Michael Geist noted that the report ultimately undermined one of the BSA's core arguments -- that countries which enact DMCA-style legislation experience significantly reduced piracy rates.
Yeah, but you can't fight these guys with logic. All they'll say to that is "See? The problem is so bad in those countries we need *even stronger laws*!
Logic and evidence is pointless when the statistics and facts in this situation are so highly open to interpretation. That makes it problem solvable only by lobbying, not facts. Those of us who are against their draconian measures need to become as politically influential as they are - something that seems unlikely right now.
I do know that (a) Jacobson's testimony, upon which plaintiffs' entire case rested, was bogus and inadmissible; (b) the plaintiffs' legal theory, which has now been rejected by the Court, was bogus; (c) plaintiffs have no evidence that defendant was a "distributor'; and (d) their statutory damages theory is unlikely to pass constitutional muster.
Given all that, we're back where we started. Strong case, high profile, "evil" opponent - the sort of case many lawyers take pro-bono anyway. When her attorney defended the case as he did, he must have known it was going to last for a while, right?
So that still leaves us with "why did he bail?" I'm not likely to accept "money" as that reason unless her attorney was drop-dead stupid, since he knew her financial situation and how expensive the trial was likely to be.
If that's the case, then we're left with an uncomfortable possibility: namely, that his stated reasons for leaving might be legitimate.
To echo another poster, just because the RIAA is generally wrong doesn't mean that all their opponents are specifically right. It's possible, in fact, that Jammie Thomas is guilty. That's a good reason to be more selective, as a community, in choosing our champions.
One company I worked for required that we list all our copyrights, websites and other intellectual content to avoid any conflicts with the company policy that any idea that pops into your head at work or at home belonged to the company. Several people offered to quit outright over the policy, others got clever by listing the URLs of every Slashdot they ever posted, and some threaten to sue. This soon became an unmanageable mess that the company was forced to drop the policy.
Um....I think that policy kind of helps protect you, as long as it's not worded as "we own absolutely everything you list here, even if you can prove prior art later" (which wouldn't be enforceable if they did).
I've signed such a thing - didn't have much to list, but it ain't a bad thing to have important non-company IP listed in black and white prior to being hired.
Your TV would have to be a monitor with no ability to tune in to a signal before you could argue exemption for TV licenses, at least in the UK, and Ireland sounds like it has a similar system.
That's reasonable since 99.99% of TVs are used as...TVs.
So really, this is just the same: if you have an internet connection, you have the ability to tune in.
Except for one massive difference: watching TV is NOT the primary use of broadband. Seems to me there's a 'presumptive use' argument missing that should be applied before taxing something. Especially for freaking TV. Really, we need a tax for *entertainment* that needs to be broadly applied not just to people using it, but to anyone using the internet? That's getting your priorities a bit out of order.
Let's apply your argument to other arenas: if my town enacts a tax on erotica, should Target have to apply the tax if I want to buy candlesticks? See how it's kind of silly to apply a tax blindly because people *might* use it for entertainment? Find a better way to target the tax. Or make it a subscription service with a decoder card, easy and done.
How is this different from, oh, say EVERY OTHER STATE SPONSORED SYSTEM IN EXISTENCE for broadcasting.
It's one thing to say that if someone owns a TV, they're probably watching TV. Here, they're saying if you have a computer and broadband, you're watching TV. Bit more of a reach. Sort of like those jurisdictions that place uniform taxes on CD media with the presumption being you're using them for music piracy and not, say, linux ISOs or something.
How about getting a job with a company that does not compete? How about the similar job for a company in a different line of business?
The more highly educated and specialized you become, the more likely it is that the situation you describe simply doesn't exist.
I can say with a high degree of probability, my skills and experience pretty much lock me into the industry I am now, and given the diverse areas in which my company does work, anyone who would hire me could be considered a competitor.
It's not reasonable to tell someone to find a complete different industry or you can't work.
Can someone remind me how Twitter makes money. Or, at least how to justify a $700 million valuation?
A few possible ways to derive value:
1) Corporate cockblock - Apple spends a little cash to make sure nobody else turns it into the Next Big Thing in some way that threatens the iPhone.
