that if anyone gets caught for it (and they will: many people use aliases when dealing with different companies, in order to spot who is passing on their details to whom. Sometimes it's deliberate, as often as not it's a simple mis-spelling. If you have a mis-spellable surname and a mis-spellable street name, there are a few combinations and it does no harm to let them ride), an example will be made of them.
But the UK Data Protection Act assigns a "rightful purpose" to the data they are storing about you, and anything other than that rightful purpose (including internal systems testing, technically!) is a misuse -- which is a breach of the Act. If you've asked them to remove your data then it now has no rightful purpose, so anything they do with it from then on is in breach of the Act.
Note that at least until not long ago, data stored by non-computerised means was exempt from any legal protection whatsoever. There was at lease one organisation which used this loophole to their advantage, and held much information on "Undesirables" (such as dope smokers, trade unionists, people who donated to Amnesty International, people seen wearing a Levellers t-shirt..... that kind of Undesirable) on paper in filing cabinets. And there was nothing anyone could do about it. I'm not sure if the 1998 amendments sought to block this.
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The practice of shill bidding has been going on since forever, anytime anyone has ever sold anything for a negotiable price. One strategy is to place a phone call from a pub or café, ostensibly begging to borrow some money to purchase an item from a nearby antique shop or market stall which is claimed to be on offer at a price much lower than its true value (which is invariably mentioned, possibly along with the name of a potential purchaser) and about which the caller is clearly rather excited. Of course, the "caller" is part of the scam, in league with the seller; and fully expects to be overheard by someone, who then departs quietly and purchases the item (in reality worth very little and marked up) before the loan can be completed.
..... but only if buyers keep their cool and don't get auction fever.
Of course, the scam only works because of the eavesdropper's greed -- they get so carried away by the thrill of listening in on a private phone call and discovering a little secret that they weren't supposed to know about, that they totally forget that it might not even be for real. You can't con an honest person.
Just remember, fools and their money are soon parted. Treat eBay just the same as any other form of gambling, and never spend more than you would be prepared to lose. If the bidding goes above what you wish to pay, walk away. If the seller does win their own item back, they will still have to pay the listing fees, plus PayPal's cut, which can provide some measure of disincentive against shill bidding
Then you'd have to increase taxes year-by-year to make up for this. And people would still think they'd been ripped off.
Like service ducts under the streets, compressed-air mains and a truly integrated transport infrastructure, it's just not going to happen because the transition would be (mis-)perceived as worse than the problem it would be solving. Maybe when we colonise another planet, we can get its population used to polynomial taxation along with all the other good stuff we will have to put in from day one when we build the new cities.
Wait ..... so you're saying the ticket on the edge of the shelf says $20, but when you take the item to the till you get charged $22? That sounds mucked-up to me!
In the UK and the EU, the price it says on the ticket is the price you pay. You pay your sales tax (VAT) in the country where the item is purchased, and you don't have to pay any duty when you take the goods from one EU country to another.
All the same, tax bands are messy. They were originally invented as a bodge, so as to provide a rough approximation to a polynomial regression without requiring a computer to work out everyone's taxes. Since then, computers have become more plentiful. I propose that tax bands should be replaced by a "simple" (for a computer; and still do-able on paper, to enable checking) polynomial regression.
Unfortunately, this will make some people worse off and so probably is an automatic non-starter.
No; it's just the only country where the prizewinner is responsible for paying the taxes after they win, rather than the competition organiser having to pay them in advance.
Well, if GOTO is that harmful, why does every processor have an unconditional jump instruction? Come to think of it, they store different types of data in the same memory -- like the chef who cooks beans and peas in the same pot!
Yeah, but you have to admit ..... that's getting on for as much effort as it takes to be a Distributor!
If you want something that you know isn't going to change much, and certainly never in a way that breaks anything, use Debian Stable -- and be prepared to build the odd package from source {it really isn't as bad as it's made out to be} if you have to have a massively up-to-date version of something. They have a more-than-King-size package repository.
One of the reasons I've resisted wireless for so long (apart from the fact that by the time I've even unwrapped my first wireless router, there will be a whole new standard out running at ten times the speed and the kit will be twenty pounds cheaper) is that you don't know what's on the end of it. A cable can be followed. RF can't. If someone wants to play silly buggers with a wired network, they've got to get physical access to your cables. But no wires means no traceability!
