According to Lawrence Lessig (6 min 30 in), some 75% of all books are orphaned. It's legally impossible to do anything with those works, because the copyright holder can't be reached for permission.
I think you're suggesting that that should be no problem, because if the copyright owner can't be found, who's going to sue you for using their work? The problem is that you don't know they're not going to suddenly appear and sue you afterward, and for this reason no right-minded company will publish/broadcast/produce your work unless you have secured all related rights.
So, to answer your question, these works are an issue because otherwise some 75% of creative works are just lost: out of print and inaccessible.
How nice to be so binary, but for many of us the situation is not so clear-cut. I do not want to be shown animated ads at all: their usefulness to me is outweighed by their intrusiveness. But I'm perfectly happy for a site to include text links, because they may be relevant, and will help keep this website, which I have found useful enough to visit, operational.
Currently there is no way for me to express this preference. I have to block everything or nothing.
Except it's not. Posts from Last.fm staff in the comments make it clear that this is about revenue maximization, not licensing problems:
[The US, UK, and Germany] are the countries in which we have the most resources to support an ad sales organization, which is how we earn money to pay artists and labels for their music. We are focused on the US, UK, and Germany as key markets, with the help of the CBS Interactive salesforce and our own sales team here in London.... And so we've made the decision to focus on these markets for free streaming radio.
No, either way, it's wrong. The heading says, "Second Brightest-Object In the Sky," which is incorrect, because the Sun is the brightest object in the sky and the second-brightest is the Moon.
The summary says, "the brightest object in the night sky," which is incorrect, because that would be the Moon.
I know you're joking, but this is Slashdot, and I expect the jokes to be funny AND measurably correct.
> Now you could disable it on the system, I suppose, but that'd gain you nothing. The software would just refuse to play.
I suppose the objection is that DRM such as HDCP only proliferates if players support it. The content manufacturers come up with a scheme, and all the little software & hardware players must come on board, because if they don't their products won't be able to play the content.
Microsoft, by virtue of its near-monopoly on the desktop, could kill a DRM scheme for the desktop simply by refusing to support it. But they choose not to. Which is a reasonable business decision, but still rankles.
Politicians never really stop campaigning, of course, but I think it's exacerbated by two things in the US:
1. Fixed election day. Which is useful in its own right, but encourages campaigning to start early. Where I live (Australia), the government can call an election any time within a certain window, which prevents parties from entering full-scale campaign mode until then.
2. Term limits. When an incumbent runs, their governing--what they're doing in office--is a major part of their campaign. The challenger's campaign is forced to focus on what the incumbent has done wrong and what they'd do differently. Without an incumbent, it's much more hot air and promises, the kind of campaigning that gets tiresome. The US has very low term limits, relatively speaking, which creates many incumbent-free elections.
Not to stereotype Slashdot readers or anything, but I notice nobody sees any difference between sunlight and electric light. If you go outdoors during the day, you may be surprised to find daylight has many ambient properties not provided by your basement's fluorescent bulb (warmth, happy feelings, etc).
Let me save you some time and map out your journey to acceptance of the awesome bar.
First you hate it, because it's new and different to what you expect. You are trained to use it as an address bar and nothing else, so it acting like a search bar is confusing and suboptimal to you.
At this point many people decide to trial the new bar, but you are the kind of person who tends to think he (forgive me, but he) knows what's good and what's not, and even quite enjoy the idea of customizing your Firefox. So you look for a way to preserve your old behavior. There are enough people like you to make worthwhile a mass solution: a config option and an extension.
You and your anti-awesome fellows make use of these. You occasionally grumble that the awesome bar shouldn't be default at all, but you are basically satisfied so the rest of the world hears from you less and less.
As time passes, you occasionally find yourself using other people's computers that have Firefox in a default state. This annoys you at first and if you are spending any serious time on them, you disable the awesome bar. But sometimes you're only using them briefly, so it's not worth modifying. Then, all of a sudden, you find the awesome bar useful. It's a surprise, like a door opening: you suddenly see that if you alter your behavior a little, the awesome bar could be quite useful.
From this point you never disable the awesome bar again, although you leave it disabled on your main desktop, as a matter of principle.
A new version of Firefox is released. The "Disable Firefox Awesome Bar" extension hasn't yet been updated to work on it. But by now you don't really mind. You now prefer the awesome bar. When you have to use Internet Explorer, or Firefox 2, the lack of an awesome bar bugs you. It seems so inflexible, so archaic.
