There is nothing wrong with intellectual property laws to the extent that they allow innovators a period of exclusivity to reap the rewards of their innovation
Wrong. There is everything wrong with such laws, but the wrongs are sometimes balanced with rights. It is bad that companies can't copy others' inventions, but there is a potential benefit of increased R&D spendings.
You seem to have the belief that laws are fundamentally good, no matter what they say. There are many good ways to solve the problem of "innovation coming to a screeching halt", while also opening the world of ideas to human creativity. For example, compulsory licensing of patents and designs would allow that company to make their Super Shuffle as long as they pay Apple, say 10$ per item. We would still get our FM-enabled shuffle and Apple would still be stimulated to develop great designs in the future.
Shuffle is the name of a standard function on music players. Saying that Apple's trademark is violated is the same as me calling my CD burning software "Multi-session" and then objecting to someone else using the same word in their product. If Apple wanted strong protection, they should have went with a less generic name.
If Apple didn't have the uber-powerful patent, copyright and trademark laws on its side, we could expect each and every product relentlessly improved by competitors. No longer would we complain about Apple not including FM, because we would have an option of a better competing product and Apple would be forced to include the option or lose part of the market.
This guy is surely not particularly innovative when it comes to whining. He seems to committed to repeating the same argument that gameplay innovation is somehow more important than better graphics.
There are many whiners of smaller rank, but with similar attitude here on Slashdot. Every time a new graphics card is released or a new engine feature is announced, they join the whining, claiming they are dying without good fun innovative gameplay.
I wonder if I am in the minority with my old-fashioned views on computer games.
I like FPS and RTS games and I am probably not alone. I also play some economic sims and some simple racing/flying sims (more arcade than simulation). And I can tell you that I am perfectly willing to shell out the cash for new FPS games with enviable regularity. I will buy and play every AAA-class FPS title. Halo, Far Cry, Painkiller, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Riddick, FEAR, Stalker, etc. I must be an easy customer to please, because I don't buy these games to have some revelation, to have some never before seen gameplay. I buy these games to see more realistic monsters, more realistic water, more realistic trees, more realistic shadows and, of course, more realistic blood splutter and gibs.:) Yes, I do appreciate good story, good acting and increased realism (physics and interactivity), but these are all pretty straightforward things to do. I will probably enjoy an innovative FPS game, but I can also enjoy the same old tried formula - monsters + shotgun + blood splutter.
Don't get me wrong, it's great when game developers innovate and innovation is vital for the long-term well-being of the industry. But to pretend that this innovation is somehow more important than bringing to market incrementally better titles every year, every month and every week, is, in my opinion, deeply wrong.
You can't make every new game as innovative as Kaitamari Daimatsu or whatever it's called. There are simply not enough ideas and genius developers to pull this out. If you want to satiate the enormous game market, you need to make those 1000 titles (how many there are, actually?) every year. And 95-99% of those WILL be formulaic rehashes of old ideas... must accept it.
Now that we see it, let's find out what is more important - better graphics (i.e. better hardware, better engines and overall better technologies) that can benefit 90% of the games, or those "new ideas", which Mr. Iwata is so intent on pushing, and which can only benefit 5-10% of the new games?
I dare suggest that better graphics (and better sound, better physics, faster networks, larger DVDs and so on) are actually more important than gameplay innovations.
"The DVD will be short lived," said Tchuruk. "This kind of video was a passive exercise. Today things need to be much more interactive."... Tchuruk described as "user-centric broadband"
I don't see any other quotes there. It seems that a lot of your attacks on Tchuruk should be targeted at Iain Thomson instead. I am sure that Tchuruk's speach had much more content than the article (I am really uncomfortable calling it an "article", since it seems to be just a quick and dirty recollection of some points made by Serge), but then again, Alcatel Forum was an invitation-only event and I wasn't invited, so what do I know...
I still don't see how you can attack Tchuruk for imprecise language. "Flash in the pan" was not quoted in the article, unlike, say, "user-centric broadband", so we have no reason to believe that Tchuruk used these words.
What he said is that in some indeterminate future (short term enough to warrant speaking about it, but no hard estimates were given) broadband will replace DVDs as delivery method for movies. Nowhere does he claim that customers "will suddenly stop buying DVDs". For all we know, may be Tchuruk agrees with you that "the DVD [will fade] away gradually" like VHS. This sounds reasonable and if a CE? of Alcatel (the leader in fibre-optics) believes it is feasible to provide enough capacity to customers to watch movies via broadband, I see no reason not to believe them.
I share your indignation at the article, it was really pathetic and not very informative. But a) we don't have a better article and b) Serge Tchuruk didn't write it, Iain Thomson did. So please stop attacking Tchuruk. I am starting to suspect that you have some personal grudge against Serge...
