I can't find the statistic, but for young people, the suicide rate I believe is quite a bit higher due to the cram-course/get-a-good-college-or-you're-a-failure culture--but since I can't remember the exact figures or place, take that one with a grain of salt.
What I really don't understand is how they can continue to file these lawsuits when their own rationale for filing them doesn't even hold up anymore.
They used to simply use the catch-22 situation, where if file sharing went up and sales went down after they filed lawsuits they simply said to themselves, "This proves we need to file more lawsuits! What we're doing just isn't enough!" and if file sharing went down (according to now discredited figures, since people were just moving off of Kazaa) and sales went down, they'd say "It works! Now let's keep up the good fight to improve those sales!"
Well, this last period, file sharing has gone up and sales have also gone up. There just isn't any way to justify lawsuits using this information, according to the RIAA's own spurious justifications.
Except to say, that is, that knowing the impending backlash was coming, the RIAA probably steeled themselves against any public pressure--and along with it rationality-- before they began to file lawsuits. Looking at Cary Sherman's statements, for instance, its hard not to notice he never actually addresses the efficacy or goals of the lawsuits. He just parrots "We are within our rights. We can't stand by while thieves are stealing our music. Artists need to be paid," and similar argumentively disconnected soundbites.
Well, news flash, RIAA--copyright is pragmatic. You enforce it to increase sales, not for moral (that is, constitutionally unfounded) rationales. You may have the right but how about a reason? How exactly can you justify enforcing it to a cane-flogging-for-jaywalking extremity, infuriating your customers, while when it is rising your sales are also rising?
Wait, you forgot to mention the PSP's other feature--Sequels! Yes, that's right, while DS players are enjoying XX/XY Feel The Magic and that awesome-looking surgery game, and other games that take advantage of the touch screen, Sony PSP players can play the latest Madden and uh...Ridge Racer. Or, wait, it appears these are also coming out for the DS.
Really, I can't understand why anyone would buy a PSP now that the battery life has been announced. Yes, the system is sexy as hell, but what fun, innovative games are you gonna play on that thing?
"Outside the United States of Puritan Wack-jobs, it's fairly obvious that that sort of thing is totally innocuous. The only interesting thing about the incident was the way that Americans seemed to lose their minds over it."
Just so you know, sharing MP3s may be illegal, but considering it doesn't fall into an easy category like, oh, "theft," it's anything but self-evident that it's immoral. And FWIW, this is from a philosophy/ethics and music graduate.
"I made my mistake at university, gave one of my first cds to a kid across the hall. within a day, it was smeared across the whole campus, and couple of the houses off site."
Not to sound trite, but you do realize that there are people reading that line and wishing they could be in your position. If you do not have a record contract you don't have publicity. If you're on the internet, there's too much noise for you to have publicity. Fine, you didn't authorize it and obviously it annoyed you, but have you really understood--everybody on that campus apparently listened to what you had. From the rest of your message, you seem to think that people are just falling over to listen to amateur unsigned music.
Well, guess what--music has been a buyer's market for a long time, and no matter whether you use traditional means or not, you got an opportunity for free that better musicians than you worked harder to fail at getting. No matter what you say about it not earning you money to buy new instruments, it still got you a lot closer to it than keeping the music locked up tight in your closet. If you were Britney Spears you'd have an argument about some potential sales lost, but you have to practically (or literally, I guess, with a typical record contract) pay people to listen to your music if you're unknown.
Again, I majored in music, I've published works and so on. Even if it was an unfinished demo, you had publicity that most people only dream about. Really, you seem to have known my argument before I said it, in an abstract way, but you don't seem to really get that it's just going to get harder and harder to get anyone to listen after you graduate, and most people in college can't get "the whole college and a few houses off campus" interested enough to listen even if they're popular while in college.
My argument is not that "people are trading MP3s for the good of the artist," but it's not "people are trading MP3s because they're immoral thieves," either. In actuality, people trade MP3s because people want to listen to music. There is nothing moral or immoral about that fact, no matter what your post-ethical legal standpoint is. So cheer up and try to stop being angry at people for the damnable sin of being curious about your music.
" I seem to recall Apple having an anti-trusted computing and drm stance. All it does is complicate things, not something that apple would want, since its a computer for "the rest of us" and such."
That's funny, I seem to remember Steve Jobs telling the MPAA that they absolutely should not release the next generation HD video formats until it can be completely and totally hackerproofed and DRMed. Sorry, I can't find the reference link on Slashdot (get a better search engine, please!!) or news.com.com, but it was reported on both.
