File sharing copyrighted material is not in of itself a crime. The RIAA does not KNOW if filesharers are committing a crime--they are assuming that they are. If I own a CD, I have the right to own that music in a different form. As far as I know, this is not (yet) illegal in the U.S. It is fair use.
The issue with spammers if that they know SOMEONE is breaking the law--they just don't know who; hence, the need for a subpoena.
If Wal Mart is really just looking to sell PCs at the cheapest possible price, I don't think the day the is too far away when Linux distros are sufficiently commodidized for there to be a Sam's Choice Distribution on their bottom end PCs. Just knock off the Windows look and feel, and throw a red white and blue theme on there.
Re:I think I'll wait....
on
Online! The Book
·
· Score: 3, Funny
This sounds like the flag they have in Redbook audio. Whenever I copy a CD in Nero, I see that the tracks are flagged as protected... but that doesn't affect the software in any way.
Yes, the Hercules Game Theater XP is an excellent piece of hardware with excellent sound quality at a low price. There is no doubt in my mind that Hercules has some great hardware engineers working for them. However, the driver support for the GTXP was horrendous. The drivers would crash consistantly under WinXP for almost a year after that OS came out. It took them almost two years to have stable drivers in general. The GTXP got great reviews when it came because everyone was still using Win98.
This DJ thing is a toy, but its probably a good solution for someone who wants a decent soundcard and maybe wants to mess around with the pads, too. But I wonder if Hercules has got their driver support up to par. I for one know I will never buy another Hercules product because of the slap in the face they gave everyone who bought the GTXP.
I currently have IE, Mozilla, and Opera installed. But I still use IE for day to day browsing simply because the button bar is so flexible. When Moz or Opera make it so I can have my Google Toolbar (which does a great job blocking popups, btw) in the same line as the menubar and the standard buttons on the same line as the address bar in a few clicks, I will switch.
I know that Moz and Opera support skins, but why should I need to go hunting around for a skin I may or may not like when IE lets me customize the interface so easily?
The fact is, simplicity works sometimes. IE lets me see more of the actual web page I want to look at with less interface clutter. MS won the browser wars because their browser provides the best user experience. Moz is getting there, and Opera will always have its niche, but as of now, MS is tops because IE really is the best browser.
Even if you can't point out a true aural difference between CDDA and a 256kbs MP3 (I'm not too familiar with WMA and how the quality scales), the fact of the matter is, you are not getting the original material as the artist intended it. I ran across a cool link on/. a couple weeks ago about about the Aphex Face. Granted, its a highly specific example, but any kind of lossy compression at any bitrate, whether you can "hear" the difference or not, would destroy that aspect of the sound wave. To me, that is inexcusable for a final product and is inherently inferior.
Furthermore, even if human ears can't hear the difference between a CDDA source and a compressed version in a lossy compression scheme, further lossy compression using the WMA/mp3/whatever as a source, *will* make a noticable difference, as more and more "unimportant" parts of the sound are thrown away. This is why I will never purchase music in a lossy format--the flexibility of the file is severely limited. This seems like a very likely scenario for music bought from Buy.com's store. Since you can't redownload what you buy if you lose it, if your only permanent copy of the music is a Redbook audio cd, any mp3s you make from this source will be noticably inferior to the orignal WMA.
I agree 100%. Even though they advertise $8 albums, most are closer to $12. What serious music fan (of any genre) is going to pay CD price to download music that is severely restricted and has inherently inferior fidelity??
It makes me wonder who the target market for these services is. Anyone who seriously listens to music will not be satisfied by WMA, those who like to collect music will be put off by the (absurd) DRM, and those who travel with music will be limited by the transfer limitation (you can only transfer songs to a portable a handful of times? I was under the impression most people cycled the files on their portables).
All this is even ignoring the fact that their jazz selection blows... even on the few decent albums they offer, they only have a couple tracks available for download, for about $2 a piece. I don't see Teenyboppers getting into this when its so easy to get "singles" off of Kazaa, or to just turn on the local ClearChannel or MTV. And they offer nothing to those of us that really enjoy music! At least iTunes has yuppy chic appeal.
Maybe there was a lot of unauthorized content on BT, but there is a large group of users using it to download legal, live music. Look at Etree's Box of Rain forum, Groove Salad, and Sharing in the Groove as just a few example of the many message boards that have gigabytes of 100% legal, 100% lossless (.shn and.flac) music posted daily.
When the Phish summer tour aud sources come out, BT is going to be key. It sure beats trying to log in to someone's 3-slot FTP.
On my university campus, SMB is a very popular way to share files, copyrighted or not. Its very easy for an uninformed person to turn on their Windows File Sharing to legitmitally share a document with a colleague/peer, and at the same time accidentally share copyrighted material. SMB file sharing is so popular, some geeks have written web based search engines to find files on the network (luckily they smartened up and made them only available to on-campus connections. I still think this constitutes a public network, though, because the entire campus community has access).