A while later, the author of the awesome-disabling extension stops updating it. People forget that anybody ever didn't like the awesome bar. But this new Firefox feature, the predictive URL form mapping--oh man, that's just so horrible, why is it on by default?
I use Linux -- no iTunes. How can I watch? Please answer quickly, knowing other people are watching new Joss Whedon stuff while I'm locked out may cause me to go TOTALLY FREAKING POSTAL.
Why do people insist upon treating a corporation like it is anything other than a legal fiction?
Because it is. It's very simplistic to consider a corporation no more than the sum of its parts. You're buying into the "bad apple" fallacy, whereby corporate misdeeds are blamed on one or two terrible individuals (who can then be fired and scapegoated). The thing is, if you look at enough of these, you find that the vast majority of corporate crimes against the community (as opposed to crimes against the corporation, like embezzlement) are not due to bad apples. They are the result of small decisions over years or decades from dozens or hundreds of different people, none of whom can be considered particularly evil or acted out of any motive other than to perform well in their job. In many cases, there are many people who should have known better but had no incentive to speak up, or to act on information received from those who did.
You can't blame the entire endless series of corporate misdeeds (tobacco, asbestos, chemicals...) on random bad apples. There is a systemic pressure on individuals within corporations to make small trade-offs of ethics for profitability. The beneficiary of these accumulated bad decisions, and the reason that pressure exists, is the corporation, and it should rightly be held accountable.
That's it! I can't take it any more! Every second Slashdot story tries to make something seem more evil and mysterious by saying it's been done "quietly." Now you can be quiet even when you make an announcement?
you can't just make it *look* like you've changed your spots. You actually have to change your behavior, and regaining credibility takes a lot longer than destroying it does.
Only to people who pay attention.
You noticed this because it's tech. You don't notice most of the thousands of times it happens elsewhere.
If she had a passenger in the car and they had suddenly said "stop the car NOW" I bet she would have done the same thing.
Is that perhaps not the point, though? Some people think computers are as smart as human brains--even more so; infallible. Those of us more familiar with tech recognize it can be incredibly stupid. I would be inclined to react quickly if my passenger yelled, "Stop the car!"; less so if my on-board computer did.
So it dosn't seem like The Chaser are against piracy, only the ABC.
Gotta point out that if the legal copyright owner gives permission for free use of its material, it's got nothing to do with "piracy."
It actually creeps me out a little whenever I see "pirating" used as a general term for "downloading something for free." That's only true if all media is locked up and restricted... and we're not there quite yet.
Re:Why do this?
on
AMD's New DRM
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
AMD is coming out with some super awesome new AMD MegaLIVE!++ media PC that will automagically buy and download every movie and TV show they ever wanted to watch, and will let them listen to music and watch movies everywhere they go, and it will cure cancer, stop global warming, end our dependence on foreign oil, and bring about world peace.
People like you and I need to step aside and let the tech community vet Dr. Jacobson's "methods"
Hey Ray,
Couldn't agree more. My concern is that you're not seeing the strengths of Slashdot (the collective tech wisdom) but the weaknesses (groupthink and the tendency to assume that everything a RIAA stooge says must be wrong). I mean, seriously, let's not kid ourselves that the Slashdot crowd doesn't have biases.
If the aim here is to help you build your case, what you want to see is some dispassionate, disinterested evaluation. For example, from the transcript, you are clearly all over the fact that Jacobson didn't document his methods and that he doesn't have a clue whether the data he built his conclusion from is accurate. That's a great argument. But it's not enhanced by a dozen outraged, tub-thumping posts here saying the exact same thing, as far as I can see. What would help you is a reasoned evaluation of exactly how reliable that Kazaa private IP is likely to be, so you're well-equipped with the facts when you have to attack that at trial.
That's why I'm bothered by all those "It's possible to fake IPs/hack Kazaa, what a moron!" posts. Sure, it's possible, but is it likely? (Especially in this case, given the defendant.) I suspect that if these posters were trying to ID a random person over the web, they wouldn't waste too much time on the possibility that there was some advanced IP spoofing going on.
I'm not especially techy, but it seems that the general opinion here is much harsher on Jacobson than is really warranted. Obviously most of us here think he's on the wrong side of an important fight, but we need to actually address what he says, not dismiss him because we think he sucks.
The on-topic +5 posts here seem very biased to me. They are insulting towards Jacobsen but fail to identify anything like an actual error in anything he says. The general opinion as to why he's wrong seems to be (a) the RIAA could have faked their screenshots, (b) the application could have been custom-hacked to lie about its private IP address, (c) Jacobson doesn't know exactly how the sniffer technology works. Which is all true. But it's quite unlikely that the RIAA is faking up screenshots so they can accuse completely random people of illegal file sharing, or that the accused custom-hacked their Kazaa client, or that the sniffer tech is totally bogus.
