I dont think anyone is going to excuse this just because MS was lucky that the chamber wasn't actually loaded. The trigger went off, and thats all the ammo I need to demand someone revoke the gun license.
As for outsourcing, this is absolutely ludicrous that companies neednt take accountability for the actions of their contractors. Thats how all the clothing manufacturers dodged the anti-sweatshop movement. Now Nike/Espirit/Adidas/Gap/Etc doesn't employ the sweatshop workers, they contract them! Brilliant, and insedious. While it may not be fair to compare that to the IT world, it shows the extreme consequences of allowing companies to divest accountability for services and products offered under their brand. If we dont hold MS accountable in the least, wheres the motivation for them to be more careful with their contractor selection skills? They will continue to select contracts based on politics and economics rather than on the quality of the service/product being outsourced.
I realize that its not *entirely* their fault, but it doesn't help with the kind of facade MS puts on. Just like Oracle's "unbreakable" claim, if you want to make claims that simply are not true or that you cant deliver on (I dont care if its your fault or not, you made the claim), you're never *ever* going to get the benifit of the doubt in this kind of situation. If you wanna make claims you cant back up, you dont deserve the benifit of the doubt.:)
Back in my world, we have a little thing called 'judgement'. Yes, humans, thank god, still use it from time to time. I use this judgement to decide who it will hurt. I suspect people *like* me have been doing this for decades. I also suspect that we're still okay here. You and I (and the musicians) live better than 98% of the people on this planet.
> If more people thought like you, we all would be screwed.
Which is to say that you have never, ever cheated anything, or bent the rules any time. You've never done anything that if everybody else did, would be detremental to what ever system you were participating in? Ever? What you fail to understand is that its flat out impossible that everybody thinks like me. Simply by virtue of me thinking like me, somebody will think like you. People are different. According to your logic, humans are capable of complete Borg-like behevious, all of a sudden ditching thousands of years of diversity in thought and action, and all become music thiefs. You simply cannot comprehend that it would be a knee-jerk to implement massive legislation and banning filesharing tools... analogous to putting fences up beside roads, because, dont you know, tommorow EVERYBODY will become a jay-walker and then urban transportation routes would become useless. The reason they dont build those fences is that we can be sure that everybody *wont* do this.. since we are a social animal, we will display diversity in thought and action. I steal some music, but pay for movies. My neighbour steals some movies, but pays for music. My other neighbour sneaks into theare, but pays for music and movies.Attempting to categorize 'cheats' as one section of the population is useless, because we all pick and chose our spots in which to cheat, but overall we are incapable of decimating any given social or economic system by all of a sudden moving, as a species, one step to the left.
So putting in draconian technological barriers is expensive and fruitless, because for any given application, you're only going to catch a small percent of the population at the expense of everybody else who is using the technology in a way that does not damage the system (such as those who download *then* buy the CD, or those who download songs they already bought years ago, etc).
Please, for the love of god, argue that. Your IP argument is typical fearmongering that simply doesn't hold up against historical and psycological analysis, no matter how nicely it plugs into your Excel spreadsheet. Human behaviour is a moving target, so you can never change one thing (okay, lets see how this system is if *everybody* cheats) without seeing that change ripple through macroscopic social behaviour. Excel won't point out that when you move 80% of the non-cheaters to the cheaters category, X% of the cheaters become non-cheaters! We are self regulating in our behaviour, no 1984 needed!
Imagine it. No music. Nobody makes any music, cause its not profitable to make it. Humans retire music from their list of things they do because you will starve if you try being a musician. Hehe, you honestly think that could happen, do you? If no company existed to 'make' music, people in my town would make it, and people would pay to see it. Filesharing killing music cannot happen, because it would involve humans absolutely abolishing something they cant live without! Its as simple as that!
> Sorry for implying such a laughable idea, but I wanted to make the point that with reduced revenues caused by illegal file sharing, record companies will be forced to not sign and/or screw over more artists
How can you possibly qualify this statement? Please find out about these reduced revenues.. 5% down last year, easily attributable to the recession. I think the problem is that people expect these media giants to just grow and grow and grow, and any time they dont grow, its simply just the cheaters. There are cheaters in every system dude. Everyone does something thats not exactly along the lines of the letter of the law. But you know what. The Eagles lived good. Very good. Much better than I will ever live, and I highly doubt they need my help, unless they pissed their money away, which is entirely their fault. So, even tho its covered by a copyright, I'm going to download it for free. Tough shit. I refuse to prop entire people's superstar lives up so I have hear a measly song a few times in my life. Same goes for most artists who've already lived lives for some reason we wish we could have. Well, we could stop propping them up so high, for starters. Think of it as equalization. IP is not a bike, it is not physical. It is an idea, and the author is never going to run out of copies like a factory would were all its inventory stolen.
Plus, I think most struggling musicians (such as myself, and friends of mine, and people I know) want these media giants taken down a notch or two.
And the mid-tier musicians who aint living the superstar life? Well, I buy their CD, of course, because I like to pay those who need it, not those that have it. You simply believe that suddenly, everyone will stop buying all CDs, or suddenly some artist's fanbase is going to entirely switch to downloading songs from filesharing apps. Have you ever seen any kind of social flock all of a sudden do the _exact_ same thing? There will always be people like me who ensure the system is balanced, that this monopoly gets no more powerful. If you only follow the creed of the successful, you will never enact change.. something which people tend to associate with progress. And if people dont like it? Fuck em, I'm a musician. Lots of musians have expressed support for filesharing. But enough, I'm a criminal, lock me up!