Yeah, except a network admin should be able to set privileges to disallow the installation of 3rd party software, and so on. And also, this is a private entity, so the public good part also fails. So your analogy should be more like:
"In a world where a private corporation could create a private bridge and set strict rules of usage for that bridge, would that private corporation be responsible for its own damages if its manager of Bridge Upkeep failed to set the readily available measures to prevent paid employees to swerve around for fun, crash through side guards and park said car next to a fresh-water lobster?"
Sounds more like this guy was just looking for an excuse to submit a story and use the term "pirate2pirate."
"Who cares about controlling the airship? All you're getting there is an illusion of freedom."
I care!
I *did* do some exploring after getting done with the basic quest in FFX, but not nearly as much as I did in FF7 or 8. In FF7, I spent 30 extra hours easily at the Golden Saucer and running around finding all the secrets. In FF8, collecting all the GFs, doing the side card quest, and basically just flying around looking for rare monsters to draw from were all part of the what I think of as the Final Fantasy experience. In FFX, you are herded to your next goal thanks in part to the airship system.
But more so-- in the earlier games, once you got the airship, you had a wonderful sense of freedom to go to that area surrounded by mountains that you couldn't reach by land, or to cruise around the sea looking for islands that just might have caves that just might have super powerful monsters that just might drop amazing items, or wherever it was that you wanted to see "could there be something hidden there?" In both FF7 and FF8, you were often rewarded for your curiousity. In FFX, the map/locale/airship system seemed like a lazy attempt to try to replicate that feeling. There was the 'location discovery' system, but it was as if the designers essentially said, "Exploring the map for secrets is a great idea, but since people want instant gratification, how about we make it better by removing the actual exploring and just let them discover dots on a picture."
It might be a stupid point to argue, but I like fighting monsters and going into the legitimately unknown areas--maybe stumbling upon a Tonberry King, maybe Cactuar, maybe nothing--more than clicking on dots and arriving at some predetermined destination because it was magically marked on my map. In both game systems you're limited by the makers' linear plans, but there's something patronizing in FFX's "no, you're not interested in that island out in the sea--go here instead" system.
"Was he holding back the franchise, or was he being smart by not letting things go hog wild?"
The fact is, Sakaguchi actually was the corporate fall guy for the economic failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. He resigned and like another poster said, started his own company Mistwalker with some other ex-Square employees.
So...After making the groundbreaking FF7 and the universally underrated and innovative FF8, he was only marginally involved in the crowd-pleasing trainwreck that was FF9, and he was completely left out of mediocre-but-playable FFX and X2 (the most mainstream and least innovative of the FF games, in my opinion--I mean, you can't even control the airship?!). People will think I'm being harsh, as many of us got into FF at FFX or somewhere thereabouts, but every FF game he was involved in was innovative and not afraid to reinvent countless RPG conventions. Every FF game since has been at best well-done-derivative.
Of course, now, with nails-on-chalkboard voice overs and super linear gameplay, FFX made more money than ever. There are a lot of factors that helped that--most of all the popularity of the PS2--so it's hard to say people buy it because it's linear and derivative, but when something like 32% of the games sold in August were rehashes of the yearly sports games, people are apparently at least ready and willing to buy derivative. My own opinion is that FFX probably would have done just as well economically, and been a much better game, had Sakaguchi still been at the helm.
It's a shame, but at least Mistwalker will probably come up with something special in the years to come.
Re:It's called IP for a reason
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Is IP Property?
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"Sure, and the creators of physical property (invention) have no debt to past innovations?"
Boy, you really do wanna talk theology. The "creators of physical property." Where do I begin.
My point is that your original post said:
"IP is short for Intellectual Property. I find it interesting that no one cares about the rights of the creator."
You were effectively, by following the sentences one after the other, saying that there was no differentiation between (I can only assume physical) "property" and "intellectual property." You then followed that up with a statement talking about the rights of the "creator."
But now you say that 'creators' of 'physical property' have a debt to past innovation. Well, obviously, because you're talking about patent rights.
So what are you talking about? Physical property, which is exclusive ownership rights to a thing, or 'intellectual property,' which are pragmatic privileges to an idea or expression for a limited time to promote progress (and by these stipulations in the US Constitution NOT a property right in any traditional sense)? If it's the former, you have no coherence between your grandparent and parent posts and I can't really respond. If it's the latter, then what exactly is your differentiation between physical property rights, and 'intellectual property' rights? Either way, you then still contradict your own grandparent post assertion.
Re:It's called IP for a reason
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Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
"I find it interesting that no one cares about the rights of the creator."
Hey, now, let's not get into theology--because I know by "creator" you can't be referring to human innovations, which consistently and invariably owe a debt to past innovations.
From the article: "How the algorithm does that, precisely, is a secret well kept by Genoa. "It's part of their intellectual property," Stone says. What's certain, according to her, is that even though Genoa's technology increases the range of colors, it's not recovering the full original color information of a movie on film, lost in the conversion to other formats, like DVD. "It's kind of arbitrarily making images look better," she says, though people will in fact prefer the resulting colors, which will typically be more saturated and brighter.