2) Eyeballs. I'm sure some beancounter will compare this deal to other ones to see how much each pair of eyeballs, or "impression", is worth in terms of valuation.
3) Ad revenue (related to #2). Do some research on how one might attach an ad to twitter messages. Possibly very short ads attached to the end of the messages? Possibly with opt-in text ads (need to make them of actual interest to user).
4) Iphone exclusives. Make Twitter better with some sort of iPhone integration. I'm sure the Apple folks could do something creative there better than I could speculate. In that case, the valuation would be related to the expected bump in iPhone sales, or upselling of plans.
What, so adding more taxes to dying industries is such a hot idea?
Any time government gets involved to sort out winners from losers, the result is bad. Better idea is to tax things evenly, and let the winners and losers sort themselves out.
In this case, the fact that the BBC can't find a valid business model isn't Google's fault, and shouldn't be their problem.
I do. I don't want it on the plane and it weighs enough to be a nuisance. I pack it in the middle of the suitcase, protected by clothes and, so far, haven't had any trouble. Any data that I'd worry about is encrypted and the laptop is an old, slow, one that I use just for travel. Someday, I suppose it will be stolen or broken. Until then, I'm more than happy not to be lugging it around and putting it in a separate tray for securit
Taking a calculated risk and appropriate precautions is one thing. Checking your unprotected laptop bag is another. If you've ever sat on the side where they load luggage, you can see the sort of treatment your average bag gets. Not to mention, it's not well restrained in flight in the cargo hold, so it's probably bounding around pretty good.
I don't like trucking my laptop through the airport, but I'm not checking the damn thing. Maybe if I had a crappy backup, sure.
Don't worry, we just need to synchronise your linguistic paradigms with the globalized world to leverage the cost-benefit ratio of using industry standard terminology.
Fuck, I understood that! On the first read. Gaaaah, they've taken over my brain!
First thing tomorrow at work, I'm gonna find one of the marketing weasels and punch him in the nuts for making me listen to crap like that.
So those assholes don't decide they don't want me playing it anymore. So I don't accidentally delete it. So I can loan it to a friend. Same reason I still buy CD's (well, the once a year I find something worth listening to), rip them, and throw them in a storage tub.
Had the VCR been invented in a copyright climate like today's, would it ever have survived the legal attack against it? I'm trying to figure out what's different, other than the fact we now have the DMCA.
The VCR didn't have any copy protection built in, so there would be no "circumvention" to trip the DMCA. Of course, if they were inventing the VCR today they'd include copy protection, so the answer becomes no, no recording technology would survive.
It's unfortunate that no defendant has the balls/money to push this thing up the ladder, because circumventing copy protection is supposedly legal when necessary for interoperability. I'd like to see if a higher court would consider the effect upon fair use as well, since the DMCA basically makes fair use illegal if they use any protection at all.
We went from having no rocket program of any kind in 1945, to deciding to put a man on the moon in 1960, to actually doing it in 1969. Now, we decide we want to go to go back, and can't make any progress at all.
Our national labs are filled with nothing but bureaucracy and useless political management. There's no sense of urgency, there's no focused direction.
Seriously, we can't do in 20 years today what we did in 10 half a century ago? Come on. This shit's just sad.
It's kind of sad to see that despite all the progressive politics that Obama and Biden pretended to give a shit about during the election that they're following Hollywood's line to the letter
Fixed that. If you really didn't see this coming, then welcome to the realities of politics.
Pills actually can be quite complex and expensive to make. The chemical components are often hard to synthesize or isolate, and can take many different processes to get to the desired product. If that weren't the case, aged brandy would cost as much as water. I mean, they're both liquids, right?
The synthesis of a drug is a pittance compared to the staggering R&D costs. Put another way, the chemical components are often hard to *figure out how* to synthesize, but once that's done, it's rather cheap on a comparative basis to actually *do* the synthesis. For what it's worth, I'm a chemist, so been there, done that.
This is also why patents are so important in the Pharm business, and why generics inevitably are dirt cheap.
If that weren't the case, aged brandy would cost as much as water. I mean, they're both liquids, right?
And yet you can still get 750 mL of brandy for $20. Now, if brandy cost $2B to learn to make and get approved by the FDA, that bottle would cost a whole helluvalot more.