I'm sorry to do this, but let me destruct your two points:
1) Sure, it might happen. Maybe, in a galaxy far away. Again, you can look, time and time again at new technologies destroying old ways of doing things. But for the sake of argument, lets say it happens. Sony, EMI, etc go bankrupt. Who cares? My indie label in my neighbourhood now has the advertising inventory and space (cause now the voices of Sony, EMI, etc are silent) to promote local talent and market it locally. I sure wouldn't disagree that the era of the superstar might end (until those grassroots labels become tommorows Sonys, EMIs). The industry right now is terribly expensive to maintain, but this isn't because you have to feed the artists! It's because marketing budgets have exploded. Production values are huge, but this is only a function of the giants running the show. Even if they go bankrupt, suddenly its alot more economical to represent, promote artists again, and there is alot more market to go around to smaller but definately 'livable' salaries. Think of how disproportionately well the mega stars get paid. There is alot of market that could be shared far more effectively, and youd get a more diverse selection of music to boot. But the idea of file sharing destroying the ability to make a living off being a musician is simply laughable. Whats truely unforutnate is that musicians will have a tough time reshaping the minds of the mass consumer to focus again on the music instead of the light shows. Finally, most of the money musicians make are from performances, etc. The money made from CD royalties does not constitute a big part of a musicians' paycheque (although it is a big part of the hollywood shadow writers' paycheques who pen the hits for the stars, but I've never been a fan of that setup anyhow.)
2. Copyrights were put in place because governments were giving the Sony's and EMIs of the 1700s (the publishing houses) monopolies on cultural works. Copyrights were put in place to spurn distribution of cultural works and ensure that culture went back into the public domain. A copyright was designed to permit the author some return for their work, but make absolutely no mistake that they were put in place to _break_ the monopoly content creators had on that content, not the reverse as it is usually thought. The joke is that humans, by nature, wish to pay back, so artists, creators, etc, rarely needs laws to ensure they get paid if they make good shit.:) Think about it. The 'protection' is simply a story always cheerleaded by the current market champions to continuously increase the 'expriration date' on artistic works and thus propogate monopolies well past the death of the original creator. (Would you say we should be protecting the 2nd generation family of the artist because of, say, Mickey Mouse? Do they all deserve to live wikedly because an ansestor only had to have one good marketable artistic work?) Check out some of the history of copyright to get the full story.
Can't I reverse engineer the key and send hacked keys? How sparse is the 'key space'? Is there plenty of space in there to just send off a random selection of a key in the known legit key space?
I'm not baiting here, I actually am curious about how one would go about building a secure piracy protection scheme without resorting to owning the gates to online play (which is my main gripe due to content and communication control over what players see when they use the product?)
This technology is compatible with your current card, is it not? My impression is that cG simply makes it easier to generate the same OpenGL and DirectX code games are feeding your GF4 with now. Its to ease the work for the programmer and allow folks to concetrate more on the design of the shaders then their in-code implementation.
> like NVidia will allow other cards to support Cg so maybe they can
Um, well, Cg gets compiled to DirectX or OpenGL, so it follows that any card that can do DirectX or OpenGL (read: all of them?) will benifit Cg. I guess different cards to different levels of support, but if they want this to fly, itd be in their best interest to generate multi-card compatible code. Or at least allow you to specify what extentions your generated code will support, to tailer to specific card feature sets? Correct me if I'm confused, if anyone is really in the know.
I think the idea here is that you could use this language to write new shaders for cards on the market _now_... the gain is that it supports two targets (DX and OpenGL) and seems a significantly easier way of incorperating new shaders into games than current methods?
> Time for you to put your hand in your pocket and pay for software.
You mean, like I did for the last 5 games I've been playing?
> Because they didn't feel like it.
Buwhahaha! Yep, thats why everything that AC's can't explain happens. Because they felt like it. Gosh, that surely addresses the problems and concerns I have with Blizzard.
If you were smart, you'd have pointed out, like the guy did below, that they may just feel soured for putting so much time/money into BattleNet, only to see other folks do it properly. Not only does that make sense, it also makes a pretty good tip of the hat to bnetd's viability as an alternative to BrokenNet.
> Maybe bnetd was invented so people with pirated copies of the game could play it
Or maybe not. Maybe it was invented casue BattleNet sucks ass. Maybe it was invented because we live in whats called 'a market' where people are encouraged to supply a demand. Sure, it doesn't check keys. Is ID software going out of business? Nope. Hell, gamespy.com owes their entire business to ID (and arguably to the pirated game market.) and nobody's firing off intimidating letters to them.
So can you explain to me why Blizzard wouldn't just do a key check in the game client against a blizzard-owned key database, independant of server-finding mechanism? Can you tell me why they insist that it takes a full blown player-community environment to do a simple key check? Sounds to me like, if anything, Blizzard made a crucial architectural mistake, and now they're being forced to toss out all babies with their bathwater. Thats their own deserts, and I dont have a modicum of sympathy for them. They arnt in any danger of living on the streets, and to use the argument always used against those who have to endure tough situations, if they like what they do, why grub for every last penny?
Some wise observations, but I have a small issue with:
> If DRM with micro-payments is succesfully introduced (read legislated) it wont mean that I pay less for music
If the thrust of Liebowitz' contention in this article is correct, then we can say that filesharing doesn't significanly damage the market enough to warrent legislation. This is exactly, EXACTLY what happened with the VCRs; the courts said that the VCR didn't do enough damage to the companies' ability to turn a profit to warrent legislation (it also helps that there are legal uses for VCRs as there is for filesharing.)
So, given optional DRM, if it lets the big guns at least do some accounting and implement micro payments, more power to them. Yeah, probably they'll try and use it as an opportunity to push their margins up higher, but as so long as I can still use my computer to download and buy the second tier indie artists, I'm going to leave that battle up to the folks who like the big label artists.
I dont think there is anything wrong with DRM (indeed, web sites supported by advertising have tracking/counting software much in the same vain, and its really whats keeping alot of sites out there up online.).. just legislated DRM. If Leibowitz' hunch is correct and stands up while the SSSCA is being lobbied, thats a huge, HUGE chink in the pro-SSSCA debate's armour.