And here's what you said: "This isn't a new standard, it's just an after effect applied to existing signals."
While you're right that it can be used in transitional technology, you're wrong that it's "just" an after effect. Nobody would say that Technicolorized B&W reproductions are the same as actual full-color originals. And here, you're going to need a format that preserves color information in the new 5 color system if you're going to exploit the real improvements in this color technology: closer reproductions of actual color.
"Fact is they are claiming control of the information."
So, why exactly is a statement which affirms that each poster 'owns' the comments they make controversial? It sounds like you just don't understand what this is saying.
Nothing that that disclaimer says isn't already true by nearly every instance of international/Berne-convention-automatic copyright law in the first place. Slashdot has copyright protection on content that originates from them and they (Slashdot's operators) put on their pages. The notice at the bottom simply reiterates and affirms that posters forfeit no automatic-copyright rights when they post to Slashdot--just in case it wasn't clear. So basically, everything is as it would be if people were communicating via any other spoken or written medium. Slashdot is not claiming anything other than what is written in copyright law, and in fact is going out of its way to point out that copyright law applies in favor of individual posters and won't be used to try to assert control over posters' comments, in case that wasn't clear.
"But PV-TV's most unusual feature is its ability to act as a full-color internal and external screen. A picture or advertisement projected from inside a structure can be seen within that building, with PV-TV acting as a regular display screen. On the outside of the building, the material can function as a giant billboard."
Am I the only one who is getting really fed up with the ever-increasing advertising going on? This might be a fantastic invention--certainly it sounds very innovative--but if they are planning on selling it as an 'advertising solution' (as though there was some problem with lack of advertising that needed to be solved), it's really more depressing than it is gratifying, in my opinion.
Consumers, by definition, do own limited duplication rights on copyrighted material. If I buy a CD it isn't a mistake that I can make backup copies of it. That copyright law hasn't differentiated between digital and physical doesn't somehow mean those rights, such as fair use rights, the right to first sale, and so on don't exist.
eBay has already shown that they don't really care about preserving consumer's physical rights to resell in the digital world.
I find this more than a little hypocritical, since the entire concept of eBay is about reselling physical goods. In an entirely digital world, eBay's own policies would preclude it from selling anything.
"Beethoven didn't have to worry about people downloading his concerts on Kazaa.
We still have public performance, which is a much better target for your comparison. Instead, let's talk about as close to real, brass-tacks, 'bit-for-bit' copying as we can. You realize, of course, that the entire classical world was one big "Kazaa" of theme, motive, and technique sharing though, right? I mean, Mendelssohn basically copied Beethoven's opus 132 almost exactly, substituting dotted eighth notes here where Beethoven had quarters there, etc. I mean, this was no 'homage,' though of course there's an argument for that there, too. No matter what his motives, this was effectively flat out copying and releasing for profit, which is a step further than just copying to enjoy the music (which, I have to point out, no matter what your stance on copyright infringement is is, outside of the dizzying internal 'logic' of copyright law, a very strange thing to punish as severely as we punish it now).
Of course, Beethoven was also still able to live from the publishing of his works, in a system far less equitable than the one we have today or had a hundred years ago. And as a little bonus, Mendelssohn learned how to write a string quartet and some argue produced more original works later (not one for Mendelssohn myself). If you wanted to use a better example, you could have at least used Mozart or Schubert, anyone who actually had a hard time surviving despite considerable creative genius.
Yet, again, these people did survive. You can of course cry "What if??" in bold and italic type all you like, but it appears this is entirely your problem both here and with your conflation of infringement and that particular brand of 'theft' which is indeed a moral wrong: potential and actual losses are different, and as appalled and outraged as one can rightly be for actual losses, potential losses are simply not in the same moral league, division, ballpark, stadium, or aquarium.
Don't get me wrong, I think copyright law is wonderful. Copyrighty law as our founders imagined it got us where we are, a balance between rewarding the past (the creator's stake) and insuring the future (the public's stake). But copyright law as people like you imagine it, as a moral principle, has a lot of implications-- chief being that its purpose changes from perfect balance benefitting both parties to perfect control by the party with moral high ground. Now we only have to reward the past since copyright is now a protection of a sancrosact act of creation rather than a pragmatic social mediator. Not exactly what I imagine good copyright doing.
In sum, please stop beating copyright with the big fat ham that is this internet-changes-everything, we need moral culpibility argumen. Let the pragmatic balance approach reign as it has since 1792, and we'll all be fine.
"I guess I never realized that part of it was forgotten. It's never even mentioned in these types of discussions......I guess I was just raised a certain way. I actually work for and buy shit when I want it. I had to buy my own car growing up. When I wanted..."