We already have broadband, but we don't have: 1) Ubiquitous broadband 2) Online video stores 3) The willingness of movie studios to accept the new distribution mode etc.
It's hard to predict exactly and in details our path to our DVDless future of 2015, because it depends largely on transient random events, but the end result is clear.
In 2015 or so broadband Internet penetration will be 90-100%. All communications will be IP-based and almost everything will be routed on the Internet in one way or another. Every apartment will have a broadband connection, every device will have either wireless (wifi/bluetooth/something else) or wired connection. The consumer electronics at home will be controllable from any other device. Your TV will be capable of getting digital content online if you so wish. The studios will realise that digital online distribution is great and will somehow sort out the DRM/copyright issues (it won't be pretty, but it won't stay a perpetual problem either). If necessary, anonymous P2P will develop to fill the empty niche.
Your TV will be sufficiently high resolution to allow comfortable web/something else browsing. You'll be able to log onto some online video store (or just content store) and browse the films. Alternatively, there won't even be an online store. You will just use a local (or remote) application that would collect the data about films from Semantic Web and present it to you in the format that you choose. On selecting a movie you would simply click "play" and the movie will start instantly. The beginning will be streamed (so that you don't have to wait) in parallel with downloading the rest of the film.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the system will also accept voice input allowing you to simply say "Play the Million Dollar Baby" and that the system will also provide helpful suggestions so that you can just choose the genre (what do you want to watch - a comedy, an action film, a horror movie or drama) and the recommendation system will suggest a film you haven't seen yet, but are statistically likely to enjoy.
All that will make you stop buying DVD. Of course, you can stubbornly pretend that it won't, but that would not be very convincing. And so DVDs will in fact be a "flash in the pan", which can also mean "temporary success without no long-term effects".
And in any case, may be you could be more forgiving to the poor guy. It seems that Tchuruk is French and he can be excused for not knowing the precise meaning of every last English idiom. Especially since his speech at Alcatel Forum might have been in French and so a translator could be responsible for this bad use of a metaphor. Picking on the poor guy for that minor mistake, while completely ignoring his point sounds like something only an idiot would do.
Everything you say makes sense... in the short-term. Yes, DVDs are not going anywhere in a year, even in two years. Heck, even in 5 years DVDs will surely be somewhat popular. However, the rate of technological change is so great that you are virtually guaranteed enormous changes on the scale of 10 years. In 1995 the MP3 music was only beginning to appear online. The DVD specifications were not released until Spetember 1996. These 10 years saw the explosion of digital communications, made the Internet almost ubiquitous and fundamentally changed the way humans find and consume information.
The changes are not slowing down and there is no reason to believe they will anytime soon. In 1995 most hard disks could not hold 500 megabytes and keydrives were non-existant. Using Internet meant using a 14400 baud modem.
It doesn't take a genius (or, rather, it shouldn't take one) to realise that by 2015 we will have bandwidth and storage capacity that seem enormous to us today. There can be no question that we will be able to quickly (immediately, for all practical purposes) transmit DVD-quality (and better) video almost anywhere and then store it on a device as small as it is practical to handle.
To argue that despite all these expected developments people will retain the propensity to physical embodiments of films and music is silly. It is a factor that can be important to one customer deciding today whether to buy a DVD-player or a media center, but not to the whole market on the scale of a decade.
1) Quality. DivX does come as close to DVD quality as its users demand. People, who want to download movies determine the bitrate and quality of DivX. For everyone, who downloads a DivX today, a downloaded file is preferable to a physical copy on a DVD.
2) Ease. With DivX today you need a computer and a vide player. All decent video players disable screensavers, power saving, windows stealing focus, etc. In the future you will buy a versatile digital player, plug it into the telephone line (or just rely on wireless), select the movie and play.
3) If even you can see that your argument is idiotic, why include it? Or do you have an aversion to editing your own posts? And you can stream DVD quality video using wireless Internet, bringing you the ultimate in portability.
People never change. They always keep thinking that today will last forever and tomorrow will never come...
Nope. You are an idiot and that guy is a chief executive of Alcatel. His job is not looking out of the window and saying "DVDs are popular". No, it's about looking 10 years into the future, realising that communications in 2015 are going to be very different from what we have today, and then steering the company into that future, using the opportunities and avoiding the threats to maximum shareholders' satisfaction.
Consider this. Whenether any technology is relatively unpopular (aviation in 1899, video downloading in 2005, personal computers in 1970), asking an average person about its prospects is futile. The person is likely to reply with "noone will ever use it, don't you see that is so popular?", which is expected, but totally wrong.