With a bit of readily available software, such as Linux and hostap, you can turn a laptop (or SFF mobo plus suitable battery; a 12V/8AH lead-acid is about the right size for a good day's phun while you're away doing other things) into a great wireless hacking tool (that looks just like a real live wireless router, not an ad-hoc connection). You can snarf logins, passwords and credit card details on their way to the real website without even having to stop with a fake error message. This works even if they're using SSL; you just have to accept incoming SSL requests, let them get decrypted on your machine, and pass them on to the real internet via SSL (classic MITM hack; Bob thinks you're Alice and Alice thinks you're Bob). Your certificate probably won't be recognised by their browser; but if you put in the name of the place where you're working your scam, they might just think it's perfectly normal because they're going through that place's gateway and accept it anyway. Other people's ignorance can be your best friend.
One last word: Don't rush it. Leave awhile between snarfing the data and making use of it. That way, they're less likely to suspect you. If someone connected through a "free wi-fi" network one morning and got stuff bought on their card the same afternoon, they might remember the "free wi-fi" when trying to think what they'd done. If a couple of weeks elapse before you make your hit, it's less likely to come back on you. Oh, and getting stuff delivered to your own address is even stupider than answering the telephone in a house you're burgling!
Someone's been reading this, haven't they? :)
..... but I could, if I had what fone phreaks once referred to as a "Sky Blue Pink Box with Yellow Spots On". Oh, wait, such a thing already exists!
If / when I ever get any wireless kit, I will change the name of my neighbours' unprotected router (currently set to the make and model name; a quick Google search revealed the default password) to "pWn3d", have my router emulate theirs but with suitably distorted graphics, and see what happens. Jut a shame I can't listen in on their call to tech support
Now, that does sound like serious PHUN!
Now we come to the Principle of Equivalence, which states: all means to the same end are equally valid.
And it's here we have a problem, because here the US Constitution specifies a means to a particular end (though elsewhere, it intimates that just because something is written a particular way in one place in the constitution, doesn't mean it shouldn't be read a different way; and its original architects understood that, because perceived inflexibility in case a situation occurred in future which was not considered at the time was used as an argument against a written constitution).
The Constitution is written as though "securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" were the only possible way to "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
The question that must be asked, in the light of the Principle of Equivalence, is this:
"Is there a better way to promote the progress of science and useful arts than by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries?"
Indeed.
The original idea of copyright was to encourage people to share what they create (thereby implying that they must actually create something); which is achieved by the apparently counter-intuitive method of allowing them not to share it for awhile. At the present moment, confusion between means and ends has led to a situation where some people think the idea of copyright is to make money for record companies. But D.W.E.T.C.O.T.
Now, it's fair if you share something with everybody on the same terms, and it's fair if you don't share it at all. What's not fair is setting different terms for different recipients; such as allowing only one record company to sell recordings of their work. I personally wouldn't have a problem with paying an artist the same amount as they get when the record company sells one of their albums, whenever I made myself a copy of said album. Really, the person who wrote and sang that song in the first place is the only irreplaceable element in the whole equation. The Services provided by the record labels (recording to CD, packaging and distributing) have diminished in Value as ordinary people have acquired the wherewithal to perform some of these functions for themselves without the assistance of intermediaries.
Distributing records is still, however, ultimately a Service which has Value. A recording artist must distribute records in order to earn money; however, they can delegate the responsibility for distribution to a third party. So the artist could pay the label to manufacture and ship records; the label would skim off a portion from each sale to cover their overheads and make a profit. Except, the artist probably doesn't have any money to pay for the initial outlay (recording, mastering, pressing and artwork); at least, not to begin with. But they will have, once the punters start buying records; so I am suggesting that an artist should be allowed to mortgage the rights in their work to finance the distribution of a record. There are already plenty of existing examples as to how this would work; basically, for as long as there is any money outstanding, the lender has lien over the collateral (for instance, if you are buying a house on a mortgage, you might need approval from your lender before doing anything which could affect its value). While the rights to the work are under mortgage, it's proper for the lender to be allowed to restrict other parties from distributing copies of the work. Once the loan is paid off, the rights revert to the artist, and the requirement for non-discriminatory licencing kicks in.