Listen, your perspective is painfully and tragically well-represented, in my opinion. On Slashdot you may be a minority, but you'll be pleased to know that almost every person I've talked to outside of the concentrated, activist internet is at least well acquainted with this spuriously 'common sense,' 'moral' approach to parsing the copyright debate -- usually they don't understand any other perspective.
It makes very repeatable, catchy, and above all simple sense. But listen, bucko--these 'kids these days' are not going around stealing cars and bubble gum just because they don't want to buy it. They understand the morality of stealing, and the wrongness of taking something without paying for it. There is no moral decay going on. How do you explain increased copying then?
Here's an argument that needs to be made, though you've no doubt already heard and marginalized it as 'lawyer speak' or 'splitting hairs' or what not: Copyright infringement is different than 'taking without paying,' or 'stealing' (the word you were conjuring without actually saying). Copyright infringement is instead 'copying without paying.' Is this illegal? In many cases, yes. But it shouldn't surprise you that the specter of copyright infringement deters people less than than stealing does -- the explanation is simply that they're different things, and infringement is only a moral wrong to those who, quite simply, do not understand American copyright law, and choose instead to rely on some fictitious 'old fashioned' 'moral' outlook. The argument sounds great, but really is only a blind for their (somewhat understandable) laziness at truly understanding the mountain of legalese and unprincipled patchwork that is current copyright law.
I've been a broken record on Slashdot lately, but people keep making at least this same misinformed argument. So those who have heard it before, forgive me, but: 'back in the day' the Framers of the Constitution expressly rejected a moral outlook on copyright because it would take us back to pre-Statute of Anne copyright monopolies. Recently however, your 'moral' stance, soundbiteable and infectious meme that it is, has taken hold of the American copyright psyche. And, lo and behold, legislation is making copyright more and more like the centuries-spanning, creativity-impeding pre-Anne copyright. That is bad for obvious reasons.
So please: Copyright has nothing to do with ownership. If you have an argument against copyright infringement, great -- but what you are putting forth right now is spurious at best, and at worst is contributing to the destruction, not the salvation, of copyright.
"P2P "piracy" isn't theft, and you're right. It's worse than that--it's an usurption of another American's constitutionally guaranteed right."
I give up. Downloading a movie is worse than stealing? What are you smoking? Over-the-top rhetoric just hopelessly trivializes an important issue. Where in the Constitution does one find the words "intellectual property"? In fact, where in any Constitution-contemporary literature does one find any Founder advocating this idea, much less using these words?
The Constitution authorizes congress to create a temporary publishing right to encourage progress. That's what it's called the "Progress Clause," and not the "Intellectual Property Clause." If you want to argue for stronger "IP" laws, you have to do it using pragmatic arguments about progress, not some soundbiteably spurious morality based on absurdly unworkable conflations of creative ideas and property. Assuming, of course, that a moral idea of "intellectual property" was your constitutional argument-- though again, I see nothing to suggest any merit in such an interpretation.
In short: Copyright law is complex, it's counterintuitive, it is being exploited by those who it wasn't intended for, it basically sucks three ways from Tuesday for many reasons that you probably agree with me about. But the unchecked, blindly lobby-driven expansion of copyright is as great a threat to our creative culture and the purpose of copyright itself as whatever nightmarish damage you might think P2P could do, and it has nothing to do with black/white concepts like 'stealing' or whatever it is that you call 'worse than stealing.'
Is this or is this not the PIRATE Act? I submitted a story about this from news.com.com that seems to say the PIRATE Act was passed unanimously on Friday. If so, this is more dramatic legislation than the accompanying camcording bill-- it's not even in the same class. This would mean the DoJ might be using taxpayer dollars to pick up the tab for the RIAA's lawsuits in the near future.
Someone want to confirm or deny this? Was the PIRATE Act passed "unanimously"?
I have to say the article is written in a fairly strange style - I can't say something like
Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's compartment.
really ads much to his argument or is likely to MS to dump DRM or anything. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for papers written in a readable manner, but this guy just seems a bit off the mark.
I imagined I was sitting in a room full of smart-but-skeptical Microsoft employees and it sounded just fine to me. These are employees who probably can feel that Buick momentum as software development cycles -- such as for Longhorn with its entirely relevant NGSCB (or whatever it's called now) -- seem to drift from years into decades. The metaphor was as straightforward and legitimate of a criticism as I could imagine.
It's called trustbuilding, and Cory Doctorow seems to be doing it about as well as I'd imagine anyone would in that situation. I think he walks the light-but-incisive line pretty well.
"But of course, copyright doesn't allow this anyways, as I spent the last paragraph stating, because it misunderstands that copyright is a protection of some sort of inherent 'right' in the act of creation rather than a protection of progress through balanced public and private rights."