But this approach will NOT work on the desktop. To get Linux to work on the desktop Linux will have to make a 180 degree shift away from its current position, which I don't see happening.
Except it is happening. Try installing a modern Linux distribution, especially a user-friendly one. It will default to runlevel 4 and Gnome, which means you never see a command line unless you go looking for it. Gnome's menu system makes Windows look very complicated by comparison. I'm not a Gnome fan because it's *too* simple for me, but many people (particularly the audience you're targeting) love it.
Linux would have to abandon CLI in favor of all the GUI interfaces like those that Windows has in abundance. GUI interfaces, wizards, everything will have to be "clicky clicky" and the simple fact is most developers and IT guys HATE that. They hate the fact that the GUI robs them of power just as much as the users hate that the CLI is too strange and requires arcane Unix commands which they have NO desire to learn.
False dichotomy. There's no reason why one can't develop a good application that has a command line interface as well as a GUI. And while many Linux folks are CLI gurus, that's becoming an anachronistic stereotype; many Linux users these days prefer the GUI. Not to mention which, many developers have the goal of crushing MSFT (likely or not), so they're attempting to make Linux easier. Additionally, even the most ardent CLI guy has a wife, grandma, sister, cousin, neighbor, etc. who's constantly asking for computer help; if he wants to switch them to linux (and he does), he knows it's going to have to be stupid simple.
Seriously, most people use the internet and create documents. It's not hard to set up Linux with firefox and OpenOffice on Gnome. At that point, the Linux experience ain't much different from Windows.
While it is true that most costs are fixed and therefore the costs are no different if every customers takes an Internet break one day, one has to plan to for peak capacity... or something like a 95% threshold. No different than other utilities such as electricity, plumbing, etc.
Exactly. This is what's so brain-dead about the argument that bandwidth is free - it's only free once you've built out infrastructure to handle capacity, but something has to pay for that. This is common, as you point out, to any industry in which one-time costs dominate per-unit costs.
I compare it to the pharmaceutical industry - pills cost, say, $0.05 to make. Why do they cost a great deal more on the market? Because you have to price in the cost of research and development.
I think the fairest thing is to do what many cell phone plans do; namely, metered or capped usage during peak hours, and free access off-peak. If a user is savvy enough to schedule iso downloads or watch video off-peak, it shouldn't cost him much since that traffic truly is nearly free.
I love running barefoot. If you keep an eye on where you're going, you won't step on anything you shouldn't. And once you get calluses built up you can take a bit more than 'normal'.
I run on trails, and every step is onto something I don't want my bare feet hitting - wood chips, point rocks, sticks, thorns, etc. Some sort of foot protection is necessary if cross-country is your thing. Track, I can see where you'd like barefoot.
One thing I have been thinking about is taking a pair of my old running shoes and cutting away the heel to make it thinner, to resist the temptation to use it. To me, the ideal running shoe would be wide around the balls of the feet with some structural impact dampening, and some structural support in the mid-sole, with basically nothing in the heel.
I have run barefoot on the beach, and quite liked it.
How does that work for authors who are not US citizens? If they need to send it to the Library of Congress, why can't every other national library demand the same? If you have to take it to the national library of your own country, a full search of all national libraries are needed to determin the orphan-staus of a work. Of course, they could make a collaboration to make the search easier, but if you can't get them all to have the same terms, it is going to be a mess.
Well, we are presumably talking about *registered* copyrighted works, correct? And this is a US law? Easiest thing to me would be to restrict the program to works that are registered in the US. Which covers probably the majority of works in question.
In general, it would be trivially easy to figure out in what country a work was published for well over 99% of works, since it's listed in the work itself. Also, I'm sure that the interwebz would be good at solving such conundrums anyway.
Let's make sure not to toss a good solution in an attempt to get a perfect one.
Slashdot Mirror
Michael Geist noted that the report ultimately undermined one of the BSA's core arguments -- that countries which enact DMCA-style legislation experience significantly reduced piracy rates.
Yeah, but you can't fight these guys with logic. All they'll say to that is "See? The problem is so bad in those countries we need *even stronger laws*!
Logic and evidence is pointless when the statistics and facts in this situation are so highly open to interpretation. That makes it problem solvable only by lobbying, not facts. Those of us who are against their draconian measures need to become as politically influential as they are - something that seems unlikely right now.