So the fact that most people think DVDs will rule the earth for millennia to come and broadband will never be all that important, doesn't change the fact that those people are shortsighted morons and the fact that the future will be widely different from today.
CDs WILL die out, just like DVDs. To find out when and how just draw a time graph of music/video sales. You are likely to see a common pattern - a new technology emerges, slowly/quickly gains popularity, enjoys that popularity for a while and then fades back into obscurity. This always happens and will continue to happen, a truly universal pattern of the technological progress.
Look at MP3 sales. Look at MP3-player sales. They are growing and it can mean only one thing - the old technology is dying.
P.S. The fact that you only see what happens with CDs today and try to rationalise why that won't ever change simply means that your prognostication skills suck.
You are a bit misguided about what is so special about physical goods. It's not that they are made of materials, "stuff" that you can touch. It's that they can only be used by one person at a time.
Stealing TVs from the store, sneaking to the concert without paying, etc., all deprive others of something. Someone has to pay for that TV or for that concert seat, so prices for paying customers increase. With MP3 music it's different. Getting a pirated copy doesn't directly harm others. Prices for paying cusomters do not change.
As for your second comment, you are, of course, correct that concerts may not bring to the studios as much money as CDs do. But I suggest we ignore that for simplicity. Otherwise we can start discussing the relative merits of buying a CD in the store A vs. store B, when both stores have different distribution agreements and the studio gets different percentage of the price. Obviously my purchasing decisions always have some effect on studio profits, but it's unreasonable toget into so much details.
The fallacious reasoning behind "piracy=theft" is usually based on the premise that in both case you deprive someone of something. Let's look at this.
In case of physical items it's all clear. I deprive someone of their physical item, they no longer have it, voila - theft.
In case of music it's a bit murky. First, I am clearly not depriving Vanessa's studio of property. No physical property is lost and "intellectual property" can't be lost either. They still have copyright on Vanessa's music, despite me buying a pirated MP3 CD. So what am I depriving them of? The most common answer has imprecise words like "potential revenue", "lost profits", etc. The point is that the studio had some "potential money" and I, by not buying a proper set of 8 15-dollar CDs somehow destroyed that potential money.
Well, that's all fine and dandy, except that we must realise one simple fact - that potential money is ephemeral, can't be precisely measured and is subject to random minute influences of everyday life. My girlfriend could have dumped me while Vanessa Mae's music was playing and it would have formed negative associations in my mind depriving the studio of that "potential revenue". The main conclusion here is that you can't really use the same rules as you do with physical property for dealing with this ephemeral "potential money". There are countless legitimate ways in which I can destroy these potential money and supposedly a few illegitimate ones. You must be very careful to distinguish between these cases.
Sorry for that aside, it was necessary. Now back to my case. There clearly is some "potential money" that I am expected to spend on Vanessa's music. But it is silly to claim that from the very beginning it included at least 320$ (200$ for the concert, 8x15$ for the CDs). The only thing we can be reasonably sure about is that the amount was greater than zero. So if I have just bought the pirated CD, I would have indeed deprived the studio of that "potential money". But I have spent 200$ on the music! Clearly I have created more real money than there ever was potential money - a month ago I would have estimated my future spendings on Vanessa's music at around 10-20$ at most.
So, by very simple reasoning, I haven't deprived the studio of any potential revenue, in fact I gave them much more than anyone could have reasonably expected. This means that buying the pirated CD isn't wrong/bad/unethical/immoral/illegal. The only way to argue that it was bad is to pretend that potential revenue alwyas equals to whatever the studio wants it to be, which makes no sense at all.
This all boils down to the difference between physical and non-material goods, but I hope I made that difference clear and you see that it's more than just "crap".
I only have to add that if most companies making money off open source were writing all that software themselves, there wouldn't be much point in open sourcing it all.
The most natural model for open source is precisely where you take a lot of work done by others, add a little bit of your own work and sell the result. And then have others sell your work, of course.
Well, as a matter of fact, I do live in Russia. So those pesky US laws are, indeed, non-applicable to me.:) But whether they are applicable to Americans is not 100% clear to me. I mean, surely they are applicable, but what do they actually mean?
Here in Russia the law says that the customer is not supposed to be an expert in copyright law. If I buy a disk in a store and get a receipt for it, I can claim to have reasonable expectation that the product is legit, and any court would rule in my favour.
I would dare guess that American customers of Allofmp3 should be reasonably safe. Of course, in the litigous American legal climate they actually aren't safe, because RIAA can still sue them and they would have to settle anyway to avoid legal expenses. But then, the good thing is that noone can know (yet) that you downloaded music from Allofmp3.