Should be:
"But of course, copyright doesn't allow this anyways, as I spent the last paragraph stating, because that would misunderstand copyright to be a protection of some sort of inherent 'right' in the act of creation rather than a protection of progress through balanced public and private rights."
"All DRM blocks is the illicit spread of data against the owner's wishes, which is hardly an essential function of any society or system.
I think you have far too much faith in these systems and a fundamental misunderstanding of what copyright is meant to protect. First, already in combination with laws like the DMCA, DRM is used to deny fair use rights--to state the most obvious example, but by far not the most important. Second, you fail to realize that the purpose of copyright is to encourage progress, not protect 'creations.'
This is because American copyright, as envisioned by the Framers, rejects any moral or property protections and relies instead on a way of viewing creative progress as what I would call a 'collaboration' between generations. Each subsequent generation must have free access to the previous generations' works in order to build upon them. It is thus an essential function of any rational society or system to not impede progress by essentially granting a single generation full control to lock out future generations.
But of course, copyright doesn't allow this anyways, as I spent the last paragraph stating, because it misunderstands that copyright is a protection of some sort of inherent 'right' in the act of creation rather than a protection of progress through balanced public and private rights. In actuality, the more dangerous effect of DRM is that copyright itself becomes obsolete in a DRM-capable world. Companies need only decide what allowances they want to give to consumers through technology, and the balancing effect of the law dissappears.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't find the statistic, but for young people, the suicide rate I believe is quite a bit higher due to the cram-course/get-a-good-college-or-you're-a-failure culture--but since I can't remember the exact figures or place, take that one with a grain of salt.
They used to simply use the catch-22 situation, where if file sharing went up and sales went down after they filed lawsuits they simply said to themselves, "This proves we need to file more lawsuits! What we're doing just isn't enough!" and if file sharing went down (according to now discredited figures, since people were just moving off of Kazaa) and sales went down, they'd say "It works! Now let's keep up the good fight to improve those sales!"
Well, this last period, file sharing has gone up and sales have also gone up. There just isn't any way to justify lawsuits using this information, according to the RIAA's own spurious justifications.
Except to say, that is, that knowing the impending backlash was coming, the RIAA probably steeled themselves against any public pressure--and along with it rationality-- before they began to file lawsuits. Looking at Cary Sherman's statements, for instance, its hard not to notice he never actually addresses the efficacy or goals of the lawsuits. He just parrots "We are within our rights. We can't stand by while thieves are stealing our music. Artists need to be paid," and similar argumentively disconnected soundbites.
Well, news flash, RIAA--copyright is pragmatic. You enforce it to increase sales, not for moral (that is, constitutionally unfounded) rationales. You may have the right but how about a reason? How exactly can you justify enforcing it to a cane-flogging-for-jaywalking extremity, infuriating your customers, while when it is rising your sales are also rising?
Really, I can't understand why anyone would buy a PSP now that the battery life has been announced. Yes, the system is sexy as hell, but what fun, innovative games are you gonna play on that thing?
As an American, I couldn't agree more.
Just so you know, sharing MP3s may be illegal, but considering it doesn't fall into an easy category like, oh, "theft," it's anything but self-evident that it's immoral. And FWIW, this is from a philosophy/ethics and music graduate.
"I made my mistake at university, gave one of my first cds to a kid across the hall. within a day, it was smeared across the whole campus, and couple of the houses off site."
Not to sound trite, but you do realize that there are people reading that line and wishing they could be in your position. If you do not have a record contract you don't have publicity. If you're on the internet, there's too much noise for you to have publicity. Fine, you didn't authorize it and obviously it annoyed you, but have you really understood--everybody on that campus apparently listened to what you had. From the rest of your message, you seem to think that people are just falling over to listen to amateur unsigned music.
Well, guess what--music has been a buyer's market for a long time, and no matter whether you use traditional means or not, you got an opportunity for free that better musicians than you worked harder to fail at getting. No matter what you say about it not earning you money to buy new instruments, it still got you a lot closer to it than keeping the music locked up tight in your closet. If you were Britney Spears you'd have an argument about some potential sales lost, but you have to practically (or literally, I guess, with a typical record contract) pay people to listen to your music if you're unknown.
Again, I majored in music, I've published works and so on. Even if it was an unfinished demo, you had publicity that most people only dream about. Really, you seem to have known my argument before I said it, in an abstract way, but you don't seem to really get that it's just going to get harder and harder to get anyone to listen after you graduate, and most people in college can't get "the whole college and a few houses off campus" interested enough to listen even if they're popular while in college.
