Hey, people have always wanted authentic music...and when it got too underground or hard to get, target demographics all kinda stopped trying and just kept buying whats on mtv. the scary part about p2p is choice. its a nightmare to fund 1000 acts to get the same revenue from your customers when you could do it at 100 acts. then again, the execs 6 digit expense accounts arent all that cost effective themselves.
"Nine out of ten artists agree that the practice of recording a movie or TV show on a VHS tape to watch at home at a later time should be deemed legal under the fair use provisions of copyright law."
I hope you weren't serious about switching polarities on the motor of your burner...seriously. even if gc games did spin backwards, seems to me that such a move would make your burner not recognize a blank disc in there...and that would make it pretty hard for any burning software to help you burn a rom.
if it could be done simply from your own computer, it would be much easier to read bit for bit from the inside out, business as usual, and burn it back from the inside out, but for bit. why putz around with wiring? the format of the data doesn't have to be coherent to your pc.
what would be interesting as far as hardware hacking goes would be to possibly interface the dvd drive of a busted gamecume to a pc rather than the guts in the gc, and use that to backup the games, then burn to dvd and figure out some way of cutting off the excess disc to make it the same size as standard gc discs.
though thats just rambling, im sure its been tried and failed.
"4. The timing begins when the number becomes visible to the competitor and ends at the end of writing the answer."
This guy couldn't have possibly been able to even write down his answer in 11.8 seconds. I see the catch as being that the clock stops when you begin writing your answer, at which point you have a decent idea of what the answer will look like (ends in the same digit, starts with a 4) and with some seriously superior mathematical ability, its probably at least attainable to do it in 11.8 seconds, but if the clock stops when you start writing... That, or as its the average of 2 clocks, maybe noone started the second one...thats 23.6 seconds.
If Best Buy complains that people buy only loss leading items, how bout this for an idea? Don't sell them unconditionally at that price! The local pizza joint will sell you 2 small all dressed, a fry and a coke for less than if you bought them individually, so why won't Best Buy give you something like 15$ of a pack of DVD-R if you buy the burner instead of selling the DVD-R's so cheap?
That, and we're consuming far too much. Nobody can resist a sale anymore, we all think we "need" the crap we buy and we honestly believe we're "saving" money by purchasing things on sale. Stores take advantage through advertising to you how bad you need to buy something as well as presenting their product in very favorable ways. Thats fine, its business, but they push it to the point of having mirrors that make you look thinner in that dress.
So I can't really say I sympathize with the person who impulse buys stuff and realizes they don't need or want it, but I can't sympathize with a retailer who will sink to any depth to get you to buy it either. Besides, no retailer can in good faith refuse a first time customer based on the return rejection system they have, so everybody has a chance to learn before they screw up and keep buying solar powered flashlights and black hiliters.
That, and if a product is returned just because its not wanted - big screen for the superbowl or clothes, charge a restocking fee! Radio Shack here in canada does. I think its printed on the bill, and i have no problem only getting 90% of my money back from radio shack if I'm going to put the store through the trouble of fucking around with receipts, new package, price tag, etc. (Especially when i buy a little odd or end that works and return the broken one in the same package.)
Anyone who gets denied a refund based on that system probably deserves to be denied...if not the time they got denied, then from another time that would set the system off in the first place.
Sure, I don't like having my information gathered, i generally deny to give a supermarket my postal code, even though its just to keep track of flyers, and i usually give the name George Bush and my address as being 1600 Pennsylvaia avenue when they do ask.
I think we're all in agreement that we should vote with our wallets.
Let's be honest. The costs of tracking these people down, having lawyers send out letters and to even bother to threaten legal action in parallel to the RIAA is far too expensive.
What's the average settlement been for people sharing Britney? Roughly 3000$? Its not a viable source of revenue, its certainly not PR friendly and it definetly won't get people into theatres.