In a way it's like saying that buying a car for $20k legitimizes stealing the extras which may only amount to $500.
It isn't. Piracy is not stealing (and copyright infrigement is not piracy). The reasoning behind anti-piracy rhetoric is "potential revenue". If that is insignificant, the argument doesn't hold.
On the contrary, there is nothing greyer. My mother is pushing my to suicide. How else can you interpret constant "what have you done that is so great?" and "your life is worthless" nags. Fortunately, she is not very skilled at it and I grew resistant over time (especially as it's rather easy to see that it's not true).
Then you can easily imagine the whole spectrum of sucide pushers, up to some skillful psycho(logist)s with 100% success rates. You may think that it's easy to draw a line, I would respectfully disagree.
Where we both agree is that some forms of suicide pushing can (should?) be illegal. But I would personally draw the line much closer to "actively pushed to commit suicide someone, who wasn't likely to otherwise". Merely providing non-targeted information about suicide on a website should be, in my opinion, 100% legal protected free speech.
Is it wrong to download MP3s of Beatles songs from Allofmp3?
Hint: all songs by The Beatles are public domain in Russia.
You have no responsibility to buy music only from American stores, especially since the artists get about the same amount of money from them as they do from Russian sites.
Download music where it's the most convinient for you. And if you feel like you need to support the artists, go to their concert. E.g., I recently paid about 200$ for a ticket to Vanessa Mae's concert. Immediately after the concert I bought a pirated CD with all her eight albums in MP3 format for 2.5$ (effectively paying even less than 5 cents for a song). Please explain to me why that was wrong.
IEEE clearly makes a big deal of archiving, pretending that it is a very challenging and expensive endevour. But I suspect that if magazines released their works to the public without restrictive copyrights (basically releasing them into public domain) after recoupering somehow their initial costs, then quickly a host of independent archievers would emerge, just like it happened with Wikipedia. These archievers would then take care of distribution, backups, data migration, offline distribution, interface innovations, etc.
You don't understand free speech, particularly the "free" part. If the government has the right to prohibit information about committing suicide, than the country has no free speech at all, it only has "government-sanctioned" speech.
You ask why should any psycho be free to push people to kill themselves. I raise you the question of why we allow any psycho to preach his religion to people, why we allow advocacy groups to work. I personally don't see how distributing information about suicide is worse than preaching Christianity or Islam.
How is it different from me paying a newspaper to print my ads promoting some discounted special offers, then raising the prices back and refusing to do anything about newspaper ads, because I forget which newspaper it was, don't remember the name of my advertising agency, lost their telephone number, the dog ate my homework, etc.
It's not different, just because it's online. You fail to update your website, it's your fault, now pay a fine AND fix the problem.
Because how can you trust people, who write such shitty laws? If they can't think in advance about how this law applies to eBay, how can you trust them to modify it properly?
You had a nice childhood, alright. But the question is - can most parents provide the same kind of childhood to their children? I think it's neither possible, nor desirable. Parenting cannot be and should not be a full-time job (although I am glad that it was for my mother).
A robotic teddy bear can take some of the burden from parents. It can do much more than simply console the kid. It can teach the child about the world, point him towards good books, give him ideas for creative projects, keep an eye on his safety and so on. In essence it can be a childhood companion, a reliable surrogate friend, parent, or brother. And the level of its activity and intrusiveness can be adjusted depending on the child's environment. If owned by a lucky kid such as you or I, the teddy bear would not be as involved, would not bond with the kid as strongly and would play a more supportive role, helping the parents, not parenting the kid itself. But belonging to a poor kid living in a bad neighborhood with a single mom, who works two jobs, the teddy bear would take a more active role in child's development.
To get some ideas you can read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. While the general quality of its predictions is rather low, it shows nicely the feasibility of using AI toys (a book in that case) to raise children.
P.S. I realise that not all toys will be as responsible as I outlined above, but then how would it be worse than the present?
I don't think I need to explain this in details. You don't have a chance to elect decent people, those who are elected are not accountable, there are many avenues for corruption, there is little oversight and those who know how to game the system will win through sheer insistence.
The only way to change anything is through violent force. Find out how your MEP voted. If he/she voted for patents, find out where he/she lives, go there and kill him/her. Repeat as necessary, all the while bombarding the media with your statements (patents bad, democracy good, corruption bad, stand up and fight, and so on). There simply is no other way to go. The corporations have more money than you do, their lobbists have more time, their lawyers know the loopholes better and they all have more contacts.
Seriously, I believe we don't need too many cases of targeted violence before terrorism becomes a good word again.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing wrong with intellectual property laws to the extent that they allow innovators a period of exclusivity to reap the rewards of their innovation
Wrong. There is everything wrong with such laws, but the wrongs are sometimes balanced with rights. It is bad that companies can't copy others' inventions, but there is a potential benefit of increased R&D spendings.