My argument is not that "people are trading MP3s for the good of the artist," but it's not "people are trading MP3s because they're immoral thieves," either. In actuality, people trade MP3s because people want to listen to music. There is nothing moral or immoral about that fact, no matter what your post-ethical legal standpoint is. So cheer up and try to stop being angry at people for the damnable sin of being curious about your music.
That's funny, I seem to remember Steve Jobs telling the MPAA that they absolutely should not release the next generation HD video formats until it can be completely and totally hackerproofed and DRMed. Sorry, I can't find the reference link on Slashdot (get a better search engine, please!!) or news.com.com, but it was reported on both.
"In a world where a private corporation could create a private bridge and set strict rules of usage for that bridge, would that private corporation be responsible for its own damages if its manager of Bridge Upkeep failed to set the readily available measures to prevent paid employees to swerve around for fun, crash through side guards and park said car next to a fresh-water lobster?"
Sounds more like this guy was just looking for an excuse to submit a story and use the term "pirate2pirate."
I care!
I *did* do some exploring after getting done with the basic quest in FFX, but not nearly as much as I did in FF7 or 8. In FF7, I spent 30 extra hours easily at the Golden Saucer and running around finding all the secrets. In FF8, collecting all the GFs, doing the side card quest, and basically just flying around looking for rare monsters to draw from were all part of the what I think of as the Final Fantasy experience. In FFX, you are herded to your next goal thanks in part to the airship system.
But more so-- in the earlier games, once you got the airship, you had a wonderful sense of freedom to go to that area surrounded by mountains that you couldn't reach by land, or to cruise around the sea looking for islands that just might have caves that just might have super powerful monsters that just might drop amazing items, or wherever it was that you wanted to see "could there be something hidden there?" In both FF7 and FF8, you were often rewarded for your curiousity. In FFX, the map/locale/airship system seemed like a lazy attempt to try to replicate that feeling. There was the 'location discovery' system, but it was as if the designers essentially said, "Exploring the map for secrets is a great idea, but since people want instant gratification, how about we make it better by removing the actual exploring and just let them discover dots on a picture."
It might be a stupid point to argue, but I like fighting monsters and going into the legitimately unknown areas--maybe stumbling upon a Tonberry King, maybe Cactuar, maybe nothing--more than clicking on dots and arriving at some predetermined destination because it was magically marked on my map. In both game systems you're limited by the makers' linear plans, but there's something patronizing in FFX's "no, you're not interested in that island out in the sea--go here instead" system.
We're in agreement about FF6 though.
The fact is, Sakaguchi actually was the corporate fall guy for the economic failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. He resigned and like another poster said, started his own company Mistwalker with some other ex-Square employees.
So...After making the groundbreaking FF7 and the universally underrated and innovative FF8, he was only marginally involved in the crowd-pleasing trainwreck that was FF9, and he was completely left out of mediocre-but-playable FFX and X2 (the most mainstream and least innovative of the FF games, in my opinion--I mean, you can't even control the airship?!). People will think I'm being harsh, as many of us got into FF at FFX or somewhere thereabouts, but every FF game he was involved in was innovative and not afraid to reinvent countless RPG conventions. Every FF game since has been at best well-done-derivative.
Of course, now, with nails-on-chalkboard voice overs and super linear gameplay, FFX made more money than ever. There are a lot of factors that helped that--most of all the popularity of the PS2--so it's hard to say people buy it because it's linear and derivative, but when something like 32% of the games sold in August were rehashes of the yearly sports games, people are apparently at least ready and willing to buy derivative. My own opinion is that FFX probably would have done just as well economically, and been a much better game, had Sakaguchi still been at the helm.
It's a shame, but at least Mistwalker will probably come up with something special in the years to come.
Boy, you really do wanna talk theology. The "creators of physical property." Where do I begin.
My point is that your original post said:
"IP is short for Intellectual Property. I find it interesting that no one cares about the rights of the creator."
You were effectively, by following the sentences one after the other, saying that there was no differentiation between (I can only assume physical) "property" and "intellectual property." You then followed that up with a statement talking about the rights of the "creator."
But now you say that 'creators' of 'physical property' have a debt to past innovation. Well, obviously, because you're talking about patent rights.
So what are you talking about? Physical property, which is exclusive ownership rights to a thing, or 'intellectual property,' which are pragmatic privileges to an idea or expression for a limited time to promote progress (and by these stipulations in the US Constitution NOT a property right in any traditional sense)? If it's the former, you have no coherence between your grandparent and parent posts and I can't really respond. If it's the latter, then what exactly is your differentiation between physical property rights, and 'intellectual property' rights? Either way, you then still contradict your own grandparent post assertion.
Hey, now, let's not get into theology--because I know by "creator" you can't be referring to human innovations, which consistently and invariably owe a debt to past innovations.
And here's what you said: "This isn't a new standard, it's just an after effect applied to existing signals."