But, I've had it since birth... audio tapes, MIDI, mp3s.. there will always be free music (and free movies, and free this and that.), dont kid yourself. You'll just need a little program (like the tape on audiocasettes, natch!) to copy your music. Anyhow, I think you implying 'wont have ALL your music free anymore!', where the point of the article is that a little free music never hurt nobody to any degree that it dissuaded them from running a company, turning a profit, etc, nor purchasing CDs for themselves.
The joke is, if youre Darwinian, you'd recognize that all this technology COULDNT kill the music industry. Why? If we all stopped buying CDs, and EVERYONE copied, the record companies would crumble, musicians would stop publishing music, and there'd be nothing left to download. Social patterns always ensure there's a balance (like, if everyone littered, we couldnt move, if everyone was a conservative, we wouldnt have important liberal influence, if everyone was a liberal, we wouldnt have important conservative influence)... since it would be self-defeating for everybody to cheat out the industry, it wont happen. Furthur more, as more people join one side of the equation, the people on the other side tend to mobilize or compesate for the shift in numbers in some manner. For instance, as file sharing became more common, I contend that some people purchased more of their music than they would have before, fearing that if they didnt support music, there'd be nothing left to fileshare.
And if one insists that we do put the record companies out of business - really - so what? The whole cycle of small labels getting grassroots support (where people are much less likely to rip off local artists than megapopstars) starts again, and we're out a few hundred thousand guys in suits. boohoo. Music is 5% of the USA's GDP to be sure, but to think all that would come off the GDP instantly assumes that absolutely nobody comes in to take the place of the fallen dinosaurs, and that this collapse happens overnight. Highly unlikely.
Of course file sharing hurts sales. Just like double tape decks hurt sales. Just like not having a law preventing people from owning two VCRs hurts video sales. Just like photocopiers hurt the sales of sheet music.
Technology changes things. In some ways better, in some ways worse. It changes peoples behaviour, and it changes the machanics of society.
The question everybody should have been asking all along is, "Does it hurt sales so badly that nobody will want to make music?" The answer seems to be an overwhelming NO, so if thats the case, history suggests that we are should tolerate it until it finds its natural 'fit' within social behaviour and the economy. Just because it facilitates illegal behaviour does not mean that this illegal behaviour is going to have a negative impact on the market - and if you think about it, many discoveries, social patterns and values we hold up as examples of our progressive society started up as being illegal behaviour until we came to terms with its perceived threat and realized that many things we perceive as threatening or damaging can be channeled in a positive socioeconomic direction.
What you abandon may, or may not be judged to have a detrimental effect to the society/environment (not the hippy kind, I mean the surroundings, context).. but there is absolutely nothing preventing you from abandoning that car in a location where you have the approval of the land owner (or the community that maintains that land if that land is public domain). Heck, what you wish to leave behind is most often userful or valuable to somebody else.
Its simple ethics, morals, etc. The only reason public domain scares some people is because of the concept that nobody can claim that thing as private property. That conflicts with alot of classical capitalist economists theories on what you need in order to make capitalism work; the ability to claim ownership to something according to 'first come, first serve'.. which was how public land in fuedal times started suddenly becoming 'owned' overnight by the fuedal lords thanks to Adam Smith et al. It was the denial that public domain existed that allowed the ruling class to furthur cemenent their ownership of the last bit of publicly maintained/owned property within their land.. and started the creation of a lower class who while once could at least farm for their food on the public land were now subject to paying taxes for something they had for free to maintained themselves at one time. Read up on the Hedge Wars and Food Riots for furthur reading.
This absolutely is true. Copyright law was enacted to force works back INTO the public domain, because authorities in the 1600's were catching the whiff of power that pro free-market, pro-capitalism economists around the 1500s/1600s 'he who stakes claim first owns' ideology. (Such as public land could become your land if you claimed it, because by claiming it, you could make the weak argument that you were adding value to the land in administering and maintaining it.)
Authorities were doing all they could to grant monopolies in publishing to the successful printers of the time, inpart thanks to The Licensing Act in 1662. So, in 1710, copyright law finally forced a limited ownership term on creative works. It's worth noting that times of british history subject to the least amount of market regulation (and copyright law is a form of market regulation, because it prevents monopolies on creative works, polluting the idea of 'right to private property' required to make the free-market work and prevent looting and group action with respect to private property) saw the rise of the most wealth disparities and social turbulance. It should be obvious that those in power held a significant advantage in the race claim ownership to most new developments and unclaimed land at the time, so naturally, authorship became one such commodity that the ruling class sought to own. If power corrupts abolutely, then we can always assume that the ruling body will always attempt to legislate in favour of the most ecomically abled and power supporters in the market - so it should be obvious that you need laws that counter-act that force and keep participants in a 'free market' from gainining an insurmountable lead in the race to economy of scale and a monopoly on visibility within the market place. One might suggest that we just make a law that disallows ALL forms of legislation such as the Licensing Act. Unfortunaetly, since laws that you could jusitfy as not being related to market relgation _can_ affect the balance of power within a market, you'll always need laws to maintain the balance and keep people believing and participating in that market.
For a brief rundown, here: http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html
> who downloads and burns casually (read: songs here and there
full disclosure: I made a few (maybe arond 40 or so over the course of a few years) audiocassettes in the late 80s by copying songs from friends' CDs, or the radio. I made mixtapes for friends. I was just as much of a criminal (if you call that criminal behaviour) before filesharing was even coined as a phrase. I suspect that many of the 'filesharing = theivery' accusers did the same. For some reason (might be because the media companies that are chomping at the 'profit is a right' bit also own/provide/edit 99% of the news and opinion pieces on this matter), there's been a mindset shift on whether any level of piracy can be tolerable.