I do know that (a) Jacobson's testimony, upon which plaintiffs' entire case rested, was bogus and inadmissible; (b) the plaintiffs' legal theory, which has now been rejected by the Court, was bogus; (c) plaintiffs have no evidence that defendant was a "distributor'; and (d) their statutory damages theory is unlikely to pass constitutional muster.
Given all that, we're back where we started. Strong case, high profile, "evil" opponent - the sort of case many lawyers take pro-bono anyway. When her attorney defended the case as he did, he must have known it was going to last for a while, right?
So that still leaves us with "why did he bail?" I'm not likely to accept "money" as that reason unless her attorney was drop-dead stupid, since he knew her financial situation and how expensive the trial was likely to be.
If that's the case, then we're left with an uncomfortable possibility: namely, that his stated reasons for leaving might be legitimate.
To echo another poster, just because the RIAA is generally wrong doesn't mean that all their opponents are specifically right. It's possible, in fact, that Jammie Thomas is guilty. That's a good reason to be more selective, as a community, in choosing our champions.
One company I worked for required that we list all our copyrights, websites and other intellectual content to avoid any conflicts with the company policy that any idea that pops into your head at work or at home belonged to the company. Several people offered to quit outright over the policy, others got clever by listing the URLs of every Slashdot they ever posted, and some threaten to sue. This soon became an unmanageable mess that the company was forced to drop the policy.
Um....I think that policy kind of helps protect you, as long as it's not worded as "we own absolutely everything you list here, even if you can prove prior art later" (which wouldn't be enforceable if they did).
I've signed such a thing - didn't have much to list, but it ain't a bad thing to have important non-company IP listed in black and white prior to being hired.
Your TV would have to be a monitor with no ability to tune in to a signal before you could argue exemption for TV licenses, at least in the UK, and Ireland sounds like it has a similar system.
That's reasonable since 99.99% of TVs are used as...TVs.
So really, this is just the same: if you have an internet connection, you have the ability to tune in.
Except for one massive difference: watching TV is NOT the primary use of broadband. Seems to me there's a 'presumptive use' argument missing that should be applied before taxing something. Especially for freaking TV. Really, we need a tax for *entertainment* that needs to be broadly applied not just to people using it, but to anyone using the internet? That's getting your priorities a bit out of order.
Let's apply your argument to other arenas: if my town enacts a tax on erotica, should Target have to apply the tax if I want to buy candlesticks? See how it's kind of silly to apply a tax blindly because people *might* use it for entertainment? Find a better way to target the tax. Or make it a subscription service with a decoder card, easy and done.
How is this different from, oh, say EVERY OTHER STATE SPONSORED SYSTEM IN EXISTENCE for broadcasting.
It's one thing to say that if someone owns a TV, they're probably watching TV. Here, they're saying if you have a computer and broadband, you're watching TV. Bit more of a reach. Sort of like those jurisdictions that place uniform taxes on CD media with the presumption being you're using them for music piracy and not, say, linux ISOs or something.
a repeat of the whole xfree86/x.org thing ?
That's what I'm seeing. A coup more than a fork.
Thankfully, FOSS allows a group to vote the bully off the island.
How about getting a job with a company that does not compete? How about the similar job for a company in a different line of business?
The more highly educated and specialized you become, the more likely it is that the situation you describe simply doesn't exist.
I can say with a high degree of probability, my skills and experience pretty much lock me into the industry I am now, and given the diverse areas in which my company does work, anyone who would hire me could be considered a competitor.
It's not reasonable to tell someone to find a complete different industry or you can't work.
So how much would that make goatse worth?
Let's just say its customer retention rate is very, very low. I'd pay $10 for it.
Can someone remind me how Twitter makes money. Or, at least how to justify a $700 million valuation?
A few possible ways to derive value:
1) Corporate cockblock - Apple spends a little cash to make sure nobody else turns it into the Next Big Thing in some way that threatens the iPhone.
2) Eyeballs. I'm sure some beancounter will compare this deal to other ones to see how much each pair of eyeballs, or "impression", is worth in terms of valuation.