While you're right that it can be used in transitional technology, you're wrong that it's "just" an after effect. Nobody would say that Technicolorized B&W reproductions are the same as actual full-color originals. And here, you're going to need a format that preserves color information in the new 5 color system if you're going to exploit the real improvements in this color technology: closer reproductions of actual color.
"Fact is they are claiming control of the information."
So, why exactly is a statement which affirms that each poster 'owns' the comments they make controversial? It sounds like you just don't understand what this is saying.
Nothing that that disclaimer says isn't already true by nearly every instance of international/Berne-convention-automatic copyright law in the first place. Slashdot has copyright protection on content that originates from them and they (Slashdot's operators) put on their pages. The notice at the bottom simply reiterates and affirms that posters forfeit no automatic-copyright rights when they post to Slashdot--just in case it wasn't clear. So basically, everything is as it would be if people were communicating via any other spoken or written medium. Slashdot is not claiming anything other than what is written in copyright law, and in fact is going out of its way to point out that copyright law applies in favor of individual posters and won't be used to try to assert control over posters' comments, in case that wasn't clear.
What's your problem with this again?
Am I the only one who is getting really fed up with the ever-increasing advertising going on? This might be a fantastic invention--certainly it sounds very innovative--but if they are planning on selling it as an 'advertising solution' (as though there was some problem with lack of advertising that needed to be solved), it's really more depressing than it is gratifying, in my opinion.
Yeah, I'm reading a book about one of them now.
Consumers, by definition, do own limited duplication rights on copyrighted material. If I buy a CD it isn't a mistake that I can make backup copies of it. That copyright law hasn't differentiated between digital and physical doesn't somehow mean those rights, such as fair use rights, the right to first sale, and so on don't exist.
I find this more than a little hypocritical, since the entire concept of eBay is about reselling physical goods. In an entirely digital world, eBay's own policies would preclude it from selling anything.
We still have public performance, which is a much better target for your comparison. Instead, let's talk about as close to real, brass-tacks, 'bit-for-bit' copying as we can. You realize, of course, that the entire classical world was one big "Kazaa" of theme, motive, and technique sharing though, right? I mean, Mendelssohn basically copied Beethoven's opus 132 almost exactly, substituting dotted eighth notes here where Beethoven had quarters there, etc. I mean, this was no 'homage,' though of course there's an argument for that there, too. No matter what his motives, this was effectively flat out copying and releasing for profit, which is a step further than just copying to enjoy the music (which, I have to point out, no matter what your stance on copyright infringement is is, outside of the dizzying internal 'logic' of copyright law, a very strange thing to punish as severely as we punish it now).
Of course, Beethoven was also still able to live from the publishing of his works, in a system far less equitable than the one we have today or had a hundred years ago. And as a little bonus, Mendelssohn learned how to write a string quartet and some argue produced more original works later (not one for Mendelssohn myself). If you wanted to use a better example, you could have at least used Mozart or Schubert, anyone who actually had a hard time surviving despite considerable creative genius.
Yet, again, these people did survive. You can of course cry "What if??" in bold and italic type all you like, but it appears this is entirely your problem both here and with your conflation of infringement and that particular brand of 'theft' which is indeed a moral wrong: potential and actual losses are different, and as appalled and outraged as one can rightly be for actual losses, potential losses are simply not in the same moral league, division, ballpark, stadium, or aquarium.
Don't get me wrong, I think copyright law is wonderful. Copyrighty law as our founders imagined it got us where we are, a balance between rewarding the past (the creator's stake) and insuring the future (the public's stake). But copyright law as people like you imagine it, as a moral principle, has a lot of implications-- chief being that its purpose changes from perfect balance benefitting both parties to perfect control by the party with moral high ground. Now we only have to reward the past since copyright is now a protection of a sancrosact act of creation rather than a pragmatic social mediator. Not exactly what I imagine good copyright doing.
In sum, please stop beating copyright with the big fat ham that is this internet-changes-everything, we need moral culpibility argumen. Let the pragmatic balance approach reign as it has since 1792, and we'll all be fine.
Listen, your perspective is painfully and tragically well-represented, in my opinion. On Slashdot you may be a minority, but you'll be pleased to know that almost every person I've talked to outside of the concentrated, activist internet is at least well acquainted with this spuriously 'common sense,' 'moral' approach to parsing the copyright debate -- usually they don't understand any other perspective.
It makes very repeatable, catchy, and above all simple sense. But listen, bucko--these 'kids these days' are not going around stealing cars and bubble gum just because they don't want to buy it. They understand the morality of stealing, and the wrongness of taking something without paying for it. There is no moral decay going on. How do you explain increased copying then?