If you're accused of illegal file sharing and you're innocent, I'd imagine plausible reasons why are: (a) They identified the infringer's IP address correctly but are mistaken in thinking it was assigned to you during the relevant time window; or (b) The infringement did take place on your IP address but you have an unsecured network (ideally a wireless router) and god knows who did it; or (c) The infringement did take place on your computer but several people use that and who knows which of them did it.
Unless Verizon screwed up, (a) seems out. And despite what Ray seems hell-bent on establishing, so does (b), given the public IP/private IP match. That strongly suggests it was indeed a single computer with a direct connection to the internet. Now, I know it's not 100% proof. But it seems to be quite likely, and I'd think it certainly sounds plausible to a judge.
Now please correct me if and where I'm wrong! Can we actually find something Jacobson said that's plainly wrong, and not just possibly wrong under unlikely circumstances?
This is my first real-life encounter with a deposition, and I've gotta say it's quite fascinating. I like how the opposing lawyer relentlessly objects to nearly every single question. And how Mr. Beckerman's first goal seems to be to show that the "expert" has a financial interest in what he's been claiming, coupled with that expert's bizarre claims that he doesn't have the foggiest idea about the commercial reality surrounding his work. For example:
A. Our company worked with Audible Magic to develop a product to stop peer-to-peer traffic as identified by Audible Magic's proprietary code.
Q. And you are testifying here today that you have no idea how the RIAA reacted to this work that you are doing?
A. That's correct.
Q. Have the press releases issued by Palisade Systems referred to the RIAA?
MR. GABRIEL: I object to the form.
Lack of foundation.
A. I'm sure that some of our press releases have probably mentioned the RIAA.
I'm not sure how you can have "no idea" whether the RIAA is pleased, furious, or otherwise about the fact that your company is creating anti-P2P products, while being simultaneously "sure" that your company is referring to the RIAA in its press releases to help sell its products.
This is funny, too:
Q. Based upon your examination of the hard drive which you examined, what evidence did you find that inculpated Marie Lindor personally?
MR. GABRIEL: Object to the form.
Lack of foundation.
A. Would you please define the second-to-last word.
Q. "Her"?
A. No, "inculpated." Would you please define that for me.
Q. Do you not know what the word "inculpated" means?
A. That's correct.
Q. Are you familiar with the word "exculpate"?
A. No.
Q. What is your educational background?
A. Computer engineering.
Also in the 90's - did you know that they SPED UP the shows so that a 44minute show ran for 43minutes? Yeap - another minute of ads there. (channel 9 was the main user of this)
Hmm... you sure that isn't just an effect of NTSC/PAL transfer? Converting 24fps film to 25fps PAL can cause a 4% speedup.
But I'm totally with you on the networks doing everything they can to make Aussie TV not worth watching. One time I missed the end of "The Closer" because it was broadcast 20 minutes late. I downloaded the show for the last few minutes and discovered that in the US it had been a special ad-free episode. Channel 9 had decided that rather than (a) show it ad-free, or (b) schedule 90 minutes for the show plus ads, it would instead (c) cut around 15 minutes out of the show and replace with ads. No wonder I'd found the ep hard to follow!
Not to mention how Aussie TV stations routinely show episodes out-of-order, mix surprise repeats in with new episodes, throw up big ad banners during the show, never start on time...
I think it is important to note that they are, indeed, pseudo-persons. They have not actually any consciousness, will or deciding ability in themselves. Normally, that task is carried out by actual humans.
There's an interesting view emerging that it's actually more accurate to view a corporation as a self-aware entity. The reason that corporations routinely engage in behavior that would be considered obscene by a human being is not that there just happen to be a few "bad eggs" in positions of power, but rather that the structure of a corporation encourages and extracts bad behavior from otherwise reasonable human beings.
There are endless examples of this, and an intriguing discussion in Wade Rowland's Greed, Inc.. It's convenient for corporations to blame "bad egg" individual employees, because people can be easily replaced, and ignores the reality that the true root of the problem is systemic.
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla guy responds to that here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=522777#c83
According to Lawrence Lessig (6 min 30 in), some 75% of all books are orphaned. It's legally impossible to do anything with those works, because the copyright holder can't be reached for permission.