It would be much nicer to see that incentive put in to making movies affordable. Up North here, its about 10$ for a movie ticket. Now take your wife and 2 kids to see the new Disney crapathon, buy a coke and a popcorn for everybody, and you've just hit 60$ to take the kids out to a flick. Its terribly unaffordable. Not that its a reason to "steal", but even then, the product downloaded (unless its a DVD) isn't comparable to the product the RIAA puts out. A cd is a cd in your discman or in mp3, ogg (insert format of choice here). You can't yet substitute a screen the size of Brando's ass on your computer yet. I've downloaded a couple of flicks to see if they were worth seeing on a big screen with friends, and they weren't, but just like music is now, I have a means of checking before buying. Critiques of films mean nothing, everything gets 3 thumbs up.
This litigation is totally out in left field relative to the problems (if any) downloading causes to theatre revenue, and irrelevant to the people who download significant amounts of movies.
I'm just guessing (yeah, dangerous) that the MPAA picked up the people off kazaa or something. I doubt it was BT, seeing as the RIAA hasn't tracked anyone down through that anyways (I could be wrong).
And truth be told, if you're significantly downloading DVD rips, its not off Kazaa.
I'm in Quebec, and yes, I've borrowed the film and the book
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
as well as Mondo Bizarro, the Ramones album from my library. It is perfectly legal here, to my knowledge.
Not quite familiar with the ALA, but up here in Canada, my library rents out books. It has a couple of small shelves of hardcover new stuff that you'd get for roughly 2-3$ a week. Pretty fair. I'm sure they're paying whatever legal duties or price for those books to rent them out and you can legally read the new Steve King book without shelling out an arm and a leg.
That said, I happen to find it bloody interesting that the ALA is getting involved in the whole online/copyrighted scheme of things. This is a public organization, supported by public money (ie your tax dollars) that acquires a broad amount of copyrighted material (and at my local library it extends to music cd's, film, magazines etc) intended for free public consumption. I'm liking the idea of a public library using public money to now make that content available over the internet. The ends will justify the means.
Imagine how culturally enriched we could be as a society if every young person (or at least those online - which in 15 years will be all of them) who would never set foot into a library, (come on, the place is flat out boring) could actually access the entire catalogue of available material from their computer when they got bored of ebaum's world.
The business world, MPAA, RIAA, BSA etc can rape us of fair use and any use of our purchased items, but I love the idea of the ALA getting involved in this, because the more the average Joe can equate the concepts of copyright with that place where you can pay 3$ for a membership and take out whatever the hell you want and pay $0.05 a day late fees, the more the general public concensus will sway towards maintaining fair use and maintaining copyright for its originally intended purposes.
Hmm, i had an interesting thought. Record labels are international, though separate companies in different countries (EMI Canada for example.) This would lead me to believe that EMI Canada and EMI US are financially and legally "autonomous" entities. As such, EMI canada is the protector of the copyright on all discs sold in canada. (supposing the artist allows the label to go with legal proceedings). Now, for example, the new Iron Maiden album happens to be at number 1 in various european countries, and is indefinetly online, does the file sharing of mp3's from a canadian release apply to the US? If the original disc has a copyright by EMI CANADA, even though the same song was released in the states, does EMI US have any grounds to sue for an infringed copyright? Its the uploading thats illegal, and if the upload is of a song which originated as not having EMI US's copyright, then does the RIAA have any claim? I dont know much international copyright law, but it would be nice if someone could answer that!
I don't think the paper addressed the question that if in fact SCO's proprietary code got into Linux, how that necessarily means IBM did it. Wouldn't there have to be evidence shown in the form of SCO source code vs IBM contributed source code, belonging to SCO, as being the same?
Even then, it would only take about a few weeks before SCO published the specific code, already in Linux and fixes were made to exclude the code...invalidating the whole concept of a license. Its not a fine for using linux, its a license of SCO's proprietary code.
Next: Does SCO have the right to sell licenses to code they may not own?