Hopefully this will stop the folks who collect bytes for the sake of collecting ithem (dude, I got the Muppets Movie on Kazaa last night! are you actually going to watch it? No, but its the Muppets Movie!), thus weakning MPAA/RIAA's position on the wonton mass theifdom going on online. If the 'cause I wanna be the man' pirates are exercised from the net, I hope that file sharing will become a tolerable evil. Plus, it leaves all the rest of the 'criminals' as us (or me), who downloads and burns casually (read: songs here and there, stuff thats hard to get, stuff that I need to hear immediately when I think about it, never entire albums, no movies), but still buys music.
AS a bonus, I'll never have to ask why the fuck anybody would be excited about having just downloaded a mediocre movie, DivX'd and all but unwatchable on that 15 inch monitor in their bedroom.
How about mainly because you can get it from home, you can burn it across all your mediums (CD/MP3player/computer), you can easily share it with a friend (keeping in mind that it is not uncommon for people's friends to live in entirely seperate geographies much more so today than 20 years ago, so there is a significant advantage over snail mailing a CD to lend to a friend. Oh wait, I'll bet lending a CD is illegal too now.)
There are a plethora of reasons why Napster beats your local music store. Price is certainly one factor, but technology adoption does not soley rely on price.
I still can't figure out why Sony cand mp3-ize their collection, stick it online with some php scripts to count your purchases, and be done with it. That'd kill the Naspter-closes pretty quickly, given the numerous problems file sharing networks have (reliability, data authenticity, etc.)
Sony would say people would just share what they downloaded, but then they'd miss my point above. Price doth not adoption make. There are many many reasons why technology is successfully adopted (or not adopted), and if I were a giant like Sony, I'd have the money to cover way more of those reasons than any file sharing network could. The problem is, it seems like these companies are frozen in the headlights of change, and the RIAA hasn't clued into any solution other than bullying, which surely wont help their case in the long run.
Oh doh, well the desire to grow in wealth is not the most fundamental human desire (though its in there, sure). We wish to do what we want to do, with minimal interference from others, so essentially to co-exist peacibly. I know I sound like a hippy, but what the hell, because last I checked most of us value living over dying than wanting to get that mad cash 'n shit. It may be what drives parts of this society, but since it isn't the fundamental desire. Adam Smiths invisible hand did pop out of nowhere. That's what the academic community does. It discovers new ideas and ways of thinking which alters human behaviour. Thats what technology is. Discovery. New ideas, new physical manifestations of those ideas.. and while it changes those who are exposed to it, that doesn't neccessarily mean that his idea is THE idea. Humans just follow ideas as they come, and yes, sometimes they go away again.
There are plenty of successful self sufficient communites on the planet which did not need to encourage material greed. Sure, some people had a little more than others, some a little less. Course, sure, they are far smaller societies than the western one. I suppose next youll tell me to move to one.;) It's not like I'm against material gain, but unmitigated gain, a la free market no limits approach, bad. Everything in moderation.:(
I'm no luddite, but I'm just sayin we impose social limits on lots of things, so is it really safe to stroke the desire to gain money the most? It seems to generate unhappiness much greater than the happiness from my curtural analysis.
Re:Only Windows Boxes should be called Mines ..
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sounds like a good idea, but how would I remove it from your ass in the first place?
oh man, I'm turning into the/. luser I swore I never would be, the irony, the tragedy
Only Windows Boxes should be called Mines ..
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.. because the slightest level of interaction tends to cause them to blow up!
sorry, you have to admit, it was a pretty obligatory offtopic/troll/bait post. and its getting boring always having 50 karma.:(
I think that argument stopped holding water once companies became fundamentally more powerful and influential than governments, maybe around the early 80s when the like of foreign investor settlement laws began sneaking into trade agreements and such. The rules may be signed by the government, but it is companies, and companies alone, that have the might and influence to purchase laws. DMCA is a perfect example. Take away the money from the companies that lobbied for it, and the government would have never passed it.
Frankly, when I talk about the government, I'm talking about what it SHOULD be, not what it IS. The fact that people are disillusioned with governments having no choice but to be bought out (after all, since companies own most if not all of the media pipelines, where do you think people get their impressions and ideas of whos at fault in all of this?)
The problem _is_ the system, but I personally feel its more in people's disillusionment with democracy, and their fear of limiting the power and scope of enterprise to turn democracy into a reality, rather than the smokescreen in front of the plutocracy we have now.
I personally feel that the problem is were are simply too dependant on the corperate economic machine to maintain the western world's dominance (though we'd be fools to dismantle this power structure without first diffusing the anti-western sentiment common around the world), so while, I think, many people understand and are willing to accept that the government has become the puppet of *large* corperations, they fear what will happen if we begin to try and diffuse or distribute some of that power again. We might lose our precious SUVs, video games, and lattees (or whatever your thing is.).. or worse yet, get flogged, economically if not militarily, by the next super-power in waiting.
> theft does not even out a "material wealth disparity!"
No, but without the government to back property rights, theft would rise as wealth disparity rose. I never suggested it would equalize due to that kind of behaviour - simply that people are more prone to commit theft (or simply property damage for that matter) the worse off they become to their neighbour. I'm not saying its right or wrong - its just human nature and psycology that suggests that wealth disparity will cause people to feel their system is unfair and force them to action (as wrong, unethical, illegal, useless, mob-like that action might be.)
Heck, it even makes mathematical sense - whats the use of stealing (aside from those who commit theft for the psycological thrill rather than the social/material ends) from someone who doesn't have anything more than you do?
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I dont think anyone is going to excuse this just because MS was lucky that the chamber wasn't actually loaded. The trigger went off, and thats all the ammo I need to demand someone revoke the gun license.