My point is, if someone finds and downloads a copyrighted file on a shared PC, isn't this analagous to someone leaving their room unlocked and having a stranger come in, copy a CD, and return the original? Under this bill, the person who unintentionally gave the public access to the copyrighted material is the one who is charged with a crime, not the person who actually did the copying (which, under traditional copyright law, is the actual crime).
Slashdot Mirror
There is a major difference here:
File sharing copyrighted material is not in of itself a crime. The RIAA does not KNOW if filesharers are committing a crime--they are assuming that they are. If I own a CD, I have the right to own that music in a different form. As far as I know, this is not (yet) illegal in the U.S. It is fair use.
The issue with spammers if that they know SOMEONE is breaking the law--they just don't know who; hence, the need for a subpoena.
If Wal Mart is really just looking to sell PCs at the cheapest possible price, I don't think the day the is too far away when Linux distros are sufficiently commodidized for there to be a Sam's Choice Distribution on their bottom end PCs. Just knock off the Windows look and feel, and throw a red white and blue theme on there.
Online! The movie.
"I saw the shit out of it!"
Shit sandwich.
This sounds like the flag they have in Redbook audio. Whenever I copy a CD in Nero, I see that the tracks are flagged as protected... but that doesn't affect the software in any way.
This DJ thing is a toy, but its probably a good solution for someone who wants a decent soundcard and maybe wants to mess around with the pads, too. But I wonder if Hercules has got their driver support up to par. I for one know I will never buy another Hercules product because of the slap in the face they gave everyone who bought the GTXP.
Not to mention the lack of linux support.
I know that Moz and Opera support skins, but why should I need to go hunting around for a skin I may or may not like when IE lets me customize the interface so easily?
The fact is, simplicity works sometimes. IE lets me see more of the actual web page I want to look at with less interface clutter. MS won the browser wars because their browser provides the best user experience. Moz is getting there, and Opera will always have its niche, but as of now, MS is tops because IE really is the best browser.
Even if you can't point out a true aural difference between CDDA and a 256kbs MP3 (I'm not too familiar with WMA and how the quality scales), the fact of the matter is, you are not getting the original material as the artist intended it. I ran across a cool link on /. a couple weeks ago about about the Aphex Face. Granted, its a highly specific example, but any kind of lossy compression at any bitrate, whether you can "hear" the difference or not, would destroy that aspect of the sound wave. To me, that is inexcusable for a final product and is inherently inferior.
Furthermore, even if human ears can't hear the difference between a CDDA source and a compressed version in a lossy compression scheme, further lossy compression using the WMA/mp3/whatever as a source, *will* make a noticable difference, as more and more "unimportant" parts of the sound are thrown away. This is why I will never purchase music in a lossy format--the flexibility of the file is severely limited. This seems like a very likely scenario for music bought from Buy.com's store. Since you can't redownload what you buy if you lose it, if your only permanent copy of the music is a Redbook audio cd, any mp3s you make from this source will be noticably inferior to the orignal WMA.
I agree 100%. Even though they advertise $8 albums, most are closer to $12. What serious music fan (of any genre) is going to pay CD price to download music that is severely restricted and has inherently inferior fidelity??
It makes me wonder who the target market for these services is. Anyone who seriously listens to music will not be satisfied by WMA, those who like to collect music will be put off by the (absurd) DRM, and those who travel with music will be limited by the transfer limitation (you can only transfer songs to a portable a handful of times? I was under the impression most people cycled the files on their portables).
All this is even ignoring the fact that their jazz selection blows... even on the few decent albums they offer, they only have a couple tracks available for download, for about $2 a piece. I don't see Teenyboppers getting into this when its so easy to get "singles" off of Kazaa, or to just turn on the local ClearChannel or MTV. And they offer nothing to those of us that really enjoy music! At least iTunes has yuppy chic appeal.
I guess I should have said "Plenty of legal music available via BT."
Maybe there was a lot of unauthorized content on BT, but there is a large group of users using it to download legal, live music. Look at Etree's Box of Rain forum, Groove Salad, and Sharing in the Groove as just a few example of the many message boards that have gigabytes of 100% legal, 100% lossless (.shn and .flac) music posted daily.
When the Phish summer tour aud sources come out, BT is going to be key. It sure beats trying to log in to someone's 3-slot FTP.
On my university campus, SMB is a very popular way to share files, copyrighted or not. Its very easy for an uninformed person to turn on their Windows File Sharing to legitmitally share a document with a colleague/peer, and at the same time accidentally share copyrighted material. SMB file sharing is so popular, some geeks have written web based search engines to find files on the network (luckily they smartened up and made them only available to on-campus connections. I still think this constitutes a public network, though, because the entire campus community has access).
My point is, if someone finds and downloads a copyrighted file on a shared PC, isn't this analagous to someone leaving their room unlocked and having a stranger come in, copy a CD, and return the original? Under this bill, the person who unintentionally gave the public access to the copyrighted material is the one who is charged with a crime, not the person who actually did the copying (which, under traditional copyright law, is the actual crime).