Through their own propaganda, they think so...if this is the case and we all flock to buy SCO licenses, could we file a class action suit against SCO for our money back because SCO never owned the code? I could imagine my ass getting sued if i sold the rights to the rolling stones catalogue to some gulliable moron...
Well, isn't morality relative to the person? I mean, I would be pissed if I saw my girlfriend with another guy, but in some countries its morally right to slash off her nipples. I don't necessarily think file sharing is "right" as a long term solution, but it is exceptional as a short term one to emphasize a digital revolution. I would buy cds way more (which is now at 0) if there was some value to the goddamned thing and if it could play in my PC.
Though you're right, its the artists we should be concerned with, because the labels sure as hell aren't. I can't imagine why Vince Neil is touring with Poison (ahhh!) or why Tommy Lee put out a rap-rock fred durst album, other than the fact that they owe and owe for the killerness of the Crue (yeah, i just took 5 minutes to find the umlaut in the character map.)
Morally, the RIAA is wrong. Noone gives a shit when a liar points the finger at someone else for lying. The RIAA needs to be exposed in the major media, and that would take something quite extraordinary.
When it comes to wanking off, I do believe the "My house, my business" defense comes into effect. Surely doing such in the privacy of my own home would not yield the night in jail that doing so at my local hardware store would.
Then by that logic, letting someone else listen to your cd is illegal. By Canadian copyright law, any copy of an original is not infringing on copyright so long as profit isn't made on it.
If you brewed your own beer from "joes kit inc" and give me some, can joe sue?
I can't say all slashdot users want to share (though im new, myself). Personally, I'd rather buy the old vinyls for a dollar or two. The sense that I seem to get from slashdot is people really, really are sick and tired of corporate muscle being used in technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, people have always wanted authentic music...and when it got too underground or hard to get, target demographics all kinda stopped trying and just kept buying whats on mtv. the scary part about p2p is choice.
its a nightmare to fund 1000 acts to get the same revenue from your customers when you could do it at 100 acts. then again, the execs 6 digit expense accounts arent all that cost effective themselves.
"Nine out of ten artists agree that the practice of recording a movie or TV show on a VHS
tape to watch at home at a later time should be deemed legal under the fair use provisions
of copyright law."
Wow. I didn't know Jack Valenti had an album out.
I hope you weren't serious about switching polarities on the motor of your burner...seriously. even if gc games did spin backwards, seems to me that such a move would make your burner not recognize a blank disc in there...and that would make it pretty hard for any burning software to help you burn a rom. if it could be done simply from your own computer, it would be much easier to read bit for bit from the inside out, business as usual, and burn it back from the inside out, but for bit. why putz around with wiring? the format of the data doesn't have to be coherent to your pc. what would be interesting as far as hardware hacking goes would be to possibly interface the dvd drive of a busted gamecume to a pc rather than the guts in the gc, and use that to backup the games, then burn to dvd and figure out some way of cutting off the excess disc to make it the same size as standard gc discs. though thats just rambling, im sure its been tried and failed.
"4. The timing begins when the number becomes visible to the competitor and ends at the end of writing the answer."
This guy couldn't have possibly been able to even write down his answer in 11.8 seconds. I see the catch as being that the clock stops when you begin writing your answer, at which point you have a decent idea of what the answer will look like (ends in the same digit, starts with a 4) and with some seriously superior mathematical ability, its probably at least attainable to do it in 11.8 seconds, but if the clock stops when you start writing...
That, or as its the average of 2 clocks, maybe noone started the second one...thats 23.6 seconds.
Thank you. I really needed to see a man get humped by a pig. Can a mod please get rid of that link after he gets slashdotted?
If Best Buy complains that people buy only loss leading items, how bout this for an idea? Don't sell them unconditionally at that price! The local pizza joint will sell you 2 small all dressed, a fry and a coke for less than if you bought them individually, so why won't Best Buy give you something like 15$ of a pack of DVD-R if you buy the burner instead of selling the DVD-R's so cheap?