In the 1980s, the plethora of incompatible home computers, each unable to run software written for any of the others, was questioned. The consensus was that you should no more expect a cassette clearly labelled for the Commodore 64 to be usable with a Spectrum, than you should expect an 8-track cartridge to be playable on a turntable or a super 8 movie on a VHS recorder. In the end, The Market decided; a whole bunch of machines failed for want of software availability, and it was the Speccy, 64, Amstrad CPC and Beeb that won out, with a few Orics and Dragons hanging on around the fringes.
Now, in some countries, "format shifting" is explicitly legal. In other words, if you own an album on CD or LP, you are allowed to make a copy of it on cassette or MP3. (In the UK, it's not actually legal, merely unprosecutable. Any court case relating to format-shifting would set a precedent, and neither outcome would be desirable.) Under such a doctrine, you probably would have a right to rewrite an Xbox game to run on another platform -- at your own expense, and for nobody's use but yours. (In the case of 8-bit home computers, such rewriting wouldn't have been altogether technically unfeasible for a programmer knowledgeable in both the source and target architectures. Anyone remember magazines with type-in listings, with the "conversion clues" sidebars? *sigh* They were great days.) That's not strictly true. At the moment, music distributors have exclusive deals to represent performers. You can buy Kellogg's corn flakes, or you can buy corn flakes from other manufacturers. You can even flatten and toast your own maize kernels. But you can't buy Pink Floyd on any label except EMI. You can't buy Sheryl Crow on any label except A&M. You can't buy Shakira on any label except Sony. (I'd change all that: performers would mortgage the copyright in their songs to finance recording and distribution; the distributor would have lien over all copies of the first pressing, the size of which would be calculated to pay off the loan. Once the first pressing was all sold out and the initial loan paid off, the rights in the song revert to the performer, who then becomes free to pay the same company or any other company to distribute their music, and distributors would compete in the marketplace both for performers [effectively suppliers] and customers. If the rights in the song expire before the initial pressing is sold out, well, the distributor is up the same well-known waterway as anyone else who buys a large warehouse full of perishable goods and fails to punt them out in good time.)
That's the essential difference: if you are concerned to listen to a particular song or a particular performer, then music is not a competitive market in the same way as other "commodities".
Also, there's already a general perception in (at least British and European) law that life is, without exception, more important than property. A logical extension might be that false, "intellectual property" is less important than real, tangible property. But this is yet to be tested in the Courts.
But you can replace vehicle parts with "pattern" parts, made by a third party unaffiliated with the original manufacturer. There's nothing (except Market Forces) stopping me or anyone else making replacement radiator caps for Ford Fiestas if I want; nor designing a brand new car that uses the same radiator cap that Ford are already sourcing for the Fiesta. However, iTunes DRM -- more specifically, Apple's unwillingness to licence it -- means that nobody else can make a player which is compatible with iTunes music store. That is what Europeans call anti-competitive behaviour.
It's even possible that a DVD Jon (isn't he a Norwegian?) -style effort to crack iTunes DRM would be considered legitimate use of reasonable force in the exercise of one's statutory rights.
Well, actually, I got a sneak preview of the next Jean M Auel book. You will recall that Ayla has already invented flint and steel for making fire, horse riding, needles and dogs, and Jondalar has invented guns. In this new book, Jondalar invents Rock and Roll (but Ayla gets jealous and smashes his instrument when he starts "sharing Pleasures" with groupies) and Ayla invents the Courts and becomes the first lawyer. She successfully prosecutes the First Cave of the Lanzadonii for breach of patent when they start sewing with needles, and later goes on to represent a woman who cuts herself on a flint knife which was not properly labelled as sharp. Later in the book, she nearly loses a case brought by the S'Armunai Wolf Women, but the case turns around when she calls one of Jondalar's exes from the Sharamudoi as a surprise witness.
No; the point was outside the speech marks, so by convention it was not part of the reported speech.
Indeed. If someone buys a CD player, they'll think it sounds better than the vinyl LP's they've been playing through the same amp and speakers for years. If someone buys a HDTV, they'll think the ordinary pictures on BBC and ITV look better. And if someone buys a computer with a 64-bit processor in it, they'll think their 32-bit applications are running faster and better.
For more than 90% of the market it's a perception thing, pure and simple. Those who take advantage of the real tangible benefits of new technology are a minority.
Not necessarily.