3) Ad revenue (related to #2). Do some research on how one might attach an ad to twitter messages. Possibly very short ads attached to the end of the messages? Possibly with opt-in text ads (need to make them of actual interest to user).
4) Iphone exclusives. Make Twitter better with some sort of iPhone integration. I'm sure the Apple folks could do something creative there better than I could speculate. In that case, the valuation would be related to the expected bump in iPhone sales, or upselling of plans.
Does any of that amount to $700M? Who knows.
What, so adding more taxes to dying industries is such a hot idea?
Any time government gets involved to sort out winners from losers, the result is bad. Better idea is to tax things evenly, and let the winners and losers sort themselves out.
In this case, the fact that the BBC can't find a valid business model isn't Google's fault, and shouldn't be their problem.
They're not selling the newspaper, they're selling ad space. The paper isn't the product, you're the product.
Readers are customers - it's just that the currency is eyeballs, not dollars.
I do. I don't want it on the plane and it weighs enough to be a nuisance. I pack it in the middle of the suitcase, protected by clothes and, so far, haven't had any trouble. Any data that I'd worry about is encrypted and the laptop is an old, slow, one that I use just for travel. Someday, I suppose it will be stolen or broken. Until then, I'm more than happy not to be lugging it around and putting it in a separate tray for securit
Taking a calculated risk and appropriate precautions is one thing. Checking your unprotected laptop bag is another. If you've ever sat on the side where they load luggage, you can see the sort of treatment your average bag gets. Not to mention, it's not well restrained in flight in the cargo hold, so it's probably bounding around pretty good.
I don't like trucking my laptop through the airport, but I'm not checking the damn thing. Maybe if I had a crappy backup, sure.
Don't worry, we just need to synchronise your linguistic paradigms with the globalized world to leverage the cost-benefit ratio of using industry standard terminology.
Fuck, I understood that! On the first read. Gaaaah, they've taken over my brain!
First thing tomorrow at work, I'm gonna find one of the marketing weasels and punch him in the nuts for making me listen to crap like that.
If Spinal Tap was in charge the pandemic threat level would go to 11.
That's not funny. Their drummer died from the pig flu.
Remind me again why you'd need a physical disk?
So those assholes don't decide they don't want me playing it anymore. So I don't accidentally delete it. So I can loan it to a friend. Same reason I still buy CD's (well, the once a year I find something worth listening to), rip them, and throw them in a storage tub.
Had the VCR been invented in a copyright climate like today's, would it ever have survived the legal attack against it? I'm trying to figure out what's different, other than the fact we now have the DMCA.
The VCR didn't have any copy protection built in, so there would be no "circumvention" to trip the DMCA. Of course, if they were inventing the VCR today they'd include copy protection, so the answer becomes no, no recording technology would survive.
It's unfortunate that no defendant has the balls/money to push this thing up the ladder, because circumventing copy protection is supposedly legal when necessary for interoperability. I'd like to see if a higher court would consider the effect upon fair use as well, since the DMCA basically makes fair use illegal if they use any protection at all.
nsuficiency of the complaint? It seems to me it states clearly what/when.
How about "who?"
We went from having no rocket program of any kind in 1945, to deciding to put a man on the moon in 1960, to actually doing it in 1969. Now, we decide we want to go to go back, and can't make any progress at all.
Our national labs are filled with nothing but bureaucracy and useless political management. There's no sense of urgency, there's no focused direction.
Seriously, we can't do in 20 years today what we did in 10 half a century ago? Come on. This shit's just sad.
It's kind of sad to see that despite all the progressive politics that Obama and Biden pretended to give a shit about during the election that they're following Hollywood's line to the letter
Fixed that. If you really didn't see this coming, then welcome to the realities of politics.
Pills actually can be quite complex and expensive to make. The chemical components are often hard to synthesize or isolate, and can take many different processes to get to the desired product. If that weren't the case, aged brandy would cost as much as water. I mean, they're both liquids, right?
The synthesis of a drug is a pittance compared to the staggering R&D costs. Put another way, the chemical components are often hard to *figure out how* to synthesize, but once that's done, it's rather cheap on a comparative basis to actually *do* the synthesis. For what it's worth, I'm a chemist, so been there, done that.
This is also why patents are so important in the Pharm business, and why generics inevitably are dirt cheap.