That, and we're consuming far too much. Nobody can resist a sale anymore, we all think we "need" the crap we buy and we honestly believe we're "saving" money by purchasing things on sale. Stores take advantage through advertising to you how bad you need to buy something as well as presenting their product in very favorable ways.
Thats fine, its business, but they push it to the point of having mirrors that make you look thinner in that dress.
So I can't really say I sympathize with the person who impulse buys stuff and realizes they don't need or want it, but I can't sympathize with a retailer who will sink to any depth to get you to buy it either.
Besides, no retailer can in good faith refuse a first time customer based on the return rejection system they have, so everybody has a chance to learn before they screw up and keep buying solar powered flashlights and black hiliters.
That, and if a product is returned just because its not wanted - big screen for the superbowl or clothes, charge a restocking fee! Radio Shack here in canada does. I think its printed on the bill, and i have no problem only getting 90% of my money back from radio shack if I'm going to put the store through the trouble of fucking around with receipts, new package, price tag, etc.
(Especially when i buy a little odd or end that works and return the broken one in the same package.)
Anyone who gets denied a refund based on that system probably deserves to be denied...if not the time they got denied, then from another time that would set the system off in the first place.
Sure, I don't like having my information gathered, i generally deny to give a supermarket my postal code, even though its just to keep track of flyers, and i usually give the name George Bush and my address as being 1600 Pennsylvaia avenue when they do ask.
I think we're all in agreement that we should vote with our wallets.
Let's be honest. The costs of tracking these people down, having lawyers send out letters and to even bother to threaten legal action in parallel to the RIAA is far too expensive.
What's the average settlement been for people sharing Britney? Roughly 3000$? Its not a viable source of revenue, its certainly not PR friendly and it definetly won't get people into theatres.
It would be much nicer to see that incentive put in to making movies affordable. Up North here, its about 10$ for a movie ticket. Now take your wife and 2 kids to see the new Disney crapathon, buy a coke and a popcorn for everybody, and you've just hit 60$ to take the kids out to a flick. Its terribly unaffordable.
Not that its a reason to "steal", but even then, the product downloaded (unless its a DVD) isn't comparable to the product the RIAA puts out. A cd is a cd in your discman or in mp3, ogg (insert format of choice here). You can't yet substitute a screen the size of Brando's ass on your computer yet. I've downloaded a couple of flicks to see if they were worth seeing on a big screen with friends, and they weren't, but just like music is now, I have a means of checking before buying. Critiques of films mean nothing, everything gets 3 thumbs up.
This litigation is totally out in left field relative to the problems (if any) downloading causes to theatre revenue, and irrelevant to the people who download significant amounts of movies.
I'm just guessing (yeah, dangerous) that the MPAA picked up the people off kazaa or something. I doubt it was BT, seeing as the RIAA hasn't tracked anyone down through that anyways (I could be wrong).
And truth be told, if you're significantly downloading DVD rips, its not off Kazaa.
I'm in Quebec, and yes, I've borrowed the film and the book The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz as well as Mondo Bizarro, the Ramones album from my library. It is perfectly legal here, to my knowledge.