Hard as it may be for Microsoft to appreciate, some people actually don't want a Microsoft Operating System.
More importantly, your name would have been silently added to some count of Satisfied Windows Customers, and pointed to whenever MS want to make a point about how many people are deliriously happy staying with Windows. There's no obvious way to de-register a Windows purchase if you intend to scrap it.
Firstly, you can't use quantum encryption to get a message into the human brain because we don't have quantum sense organs. You could modulate the quantum-encrypted message onto a non-quantum carrier, but that makes it every bit as hackable as a non-quantum-encrypted message. (And anyway, the quantum communication process is inherently unreliable. It can never give better than 50% efficiency and is really only good for semi-secure key exchange. I say semi-secure because you still require a non-quantum backchannel to verify the key you exchanged over the quantum channel; and a MITM attack is not impossible, just supremely difficult and highly dependent on luck.) Secondly, what about cinemas? All the content being shown on one screen must be encrypted against the same key if everyone present is going to be able to view it. What about live concerts? The unencrypted material most definitely exists in the most eminently hacker-friendly form. And thirdly, implanting a different private key in every individual's brain would cost more than making the content it was supposed to protect in the first place. Sounds like you've been staring so long at a means that you've forgotten what the end was supposed to have been.
The public aren't going even to begin to fall for this. Even if some content providers do go down this route, somebody somewhere is going to realise the benefit of what I call the "newspaper method" (almost every newsagent's shop has a photocopier, but nobody uses these to "pirate" newspapers because it's cheaper just to buy one) and release unprotected content at a price which is low enough to make copying economically unfeasible. Once customers suss out that they're paying more for the packaging than the contents that they can get cheaper elsewhere, you'd better get used to what a person looks like from behind; 'cause that's the only angle you'll be seeing them from.
Now, go back to wanking over your science fiction pamphlets (and this time, lock the door in case your mother walks in). And log in next time you want to have a serious discussion.
If you have a HDTV set with a cathode-ray tube, you can use this to decrypt your signal. Get the red, green and blue intensities from the electron gun grids and you can get the position of the beam from the scan coil drives. This should be enough information to be going on with. You can (assuming the beam is scanning normally, which is a fair assumption) create a sync signal in sympathy with the starts of each horizontal line and vertical field. Then just adjust the RGB voltage levels to match the RGB inputs found on all modern sets, and feed the decrypted picture to another television or monitor. As soon as you have got hold of some unencrypted form of the movie, no matter how good the original protection may have been, it's worthless. You can make as many copies as you like of your unprotected version.
The public have been accepting egregious degradation from audio and video cassettes for years. The film E.T. was probably the most pirated in its day; it wasn't released on video for something like ten years, so there were a lot of dodgy camcorder copies (and such camcorders as existed in the early 1980s were enormous) about. But a flickery rendition with people walking about and making noises is better than nothing.
I don't know whether your example of "flip-book sketches" is at all realistic.
Yes, but DRM is mathematically incapable of ever working. It's not the case that "something just needs to be invented". There's nothing anyone could invent that would make DRM work, just like there's nothing anyone could invent that would make water not wet.
To put it simply, if a recording can be viewed, it can be copied. And experience has already shown how the public will put up with a hell of a lot of degradation rather than pay for content.
No; but by letting people know that it is illegal, you're ensuring that if anyone gets caught for it (and they will: many people use aliases when dealing with different companies, in order to spot who is passing on their details to whom. Sometimes it's deliberate, as often as not it's a simple mis-spelling. If you have a mis-spellable surname and a mis-spellable street name, there are a few combinations and it does no harm to let them ride), an example will be made of them.
But the UK Data Protection Act assigns a "rightful purpose" to the data they are storing about you, and anything other than that rightful purpose (including internal systems testing, technically!) is a misuse -- which is a breach of the Act. If you've asked them to remove your data then it now has no rightful purpose, so anything they do with it from then on is in breach of the Act.
..... that kind of Undesirable) on paper in filing cabinets. And there was nothing anyone could do about it. I'm not sure if the 1998 amendments sought to block this.
Note that at least until not long ago, data stored by non-computerised means was exempt from any legal protection whatsoever. There was at lease one organisation which used this loophole to their advantage, and held much information on "Undesirables" (such as dope smokers, trade unionists, people who donated to Amnesty International, people seen wearing a Levellers t-shirt