If that weren't the case, aged brandy would cost as much as water. I mean, they're both liquids, right?
And yet you can still get 750 mL of brandy for $20. Now, if brandy cost $2B to learn to make and get approved by the FDA, that bottle would cost a whole helluvalot more.
But this approach will NOT work on the desktop. To get Linux to work on the desktop Linux will have to make a 180 degree shift away from its current position, which I don't see happening.
Except it is happening. Try installing a modern Linux distribution, especially a user-friendly one. It will default to runlevel 4 and Gnome, which means you never see a command line unless you go looking for it. Gnome's menu system makes Windows look very complicated by comparison. I'm not a Gnome fan because it's *too* simple for me, but many people (particularly the audience you're targeting) love it.
Linux would have to abandon CLI in favor of all the GUI interfaces like those that Windows has in abundance. GUI interfaces, wizards, everything will have to be "clicky clicky" and the simple fact is most developers and IT guys HATE that. They hate the fact that the GUI robs them of power just as much as the users hate that the CLI is too strange and requires arcane Unix commands which they have NO desire to learn.
False dichotomy. There's no reason why one can't develop a good application that has a command line interface as well as a GUI. And while many Linux folks are CLI gurus, that's becoming an anachronistic stereotype; many Linux users these days prefer the GUI. Not to mention which, many developers have the goal of crushing MSFT (likely or not), so they're attempting to make Linux easier. Additionally, even the most ardent CLI guy has a wife, grandma, sister, cousin, neighbor, etc. who's constantly asking for computer help; if he wants to switch them to linux (and he does), he knows it's going to have to be stupid simple.
Seriously, most people use the internet and create documents. It's not hard to set up Linux with firefox and OpenOffice on Gnome. At that point, the Linux experience ain't much different from Windows.
While it is true that most costs are fixed and therefore the costs are no different if every customers takes an Internet break one day, one has to plan to for peak capacity ... or something like a 95% threshold. No different than other utilities such as electricity, plumbing, etc.
Exactly. This is what's so brain-dead about the argument that bandwidth is free - it's only free once you've built out infrastructure to handle capacity, but something has to pay for that. This is common, as you point out, to any industry in which one-time costs dominate per-unit costs.
I compare it to the pharmaceutical industry - pills cost, say, $0.05 to make. Why do they cost a great deal more on the market? Because you have to price in the cost of research and development.
I think the fairest thing is to do what many cell phone plans do; namely, metered or capped usage during peak hours, and free access off-peak. If a user is savvy enough to schedule iso downloads or watch video off-peak, it shouldn't cost him much since that traffic truly is nearly free.
I love running barefoot. If you keep an eye on where you're going, you won't step on anything you shouldn't. And once you get calluses built up you can take a bit more than 'normal'.
I run on trails, and every step is onto something I don't want my bare feet hitting - wood chips, point rocks, sticks, thorns, etc. Some sort of foot protection is necessary if cross-country is your thing. Track, I can see where you'd like barefoot.
One thing I have been thinking about is taking a pair of my old running shoes and cutting away the heel to make it thinner, to resist the temptation to use it. To me, the ideal running shoe would be wide around the balls of the feet with some structural impact dampening, and some structural support in the mid-sole, with basically nothing in the heel.
I have run barefoot on the beach, and quite liked it.
How does that work for authors who are not US citizens? If they need to send it to the Library of Congress, why can't every other national library demand the same? If you have to take it to the national library of your own country, a full search of all national libraries are needed to determin the orphan-staus of a work. Of course, they could make a collaboration to make the search easier, but if you can't get them all to have the same terms, it is going to be a mess.
Well, we are presumably talking about *registered* copyrighted works, correct? And this is a US law? Easiest thing to me would be to restrict the program to works that are registered in the US. Which covers probably the majority of works in question.
In general, it would be trivially easy to figure out in what country a work was published for well over 99% of works, since it's listed in the work itself. Also, I'm sure that the interwebz would be good at solving such conundrums anyway.
Let's make sure not to toss a good solution in an attempt to get a perfect one.
Replace 'greed' with 'the opportunity to create new value', and your sentance makes sense.
Spammers == greedy. Reading is FUNdamental...