You seem to have the belief that laws are fundamentally good, no matter what they say. There are many good ways to solve the problem of "innovation coming to a screeching halt", while also opening the world of ideas to human creativity. For example, compulsory licensing of patents and designs would allow that company to make their Super Shuffle as long as they pay Apple, say 10$ per item. We would still get our FM-enabled shuffle and Apple would still be stimulated to develop great designs in the future.
Shuffle is the name of a standard function on music players. Saying that Apple's trademark is violated is the same as me calling my CD burning software "Multi-session" and then objecting to someone else using the same word in their product. If Apple wanted strong protection, they should have went with a less generic name.
If Apple didn't have the uber-powerful patent, copyright and trademark laws on its side, we could expect each and every product relentlessly improved by competitors. No longer would we complain about Apple not including FM, because we would have an option of a better competing product and Apple would be forced to include the option or lose part of the market.
This guy is surely not particularly innovative when it comes to whining. He seems to committed to repeating the same argument that gameplay innovation is somehow more important than better graphics.
:) Yes, I do appreciate good story, good acting and increased realism (physics and interactivity), but these are all pretty straightforward things to do. I will probably enjoy an innovative FPS game, but I can also enjoy the same old tried formula - monsters + shotgun + blood splutter.
There are many whiners of smaller rank, but with similar attitude here on Slashdot. Every time a new graphics card is released or a new engine feature is announced, they join the whining, claiming they are dying without good fun innovative gameplay.
I wonder if I am in the minority with my old-fashioned views on computer games.
I like FPS and RTS games and I am probably not alone. I also play some economic sims and some simple racing/flying sims (more arcade than simulation). And I can tell you that I am perfectly willing to shell out the cash for new FPS games with enviable regularity. I will buy and play every AAA-class FPS title. Halo, Far Cry, Painkiller, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Riddick, FEAR, Stalker, etc. I must be an easy customer to please, because I don't buy these games to have some revelation, to have some never before seen gameplay. I buy these games to see more realistic monsters, more realistic water, more realistic trees, more realistic shadows and, of course, more realistic blood splutter and gibs.
Don't get me wrong, it's great when game developers innovate and innovation is vital for the long-term well-being of the industry. But to pretend that this innovation is somehow more important than bringing to market incrementally better titles every year, every month and every week, is, in my opinion, deeply wrong.
You can't make every new game as innovative as Kaitamari Daimatsu or whatever it's called. There are simply not enough ideas and genius developers to pull this out. If you want to satiate the enormous game market, you need to make those 1000 titles (how many there are, actually?) every year. And 95-99% of those WILL be formulaic rehashes of old ideas... must accept it.
Now that we see it, let's find out what is more important - better graphics (i.e. better hardware, better engines and overall better technologies) that can benefit 90% of the games, or those "new ideas", which Mr. Iwata is so intent on pushing, and which can only benefit 5-10% of the new games?
I dare suggest that better graphics (and better sound, better physics, faster networks, larger DVDs and so on) are actually more important than gameplay innovations.
"The DVD will be short lived," said Tchuruk. "This kind of video was a passive exercise. Today things need to be much more interactive." ... Tchuruk described as "user-centric broadband"
I don't see any other quotes there. It seems that a lot of your attacks on Tchuruk should be targeted at Iain Thomson instead. I am sure that Tchuruk's speach had much more content than the article (I am really uncomfortable calling it an "article", since it seems to be just a quick and dirty recollection of some points made by Serge), but then again, Alcatel Forum was an invitation-only event and I wasn't invited, so what do I know...
I still don't see how you can attack Tchuruk for imprecise language. "Flash in the pan" was not quoted in the article, unlike, say, "user-centric broadband", so we have no reason to believe that Tchuruk used these words.
What he said is that in some indeterminate future (short term enough to warrant speaking about it, but no hard estimates were given) broadband will replace DVDs as delivery method for movies. Nowhere does he claim that customers "will suddenly stop buying DVDs". For all we know, may be Tchuruk agrees with you that "the DVD [will fade] away gradually" like VHS. This sounds reasonable and if a CE? of Alcatel (the leader in fibre-optics) believes it is feasible to provide enough capacity to customers to watch movies via broadband, I see no reason not to believe them.
I share your indignation at the article, it was really pathetic and not very informative. But a) we don't have a better article and b) Serge Tchuruk didn't write it, Iain Thomson did. So please stop attacking Tchuruk. I am starting to suspect that you have some personal grudge against Serge...