:)
As for outsourcing, this is absolutely ludicrous that companies neednt take accountability for the actions of their contractors. Thats how all the clothing manufacturers dodged the anti-sweatshop movement. Now Nike/Espirit/Adidas/Gap/Etc doesn't employ the sweatshop workers, they contract them! Brilliant, and insedious. While it may not be fair to compare that to the IT world, it shows the extreme consequences of allowing companies to divest accountability for services and products offered under their brand. If we dont hold MS accountable in the least, wheres the motivation for them to be more careful with their contractor selection skills? They will continue to select contracts based on politics and economics rather than on the quality of the service/product being outsourced.
I realize that its not *entirely* their fault, but it doesn't help with the kind of facade MS puts on. Just like Oracle's "unbreakable" claim, if you want to make claims that simply are not true or that you cant deliver on (I dont care if its your fault or not, you made the claim), you're never *ever* going to get the benifit of the doubt in this kind of situation. If you wanna make claims you cant back up, you dont deserve the benifit of the doubt.
>It's not hurting anybody.
... analogous to putting fences up beside roads, because, dont you know, tommorow EVERYBODY will become a jay-walker and then urban transportation routes would become useless. The reason they dont build those fences is that we can be sure that everybody *wont* do this .. since we are a social animal, we will display diversity in thought and action. I steal some music, but pay for movies. My neighbour steals some movies, but pays for music. My other neighbour sneaks into theare, but pays for music and movies.Attempting to categorize 'cheats' as one section of the population is useless, because we all pick and chose our spots in which to cheat, but overall we are incapable of decimating any given social or economic system by all of a sudden moving, as a species, one step to the left.
Back in my world, we have a little thing called 'judgement'. Yes, humans, thank god, still use it from time to time. I use this judgement to decide who it will hurt. I suspect people *like* me have been doing this for decades. I also suspect that we're still okay here. You and I (and the musicians) live better than 98% of the people on this planet.
> If more people thought like you, we all would be screwed.
Which is to say that you have never, ever cheated anything, or bent the rules any time. You've never done anything that if everybody else did, would be detremental to what ever system you were participating in? Ever? What you fail to understand is that its flat out impossible that everybody thinks like me. Simply by virtue of me thinking like me, somebody will think like you. People are different. According to your logic, humans are capable of complete Borg-like behevious, all of a sudden ditching thousands of years of diversity in thought and action, and all become music thiefs. You simply cannot comprehend that it would be a knee-jerk to implement massive legislation and banning filesharing tools
So putting in draconian technological barriers is expensive and fruitless, because for any given application, you're only going to catch a small percent of the population at the expense of everybody else who is using the technology in a way that does not damage the system (such as those who download *then* buy the CD, or those who download songs they already bought years ago, etc).
Please, for the love of god, argue that. Your IP argument is typical fearmongering that simply doesn't hold up against historical and psycological analysis, no matter how nicely it plugs into your Excel spreadsheet. Human behaviour is a moving target, so you can never change one thing (okay, lets see how this system is if *everybody* cheats) without seeing that change ripple through macroscopic social behaviour. Excel won't point out that when you move 80% of the non-cheaters to the cheaters category, X% of the cheaters become non-cheaters! We are self regulating in our behaviour, no 1984 needed!
Imagine it. No music. Nobody makes any music, cause its not profitable to make it. Humans retire music from their list of things they do because you will starve if you try being a musician. Hehe, you honestly think that could happen, do you? If no company existed to 'make' music, people in my town would make it, and people would pay to see it. Filesharing killing music cannot happen, because it would involve humans absolutely abolishing something they cant live without! Its as simple as that!
> Sorry for implying such a laughable idea, but I wanted to make the point that with reduced revenues caused by illegal file sharing, record companies will be forced to not sign and/or screw over more artists
.. 5% down last year, easily attributable to the recession. I think the problem is that people expect these media giants to just grow and grow and grow, and any time they dont grow, its simply just the cheaters. There are cheaters in every system dude. Everyone does something thats not exactly along the lines of the letter of the law. But you know what. The Eagles lived good. Very good. Much better than I will ever live, and I highly doubt they need my help, unless they pissed their money away, which is entirely their fault. So, even tho its covered by a copyright, I'm going to download it for free. Tough shit. I refuse to prop entire people's superstar lives up so I have hear a measly song a few times in my life. Same goes for most artists who've already lived lives for some reason we wish we could have. Well, we could stop propping them up so high, for starters. Think of it as equalization. IP is not a bike, it is not physical. It is an idea, and the author is never going to run out of copies like a factory would were all its inventory stolen.
.. something which people tend to associate with progress. And if people dont like it? Fuck em, I'm a musician. Lots of musians have expressed support for filesharing. But enough, I'm a criminal, lock me up!
How can you possibly qualify this statement? Please find out about these reduced revenues
Plus, I think most struggling musicians (such as myself, and friends of mine, and people I know) want these media giants taken down a notch or two.
And the mid-tier musicians who aint living the superstar life? Well, I buy their CD, of course, because I like to pay those who need it, not those that have it. You simply believe that suddenly, everyone will stop buying all CDs, or suddenly some artist's fanbase is going to entirely switch to downloading songs from filesharing apps. Have you ever seen any kind of social flock all of a sudden do the _exact_ same thing? There will always be people like me who ensure the system is balanced, that this monopoly gets no more powerful. If you only follow the creed of the successful, you will never enact change
I'm sorry to do this, but let me destruct your two points:
:) Think about it. The 'protection' is simply a story always cheerleaded by the current market champions to continuously increase the 'expriration date' on artistic works and thus propogate monopolies well past the death of the original creator. (Would you say we should be protecting the 2nd generation family of the artist because of, say, Mickey Mouse? Do they all deserve to live wikedly because an ansestor only had to have one good marketable artistic work?) Check out some of the history of copyright to get the full story.