Not quite familiar with the ALA, but up here in Canada, my library rents out books. It has a couple of small shelves of hardcover new stuff that you'd get for roughly 2-3$ a week. Pretty fair. I'm sure they're paying whatever legal duties or price for those books to rent them out and you can legally read the new Steve King book without shelling out an arm and a leg. That said, I happen to find it bloody interesting that the ALA is getting involved in the whole online/copyrighted scheme of things. This is a public organization, supported by public money (ie your tax dollars) that acquires a broad amount of copyrighted material (and at my local library it extends to music cd's, film, magazines etc) intended for free public consumption. I'm liking the idea of a public library using public money to now make that content available over the internet. The ends will justify the means. Imagine how culturally enriched we could be as a society if every young person (or at least those online - which in 15 years will be all of them) who would never set foot into a library, (come on, the place is flat out boring) could actually access the entire catalogue of available material from their computer when they got bored of ebaum's world. The business world, MPAA, RIAA, BSA etc can rape us of fair use and any use of our purchased items, but I love the idea of the ALA getting involved in this, because the more the average Joe can equate the concepts of copyright with that place where you can pay 3$ for a membership and take out whatever the hell you want and pay $0.05 a day late fees, the more the general public concensus will sway towards maintaining fair use and maintaining copyright for its originally intended purposes.
Hmm, i had an interesting thought.
Record labels are international, though separate companies in different countries (EMI Canada for example.) This would lead me to believe that EMI Canada and EMI US are financially and legally "autonomous" entities. As such, EMI canada is the protector of the copyright on all discs sold in canada. (supposing the artist allows the label to go with legal proceedings).
Now, for example, the new Iron Maiden album happens to be at number 1 in various european countries, and is indefinetly online, does the file sharing of mp3's from a canadian release apply to the US? If the original disc has a copyright by EMI CANADA, even though the same song was released in the states, does EMI US have any grounds to sue for an infringed copyright? Its the uploading thats illegal, and if the upload is of a song which originated as not having EMI US's copyright, then does the RIAA have any claim? I dont know much international copyright law, but it would be nice if someone could answer that!
gps on cars? this should be great for avis rent a car. "In town on business? Need to dump a few bodies in the woods? Go Avis!"
I don't think the paper addressed the question that if in fact SCO's proprietary code got into Linux, how that necessarily means IBM did it. Wouldn't there have to be evidence shown in the form of SCO source code vs IBM contributed source code, belonging to SCO, as being the same? Even then, it would only take about a few weeks before SCO published the specific code, already in Linux and fixes were made to exclude the code...invalidating the whole concept of a license. Its not a fine for using linux, its a license of SCO's proprietary code. Next: Does SCO have the right to sell licenses to code they may not own? Through their own propaganda, they think so...if this is the case and we all flock to buy SCO licenses, could we file a class action suit against SCO for our money back because SCO never owned the code? I could imagine my ass getting sued if i sold the rights to the rolling stones catalogue to some gulliable moron...
Well, isn't morality relative to the person?
I mean, I would be pissed if I saw my girlfriend with another guy, but in some countries its morally right to slash off her nipples.
I don't necessarily think file sharing is "right" as a long term solution, but it is exceptional as a short term one to emphasize a digital revolution. I would buy cds way more (which is now at 0) if there was some value to the goddamned thing and if it could play in my PC.
Though you're right, its the artists we should be concerned with, because the labels sure as hell aren't.
I can't imagine why Vince Neil is touring with Poison (ahhh!) or why Tommy Lee put out a rap-rock fred durst album, other than the fact that they owe and owe for the killerness of the Crue (yeah, i just took 5 minutes to find the umlaut in the character map.)
Morally, the RIAA is wrong. Noone gives a shit when a liar points the finger at someone else for lying. The RIAA needs to be exposed in the major media, and that would take something quite extraordinary.
Hey! Hot for teacher rules! ... ... ...
permission to point and laugh granted....
When it comes to wanking off, I do believe the "My house, my business" defense comes into effect. Surely doing such in the privacy of my own home would not yield the night in jail that doing so at my local hardware store would.
Then by that logic, letting someone else listen to your cd is illegal. By Canadian copyright law, any copy of an original is not infringing on copyright so long as profit isn't made on it. If you brewed your own beer from "joes kit inc" and give me some, can joe sue? I can't say all slashdot users want to share (though im new, myself). Personally, I'd rather buy the old vinyls for a dollar or two. The sense that I seem to get from slashdot is people really, really are sick and tired of corporate muscle being used in technology.