We already have broadband, but we don't have:
1) Ubiquitous broadband
2) Online video stores
3) The willingness of movie studios to accept the new distribution mode
etc.
It's hard to predict exactly and in details our path to our DVDless future of 2015, because it depends largely on transient random events, but the end result is clear.
In 2015 or so broadband Internet penetration will be 90-100%. All communications will be IP-based and almost everything will be routed on the Internet in one way or another. Every apartment will have a broadband connection, every device will have either wireless (wifi/bluetooth/something else) or wired connection. The consumer electronics at home will be controllable from any other device. Your TV will be capable of getting digital content online if you so wish. The studios will realise that digital online distribution is great and will somehow sort out the DRM/copyright issues (it won't be pretty, but it won't stay a perpetual problem either). If necessary, anonymous P2P will develop to fill the empty niche.
Your TV will be sufficiently high resolution to allow comfortable web/something else browsing. You'll be able to log onto some online video store (or just content store) and browse the films. Alternatively, there won't even be an online store. You will just use a local (or remote) application that would collect the data about films from Semantic Web and present it to you in the format that you choose. On selecting a movie you would simply click "play" and the movie will start instantly. The beginning will be streamed (so that you don't have to wait) in parallel with downloading the rest of the film.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the system will also accept voice input allowing you to simply say "Play the Million Dollar Baby" and that the system will also provide helpful suggestions so that you can just choose the genre (what do you want to watch - a comedy, an action film, a horror movie or drama) and the recommendation system will suggest a film you haven't seen yet, but are statistically likely to enjoy.
All that will make you stop buying DVD. Of course, you can stubbornly pretend that it won't, but that would not be very convincing. And so DVDs will in fact be a "flash in the pan", which can also mean "temporary success without no long-term effects".
And in any case, may be you could be more forgiving to the poor guy. It seems that Tchuruk is French and he can be excused for not knowing the precise meaning of every last English idiom. Especially since his speech at Alcatel Forum might have been in French and so a translator could be responsible for this bad use of a metaphor. Picking on the poor guy for that minor mistake, while completely ignoring his point sounds like something only an idiot would do.
It should have been "noone will ever use it, don't you see that is so popular?", but I forgot to escape the angular brackets.
Everything you say makes sense... in the short-term. Yes, DVDs are not going anywhere in a year, even in two years. Heck, even in 5 years DVDs will surely be somewhat popular. However, the rate of technological change is so great that you are virtually guaranteed enormous changes on the scale of 10 years. In 1995 the MP3 music was only beginning to appear online. The DVD specifications were not released until Spetember 1996. These 10 years saw the explosion of digital communications, made the Internet almost ubiquitous and fundamentally changed the way humans find and consume information.
The changes are not slowing down and there is no reason to believe they will anytime soon. In 1995 most hard disks could not hold 500 megabytes and keydrives were non-existant. Using Internet meant using a 14400 baud modem.
It doesn't take a genius (or, rather, it shouldn't take one) to realise that by 2015 we will have bandwidth and storage capacity that seem enormous to us today. There can be no question that we will be able to quickly (immediately, for all practical purposes) transmit DVD-quality (and better) video almost anywhere and then store it on a device as small as it is practical to handle.
To argue that despite all these expected developments people will retain the propensity to physical embodiments of films and music is silly. It is a factor that can be important to one customer deciding today whether to buy a DVD-player or a media center, but not to the whole market on the scale of a decade.
1) Quality. DivX does come as close to DVD quality as its users demand. People, who want to download movies determine the bitrate and quality of DivX. For everyone, who downloads a DivX today, a downloaded file is preferable to a physical copy on a DVD.
2) Ease. With DivX today you need a computer and a vide player. All decent video players disable screensavers, power saving, windows stealing focus, etc. In the future you will buy a versatile digital player, plug it into the telephone line (or just rely on wireless), select the movie and play.
3) If even you can see that your argument is idiotic, why include it? Or do you have an aversion to editing your own posts? And you can stream DVD quality video using wireless Internet, bringing you the ultimate in portability.
People never change. They always keep thinking that today will last forever and tomorrow will never come...
Nope. You are an idiot and that guy is a chief executive of Alcatel. His job is not looking out of the window and saying "DVDs are popular". No, it's about looking 10 years into the future, realising that communications in 2015 are going to be very different from what we have today, and then steering the company into that future, using the opportunities and avoiding the threats to maximum shareholders' satisfaction.
Consider this. Whenether any technology is relatively unpopular (aviation in 1899, video downloading in 2005, personal computers in 1970), asking an average person about its prospects is futile. The person is likely to reply with "noone will ever use it, don't you see that is so popular?", which is expected, but totally wrong.