1) Sure, it might happen. Maybe, in a galaxy far away. Again, you can look, time and time again at new technologies destroying old ways of doing things. But for the sake of argument, lets say it happens. Sony, EMI, etc go bankrupt. Who cares? My indie label in my neighbourhood now has the advertising inventory and space (cause now the voices of Sony, EMI, etc are silent) to promote local talent and market it locally. I sure wouldn't disagree that the era of the superstar might end (until those grassroots labels become tommorows Sonys, EMIs). The industry right now is terribly expensive to maintain, but this isn't because you have to feed the artists! It's because marketing budgets have exploded. Production values are huge, but this is only a function of the giants running the show. Even if they go bankrupt, suddenly its alot more economical to represent, promote artists again, and there is alot more market to go around to smaller but definately 'livable' salaries. Think of how disproportionately well the mega stars get paid. There is alot of market that could be shared far more effectively, and youd get a more diverse selection of music to boot. But the idea of file sharing destroying the ability to make a living off being a musician is simply laughable. Whats truely unforutnate is that musicians will have a tough time reshaping the minds of the mass consumer to focus again on the music instead of the light shows. Finally, most of the money musicians make are from performances, etc. The money made from CD royalties does not constitute a big part of a musicians' paycheque (although it is a big part of the hollywood shadow writers' paycheques who pen the hits for the stars, but I've never been a fan of that setup anyhow.)
2. Copyrights were put in place because governments were giving the Sony's and EMIs of the 1700s (the publishing houses) monopolies on cultural works. Copyrights were put in place to spurn distribution of cultural works and ensure that culture went back into the public domain. A copyright was designed to permit the author some return for their work, but make absolutely no mistake that they were put in place to _break_ the monopoly content creators had on that content, not the reverse as it is usually thought. The joke is that humans, by nature, wish to pay back, so artists, creators, etc, rarely needs laws to ensure they get paid if they make good shit.
Can't I reverse engineer the key and send hacked keys? How sparse is the 'key space'? Is there plenty of space in there to just send off a random selection of a key in the known legit key space?
I'm not baiting here, I actually am curious about how one would go about building a secure piracy protection scheme without resorting to owning the gates to online play (which is my main gripe due to content and communication control over what players see when they use the product?)
> Why should they care about what you think?
Lets turn that around then. I'm going to pirate their game. But I'm only one guy! Why should they care about what I think?
This technology is compatible with your current card, is it not? My impression is that cG simply makes it easier to generate the same OpenGL and DirectX code games are feeding your GF4 with now. Its to ease the work for the programmer and allow folks to concetrate more on the design of the shaders then their in-code implementation.
> like NVidia will allow other cards to support Cg so maybe they can
... the gain is that it supports two targets (DX and OpenGL) and seems a significantly easier way of incorperating new shaders into games than current methods?
Um, well, Cg gets compiled to DirectX or OpenGL, so it follows that any card that can do DirectX or OpenGL (read: all of them?) will benifit Cg. I guess different cards to different levels of support, but if they want this to fly, itd be in their best interest to generate multi-card compatible code. Or at least allow you to specify what extentions your generated code will support, to tailer to specific card feature sets? Correct me if I'm confused, if anyone is really in the know.
I think the idea here is that you could use this language to write new shaders for cards on the market _now_
> Time for you to put your hand in your pocket and pay for software.
You mean, like I did for the last 5 games I've been playing?
> Because they didn't feel like it.
Buwhahaha! Yep, thats why everything that AC's can't explain happens. Because they felt like it. Gosh, that surely addresses the problems and concerns I have with Blizzard.
If you were smart, you'd have pointed out, like the guy did below, that they may just feel soured for putting so much time/money into BattleNet, only to see other folks do it properly. Not only does that make sense, it also makes a pretty good tip of the hat to bnetd's viability as an alternative to BrokenNet.
> Maybe bnetd was invented so people with pirated copies of the game could play it
Or maybe not. Maybe it was invented casue BattleNet sucks ass. Maybe it was invented because we live in whats called 'a market' where people are encouraged to supply a demand. Sure, it doesn't check keys. Is ID software going out of business? Nope. Hell, gamespy.com owes their entire business to ID (and arguably to the pirated game market.) and nobody's firing off intimidating letters to them.
So can you explain to me why Blizzard wouldn't just do a key check in the game client against a blizzard-owned key database, independant of server-finding mechanism? Can you tell me why they insist that it takes a full blown player-community environment to do a simple key check? Sounds to me like, if anything, Blizzard made a crucial architectural mistake, and now they're being forced to toss out all babies with their bathwater. Thats their own deserts, and I dont have a modicum of sympathy for them. They arnt in any danger of living on the streets, and to use the argument always used against those who have to endure tough situations, if they like what they do, why grub for every last penny?
>Say what you like about Blizzard, they make some pretty damn good games.
.. ;)
This is from the 'i-know-ponies-kill-but-I-want-one-anyways' department
And my boycott is serious. No WCIII for me. It looks awesome, but somehow I imagine I will manage to scrape by.
Some wise observations, but I have a small issue with:
.. just legislated DRM. If Leibowitz' hunch is correct and stands up while the SSSCA is being lobbied, thats a huge, HUGE chink in the pro-SSSCA debate's armour.
> If DRM with micro-payments is succesfully introduced (read legislated) it wont mean that I pay less for music
If the thrust of Liebowitz' contention in this article is correct, then we can say that filesharing doesn't significanly damage the market enough to warrent legislation. This is exactly, EXACTLY what happened with the VCRs; the courts said that the VCR didn't do enough damage to the companies' ability to turn a profit to warrent legislation (it also helps that there are legal uses for VCRs as there is for filesharing.)