Here's an argument that needs to be made, though you've no doubt already heard and marginalized it as 'lawyer speak' or 'splitting hairs' or what not: Copyright infringement is different than 'taking without paying,' or 'stealing' (the word you were conjuring without actually saying). Copyright infringement is instead 'copying without paying.' Is this illegal? In many cases, yes. But it shouldn't surprise you that the specter of copyright infringement deters people less than than stealing does -- the explanation is simply that they're different things, and infringement is only a moral wrong to those who, quite simply, do not understand American copyright law, and choose instead to rely on some fictitious 'old fashioned' 'moral' outlook. The argument sounds great, but really is only a blind for their (somewhat understandable) laziness at truly understanding the mountain of legalese and unprincipled patchwork that is current copyright law.
I've been a broken record on Slashdot lately, but people keep making at least this same misinformed argument. So those who have heard it before, forgive me, but: 'back in the day' the Framers of the Constitution expressly rejected a moral outlook on copyright because it would take us back to pre-Statute of Anne copyright monopolies. Recently however, your 'moral' stance, soundbiteable and infectious meme that it is, has taken hold of the American copyright psyche. And, lo and behold, legislation is making copyright more and more like the centuries-spanning, creativity-impeding pre-Anne copyright. That is bad for obvious reasons.
So please: Copyright has nothing to do with ownership. If you have an argument against copyright infringement, great -- but what you are putting forth right now is spurious at best, and at worst is contributing to the destruction, not the salvation, of copyright.
I give up. Downloading a movie is worse than stealing? What are you smoking? Over-the-top rhetoric just hopelessly trivializes an important issue. Where in the Constitution does one find the words "intellectual property"? In fact, where in any Constitution-contemporary literature does one find any Founder advocating this idea, much less using these words?
The Constitution authorizes congress to create a temporary publishing right to encourage progress. That's what it's called the "Progress Clause," and not the "Intellectual Property Clause." If you want to argue for stronger "IP" laws, you have to do it using pragmatic arguments about progress, not some soundbiteably spurious morality based on absurdly unworkable conflations of creative ideas and property. Assuming, of course, that a moral idea of "intellectual property" was your constitutional argument-- though again, I see nothing to suggest any merit in such an interpretation.
In short: Copyright law is complex, it's counterintuitive, it is being exploited by those who it wasn't intended for, it basically sucks three ways from Tuesday for many reasons that you probably agree with me about. But the unchecked, blindly lobby-driven expansion of copyright is as great a threat to our creative culture and the purpose of copyright itself as whatever nightmarish damage you might think P2P could do, and it has nothing to do with black/white concepts like 'stealing' or whatever it is that you call 'worse than stealing.'
"Both devices use Sony's ATRAC3 music format and also play back MP3, WAV and WMA audio formats."
Sloppy reporting on news.com.com, or an error for the Register?
Someone want to confirm or deny this? Was the PIRATE Act passed "unanimously"?
Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's compartment.
really ads much to his argument or is likely to MS to dump DRM or anything. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for papers written in a readable manner, but this guy just seems a bit off the mark.
I imagined I was sitting in a room full of smart-but-skeptical Microsoft employees and it sounded just fine to me. These are employees who probably can feel that Buick momentum as software development cycles -- such as for Longhorn with its entirely relevant NGSCB (or whatever it's called now) -- seem to drift from years into decades. The metaphor was as straightforward and legitimate of a criticism as I could imagine.
It's called trustbuilding, and Cory Doctorow seems to be doing it about as well as I'd imagine anyone would in that situation. I think he walks the light-but-incisive line pretty well.
Should be:
"But of course, copyright doesn't allow this anyways, as I spent the last paragraph stating, because that would misunderstand copyright to be a protection of some sort of inherent 'right' in the act of creation rather than a protection of progress through balanced public and private rights."
Sorry!
I think you have far too much faith in these systems and a fundamental misunderstanding of what copyright is meant to protect. First, already in combination with laws like the DMCA, DRM is used to deny fair use rights--to state the most obvious example, but by far not the most important. Second, you fail to realize that the purpose of copyright is to encourage progress, not protect 'creations.'
This is because American copyright, as envisioned by the Framers, rejects any moral or property protections and relies instead on a way of viewing creative progress as what I would call a 'collaboration' between generations. Each subsequent generation must have free access to the previous generations' works in order to build upon them. It is thus an essential function of any rational society or system to not impede progress by essentially granting a single generation full control to lock out future generations.
But of course, copyright doesn't allow this anyways, as I spent the last paragraph stating, because it misunderstands that copyright is a protection of some sort of inherent 'right' in the act of creation rather than a protection of progress through balanced public and private rights. In actuality, the more dangerous effect of DRM is that copyright itself becomes obsolete in a DRM-capable world. Companies need only decide what allowances they want to give to consumers through technology, and the balancing effect of the law dissappears.