So the fact that most people think DVDs will rule the earth for millennia to come and broadband will never be all that important, doesn't change the fact that those people are shortsighted morons and the fact that the future will be widely different from today.
CDs WILL die out, just like DVDs. To find out when and how just draw a time graph of music/video sales. You are likely to see a common pattern - a new technology emerges, slowly/quickly gains popularity, enjoys that popularity for a while and then fades back into obscurity. This always happens and will continue to happen, a truly universal pattern of the technological progress.
Look at MP3 sales. Look at MP3-player sales. They are growing and it can mean only one thing - the old technology is dying.
P.S. The fact that you only see what happens with CDs today and try to rationalise why that won't ever change simply means that your prognostication skills suck.
You are a bit misguided about what is so special about physical goods. It's not that they are made of materials, "stuff" that you can touch. It's that they can only be used by one person at a time.
Stealing TVs from the store, sneaking to the concert without paying, etc., all deprive others of something. Someone has to pay for that TV or for that concert seat, so prices for paying customers increase. With MP3 music it's different. Getting a pirated copy doesn't directly harm others. Prices for paying cusomters do not change.
As for your second comment, you are, of course, correct that concerts may not bring to the studios as much money as CDs do. But I suggest we ignore that for simplicity. Otherwise we can start discussing the relative merits of buying a CD in the store A vs. store B, when both stores have different distribution agreements and the studio gets different percentage of the price. Obviously my purchasing decisions always have some effect on studio profits, but it's unreasonable toget into so much details.
The fallacious reasoning behind "piracy=theft" is usually based on the premise that in both case you deprive someone of something. Let's look at this.
In case of physical items it's all clear. I deprive someone of their physical item, they no longer have it, voila - theft.
In case of music it's a bit murky. First, I am clearly not depriving Vanessa's studio of property. No physical property is lost and "intellectual property" can't be lost either. They still have copyright on Vanessa's music, despite me buying a pirated MP3 CD. So what am I depriving them of? The most common answer has imprecise words like "potential revenue", "lost profits", etc. The point is that the studio had some "potential money" and I, by not buying a proper set of 8 15-dollar CDs somehow destroyed that potential money.
Well, that's all fine and dandy, except that we must realise one simple fact - that potential money is ephemeral, can't be precisely measured and is subject to random minute influences of everyday life. My girlfriend could have dumped me while Vanessa Mae's music was playing and it would have formed negative associations in my mind depriving the studio of that "potential revenue". The main conclusion here is that you can't really use the same rules as you do with physical property for dealing with this ephemeral "potential money". There are countless legitimate ways in which I can destroy these potential money and supposedly a few illegitimate ones. You must be very careful to distinguish between these cases.
Sorry for that aside, it was necessary. Now back to my case. There clearly is some "potential money" that I am expected to spend on Vanessa's music. But it is silly to claim that from the very beginning it included at least 320$ (200$ for the concert, 8x15$ for the CDs). The only thing we can be reasonably sure about is that the amount was greater than zero. So if I have just bought the pirated CD, I would have indeed deprived the studio of that "potential money". But I have spent 200$ on the music! Clearly I have created more real money than there ever was potential money - a month ago I would have estimated my future spendings on Vanessa's music at around 10-20$ at most.
So, by very simple reasoning, I haven't deprived the studio of any potential revenue, in fact I gave them much more than anyone could have reasonably expected. This means that buying the pirated CD isn't wrong/bad/unethical/immoral/illegal. The only way to argue that it was bad is to pretend that potential revenue alwyas equals to whatever the studio wants it to be, which makes no sense at all.
This all boils down to the difference between physical and non-material goods, but I hope I made that difference clear and you see that it's more than just "crap".
I only have to add that if most companies making money off open source were writing all that software themselves, there wouldn't be much point in open sourcing it all.
The most natural model for open source is precisely where you take a lot of work done by others, add a little bit of your own work and sell the result. And then have others sell your work, of course.
Well, as a matter of fact, I do live in Russia. So those pesky US laws are, indeed, non-applicable to me. :) But whether they are applicable to Americans is not 100% clear to me. I mean, surely they are applicable, but what do they actually mean?
Here in Russia the law says that the customer is not supposed to be an expert in copyright law. If I buy a disk in a store and get a receipt for it, I can claim to have reasonable expectation that the product is legit, and any court would rule in my favour.
I would dare guess that American customers of Allofmp3 should be reasonably safe. Of course, in the litigous American legal climate they actually aren't safe, because RIAA can still sue them and they would have to settle anyway to avoid legal expenses. But then, the good thing is that noone can know (yet) that you downloaded music from Allofmp3.