So, given optional DRM, if it lets the big guns at least do some accounting and implement micro payments, more power to them. Yeah, probably they'll try and use it as an opportunity to push their margins up higher, but as so long as I can still use my computer to download and buy the second tier indie artists, I'm going to leave that battle up to the folks who like the big label artists.
I dont think there is anything wrong with DRM (indeed, web sites supported by advertising have tracking/counting software much in the same vain, and its really whats keeping alot of sites out there up online.)
>you just won't have your free music anymore!
... audio tapes, MIDI, mp3s .. there will always be free music (and free movies, and free this and that.), dont kid yourself. You'll just need a little program (like the tape on audiocasettes, natch!) to copy your music. Anyhow, I think you implying 'wont have ALL your music free anymore!', where the point of the article is that a little free music never hurt nobody to any degree that it dissuaded them from running a company, turning a profit, etc, nor purchasing CDs for themselves.
... since it would be self-defeating for everybody to cheat out the industry, it wont happen. Furthur more, as more people join one side of the equation, the people on the other side tend to mobilize or compesate for the shift in numbers in some manner. For instance, as file sharing became more common, I contend that some people purchased more of their music than they would have before, fearing that if they didnt support music, there'd be nothing left to fileshare.
But, I've had it since birth
The joke is, if youre Darwinian, you'd recognize that all this technology COULDNT kill the music industry. Why? If we all stopped buying CDs, and EVERYONE copied, the record companies would crumble, musicians would stop publishing music, and there'd be nothing left to download. Social patterns always ensure there's a balance (like, if everyone littered, we couldnt move, if everyone was a conservative, we wouldnt have important liberal influence, if everyone was a liberal, we wouldnt have important conservative influence)
And if one insists that we do put the record companies out of business - really - so what? The whole cycle of small labels getting grassroots support (where people are much less likely to rip off local artists than megapopstars) starts again, and we're out a few hundred thousand guys in suits. boohoo. Music is 5% of the USA's GDP to be sure, but to think all that would come off the GDP instantly assumes that absolutely nobody comes in to take the place of the fallen dinosaurs, and that this collapse happens overnight. Highly unlikely.
Of course file sharing hurts sales. Just like double tape decks hurt sales. Just like not having a law preventing people from owning two VCRs hurts video sales. Just like photocopiers hurt the sales of sheet music.
Technology changes things. In some ways better, in some ways worse. It changes peoples behaviour, and it changes the machanics of society.
The question everybody should have been asking all along is, "Does it hurt sales so badly that nobody will want to make music?" The answer seems to be an overwhelming NO, so if thats the case, history suggests that we are should tolerate it until it finds its natural 'fit' within social behaviour and the economy. Just because it facilitates illegal behaviour does not mean that this illegal behaviour is going to have a negative impact on the market - and if you think about it, many discoveries, social patterns and values we hold up as examples of our progressive society started up as being illegal behaviour until we came to terms with its perceived threat and realized that many things we perceive as threatening or damaging can be channeled in a positive socioeconomic direction.
Bad.
.. but there is absolutely nothing preventing you from abandoning that car in a location where you have the approval of the land owner (or the community that maintains that land if that land is public domain). Heck, what you wish to leave behind is most often userful or valuable to somebody else.
.. which was how public land in fuedal times started suddenly becoming 'owned' overnight by the fuedal lords thanks to Adam Smith et al. It was the denial that public domain existed that allowed the ruling class to furthur cemenent their ownership of the last bit of publicly maintained/owned property within their land .. and started the creation of a lower class who while once could at least farm for their food on the public land were now subject to paying taxes for something they had for free to maintained themselves at one time. Read up on the Hedge Wars and Food Riots for furthur reading.
What you abandon may, or may not be judged to have a detrimental effect to the society/environment (not the hippy kind, I mean the surroundings, context)
Its simple ethics, morals, etc. The only reason public domain scares some people is because of the concept that nobody can claim that thing as private property. That conflicts with alot of classical capitalist economists theories on what you need in order to make capitalism work; the ability to claim ownership to something according to 'first come, first serve'
This absolutely is true. Copyright law was enacted to force works back INTO the public domain, because authorities in the 1600's were catching the whiff of power that pro free-market, pro-capitalism economists around the 1500s/1600s 'he who stakes claim first owns' ideology. (Such as public land could become your land if you claimed it, because by claiming it, you could make the weak argument that you were adding value to the land in administering and maintaining it.)
Authorities were doing all they could to grant monopolies in publishing to the successful printers of the time, inpart thanks to The Licensing Act in 1662. So, in 1710, copyright law finally forced a limited ownership term on creative works. It's worth noting that times of british history subject to the least amount of market regulation (and copyright law is a form of market regulation, because it prevents monopolies on creative works, polluting the idea of 'right to private property' required to make the free-market work and prevent looting and group action with respect to private property) saw the rise of the most wealth disparities and social turbulance. It should be obvious that those in power held a significant advantage in the race claim ownership to most new developments and unclaimed land at the time, so naturally, authorship became one such commodity that the ruling class sought to own. If power corrupts abolutely, then we can always assume that the ruling body will always attempt to legislate in favour of the most ecomically abled and power supporters in the market - so it should be obvious that you need laws that counter-act that force and keep participants in a 'free market' from gainining an insurmountable lead in the race to economy of scale and a monopoly on visibility within the market place. One might suggest that we just make a law that disallows ALL forms of legislation such as the Licensing Act. Unfortunaetly, since laws that you could jusitfy as not being related to market relgation _can_ affect the balance of power within a market, you'll always need laws to maintain the balance and keep people believing and participating in that market.
For a brief rundown, here: http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html
Or googlize "Copyright law history". Learn.