In a way it's like saying that buying a car for $20k legitimizes stealing the extras which may only amount to $500.
It isn't. Piracy is not stealing (and copyright infrigement is not piracy). The reasoning behind anti-piracy rhetoric is "potential revenue". If that is insignificant, the argument doesn't hold.
On the contrary, there is nothing greyer. My mother is pushing my to suicide. How else can you interpret constant "what have you done that is so great?" and "your life is worthless" nags. Fortunately, she is not very skilled at it and I grew resistant over time (especially as it's rather easy to see that it's not true).
Then you can easily imagine the whole spectrum of sucide pushers, up to some skillful psycho(logist)s with 100% success rates. You may think that it's easy to draw a line, I would respectfully disagree.
Where we both agree is that some forms of suicide pushing can (should?) be illegal. But I would personally draw the line much closer to "actively pushed to commit suicide someone, who wasn't likely to otherwise". Merely providing non-targeted information about suicide on a website should be, in my opinion, 100% legal protected free speech.
Is it wrong to download MP3s of Beatles songs from Allofmp3?
Hint: all songs by The Beatles are public domain in Russia.
You have no responsibility to buy music only from American stores, especially since the artists get about the same amount of money from them as they do from Russian sites.
Download music where it's the most convinient for you. And if you feel like you need to support the artists, go to their concert. E.g., I recently paid about 200$ for a ticket to Vanessa Mae's concert. Immediately after the concert I bought a pirated CD with all her eight albums in MP3 format for 2.5$ (effectively paying even less than 5 cents for a song). Please explain to me why that was wrong.
This is exactly why I vehemently oppose cannabis legalisation. Look what it does to Canadians.
IEEE clearly makes a big deal of archiving, pretending that it is a very challenging and expensive endevour. But I suspect that if magazines released their works to the public without restrictive copyrights (basically releasing them into public domain) after recoupering somehow their initial costs, then quickly a host of independent archievers would emerge, just like it happened with Wikipedia. These archievers would then take care of distribution, backups, data migration, offline distribution, interface innovations, etc.
You don't understand free speech, particularly the "free" part. If the government has the right to prohibit information about committing suicide, than the country has no free speech at all, it only has "government-sanctioned" speech.
You ask why should any psycho be free to push people to kill themselves. I raise you the question of why we allow any psycho to preach his religion to people, why we allow advocacy groups to work. I personally don't see how distributing information about suicide is worse than preaching Christianity or Islam.
How is it different from me paying a newspaper to print my ads promoting some discounted special offers, then raising the prices back and refusing to do anything about newspaper ads, because I forget which newspaper it was, don't remember the name of my advertising agency, lost their telephone number, the dog ate my homework, etc.
It's not different, just because it's online. You fail to update your website, it's your fault, now pay a fine AND fix the problem.
Because how can you trust people, who write such shitty laws? If they can't think in advance about how this law applies to eBay, how can you trust them to modify it properly?
You had a nice childhood, alright. But the question is - can most parents provide the same kind of childhood to their children? I think it's neither possible, nor desirable. Parenting cannot be and should not be a full-time job (although I am glad that it was for my mother).
A robotic teddy bear can take some of the burden from parents. It can do much more than simply console the kid. It can teach the child about the world, point him towards good books, give him ideas for creative projects, keep an eye on his safety and so on. In essence it can be a childhood companion, a reliable surrogate friend, parent, or brother. And the level of its activity and intrusiveness can be adjusted depending on the child's environment. If owned by a lucky kid such as you or I, the teddy bear would not be as involved, would not bond with the kid as strongly and would play a more supportive role, helping the parents, not parenting the kid itself. But belonging to a poor kid living in a bad neighborhood with a single mom, who works two jobs, the teddy bear would take a more active role in child's development.
To get some ideas you can read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. While the general quality of its predictions is rather low, it shows nicely the feasibility of using AI toys (a book in that case) to raise children.
P.S. I realise that not all toys will be as responsible as I outlined above, but then how would it be worse than the present?
...is that it doesn't work.
I don't think I need to explain this in details. You don't have a chance to elect decent people, those who are elected are not accountable, there are many avenues for corruption, there is little oversight and those who know how to game the system will win through sheer insistence.
The only way to change anything is through violent force. Find out how your MEP voted. If he/she voted for patents, find out where he/she lives, go there and kill him/her. Repeat as necessary, all the while bombarding the media with your statements (patents bad, democracy good, corruption bad, stand up and fight, and so on). There simply is no other way to go. The corporations have more money than you do, their lobbists have more time, their lawyers know the loopholes better and they all have more contacts.
Seriously, I believe we don't need too many cases of targeted violence before terrorism becomes a good word again.