> who downloads and burns casually (read: songs here and there
full disclosure: I made a few (maybe arond 40 or so over the course of a few years) audiocassettes in the late 80s by copying songs from friends' CDs, or the radio. I made mixtapes for friends. I was just as much of a criminal (if you call that criminal behaviour) before filesharing was even coined as a phrase. I suspect that many of the 'filesharing = theivery' accusers did the same. For some reason (might be because the media companies that are chomping at the 'profit is a right' bit also own/provide/edit 99% of the news and opinion pieces on this matter), there's been a mindset shift on whether any level of piracy can be tolerable.
Hopefully this will stop the folks who collect bytes for the sake of collecting ithem (dude, I got the Muppets Movie on Kazaa last night! are you actually going to watch it? No, but its the Muppets Movie!), thus weakning MPAA/RIAA's position on the wonton mass theifdom going on online. If the 'cause I wanna be the man' pirates are exercised from the net, I hope that file sharing will become a tolerable evil. Plus, it leaves all the rest of the 'criminals' as us (or me), who downloads and burns casually (read: songs here and there, stuff thats hard to get, stuff that I need to hear immediately when I think about it, never entire albums, no movies), but still buys music.
AS a bonus, I'll never have to ask why the fuck anybody would be excited about having just downloaded a mediocre movie, DivX'd and all but unwatchable on that 15 inch monitor in their bedroom.
> mainly because they get it for free
How about mainly because you can get it from home, you can burn it across all your mediums (CD/MP3player/computer), you can easily share it with a friend (keeping in mind that it is not uncommon for people's friends to live in entirely seperate geographies much more so today than 20 years ago, so there is a significant advantage over snail mailing a CD to lend to a friend. Oh wait, I'll bet lending a CD is illegal too now.)
There are a plethora of reasons why Napster beats your local music store. Price is certainly one factor, but technology adoption does not soley rely on price.
I still can't figure out why Sony cand mp3-ize their collection, stick it online with some php scripts to count your purchases, and be done with it. That'd kill the Naspter-closes pretty quickly, given the numerous problems file sharing networks have (reliability, data authenticity, etc.)
Sony would say people would just share what they downloaded, but then they'd miss my point above. Price doth not adoption make. There are many many reasons why technology is successfully adopted (or not adopted), and if I were a giant like Sony, I'd have the money to cover way more of those reasons than any file sharing network could. The problem is, it seems like these companies are frozen in the headlights of change, and the RIAA hasn't clued into any solution other than bullying, which surely wont help their case in the long run.
Oh doh, well the desire to grow in wealth is not the most fundamental human desire (though its in there, sure). We wish to do what we want to do, with minimal interference from others, so essentially to co-exist peacibly. I know I sound like a hippy, but what the hell, because last I checked most of us value living over dying than wanting to get that mad cash 'n shit. It may be what drives parts of this society, but since it isn't the fundamental desire. Adam Smiths invisible hand did pop out of nowhere. That's what the academic community does. It discovers new ideas and ways of thinking which alters human behaviour. Thats what technology is. Discovery. New ideas, new physical manifestations of those ideas .. and while it changes those who are exposed to it, that doesn't neccessarily mean that his idea is THE idea. Humans just follow ideas as they come, and yes, sometimes they go away again.
;) It's not like I'm against material gain, but unmitigated gain, a la free market no limits approach, bad. Everything in moderation. :(
There are plenty of successful self sufficient communites on the planet which did not need to encourage material greed. Sure, some people had a little more than others, some a little less. Course, sure, they are far smaller societies than the western one. I suppose next youll tell me to move to one.
I'm no luddite, but I'm just sayin we impose social limits on lots of things, so is it really safe to stroke the desire to gain money the most? It seems to generate unhappiness much greater than the happiness from my curtural analysis.
sounds like a good idea, but how would I remove it from your ass in the first place?
/. luser I swore I never would be, the irony, the tragedy
oh man, I'm turning into the
sorry, you have to admit, it was a pretty obligatory offtopic/troll/bait post. and its getting boring always having 50 karma.
I think that argument stopped holding water once companies became fundamentally more powerful and influential than governments, maybe around the early 80s when the like of foreign investor settlement laws began sneaking into trade agreements and such. The rules may be signed by the government, but it is companies, and companies alone, that have the might and influence to purchase laws. DMCA is a perfect example. Take away the money from the companies that lobbied for it, and the government would have never passed it.
.. or worse yet, get flogged, economically if not militarily, by the next super-power in waiting.
Frankly, when I talk about the government, I'm talking about what it SHOULD be, not what it IS. The fact that people are disillusioned with governments having no choice but to be bought out (after all, since companies own most if not all of the media pipelines, where do you think people get their impressions and ideas of whos at fault in all of this?)
The problem _is_ the system, but I personally feel its more in people's disillusionment with democracy, and their fear of limiting the power and scope of enterprise to turn democracy into a reality, rather than the smokescreen in front of the plutocracy we have now.
I personally feel that the problem is were are simply too dependant on the corperate economic machine to maintain the western world's dominance (though we'd be fools to dismantle this power structure without first diffusing the anti-western sentiment common around the world), so while, I think, many people understand and are willing to accept that the government has become the puppet of *large* corperations, they fear what will happen if we begin to try and diffuse or distribute some of that power again. We might lose our precious SUVs, video games, and lattees (or whatever your thing is.)
> theft does not even out a "material wealth disparity!"
No, but without the government to back property rights, theft would rise as wealth disparity rose. I never suggested it would equalize due to that kind of behaviour - simply that people are more prone to commit theft (or simply property damage for that matter) the worse off they become to their neighbour. I'm not saying its right or wrong - its just human nature and psycology that suggests that wealth disparity will cause people to feel their system is unfair and force them to action (as wrong, unethical, illegal, useless, mob-like that action might be.)
Heck, it even makes mathematical sense - whats the use of stealing (aside from those who commit theft for the psycological thrill rather than the social/material ends) from someone who doesn't have anything more than you do?