I think you're suggesting that that should be no problem, because if the copyright owner can't be found, who's going to sue you for using their work? The problem is that you don't know they're not going to suddenly appear and sue you afterward, and for this reason no right-minded company will publish/broadcast/produce your work unless you have secured all related rights.
So, to answer your question, these works are an issue because otherwise some 75% of creative works are just lost: out of print and inaccessible.
How nice to be so binary, but for many of us the situation is not so clear-cut. I do not want to be shown animated ads at all: their usefulness to me is outweighed by their intrusiveness. But I'm perfectly happy for a site to include text links, because they may be relevant, and will help keep this website, which I have found useful enough to visit, operational.
Currently there is no way for me to express this preference. I have to block everything or nothing.
Except it's not. Posts from Last.fm staff in the comments make it clear that this is about revenue maximization, not licensing problems:
[The US, UK, and Germany] are the countries in which we have the most resources to support an ad sales organization, which is how we earn money to pay artists and labels for their music. We are focused on the US, UK, and Germany as key markets, with the help of the CBS Interactive salesforce and our own sales team here in London. ... And so we've made the decision to focus on these markets for free streaming radio.
No, either way, it's wrong. The heading says, "Second Brightest-Object In the Sky," which is incorrect, because the Sun is the brightest object in the sky and the second-brightest is the Moon.
The summary says, "the brightest object in the night sky," which is incorrect, because that would be the Moon.
I know you're joking, but this is Slashdot, and I expect the jokes to be funny AND measurably correct.
> Now you could disable it on the system, I suppose, but that'd gain you nothing. The software would just refuse to play.
I suppose the objection is that DRM such as HDCP only proliferates if players support it. The content manufacturers come up with a scheme, and all the little software & hardware players must come on board, because if they don't their products won't be able to play the content.
Microsoft, by virtue of its near-monopoly on the desktop, could kill a DRM scheme for the desktop simply by refusing to support it. But they choose not to. Which is a reasonable business decision, but still rankles.
That's my guess, anyway.
[citation needed]
Politicians never really stop campaigning, of course, but I think it's exacerbated by two things in the US:
1. Fixed election day. Which is useful in its own right, but encourages campaigning to start early. Where I live (Australia), the government can call an election any time within a certain window, which prevents parties from entering full-scale campaign mode until then.
2. Term limits. When an incumbent runs, their governing--what they're doing in office--is a major part of their campaign. The challenger's campaign is forced to focus on what the incumbent has done wrong and what they'd do differently. Without an incumbent, it's much more hot air and promises, the kind of campaigning that gets tiresome. The US has very low term limits, relatively speaking, which creates many incumbent-free elections.
Not to stereotype Slashdot readers or anything, but I notice nobody sees any difference between sunlight and electric light. If you go outdoors during the day, you may be surprised to find daylight has many ambient properties not provided by your basement's fluorescent bulb (warmth, happy feelings, etc).
Let me save you some time and map out your journey to acceptance of the awesome bar.
First you hate it, because it's new and different to what you expect. You are trained to use it as an address bar and nothing else, so it acting like a search bar is confusing and suboptimal to you.
At this point many people decide to trial the new bar, but you are the kind of person who tends to think he (forgive me, but he) knows what's good and what's not, and even quite enjoy the idea of customizing your Firefox. So you look for a way to preserve your old behavior. There are enough people like you to make worthwhile a mass solution: a config option and an extension.
You and your anti-awesome fellows make use of these. You occasionally grumble that the awesome bar shouldn't be default at all, but you are basically satisfied so the rest of the world hears from you less and less.
As time passes, you occasionally find yourself using other people's computers that have Firefox in a default state. This annoys you at first and if you are spending any serious time on them, you disable the awesome bar. But sometimes you're only using them briefly, so it's not worth modifying. Then, all of a sudden, you find the awesome bar useful. It's a surprise, like a door opening: you suddenly see that if you alter your behavior a little, the awesome bar could be quite useful.
From this point you never disable the awesome bar again, although you leave it disabled on your main desktop, as a matter of principle.
A new version of Firefox is released. The "Disable Firefox Awesome Bar" extension hasn't yet been updated to work on it. But by now you don't really mind. You now prefer the awesome bar. When you have to use Internet Explorer, or Firefox 2, the lack of an awesome bar bugs you. It seems so inflexible, so archaic.
A while later, the author of the awesome-disabling extension stops updating it. People forget that anybody ever didn't like the awesome bar. But this new Firefox feature, the predictive URL form mapping--oh man, that's just so horrible, why is it on by default?
I use Linux -- no iTunes. How can I watch? Please answer quickly, knowing other people are watching new Joss Whedon stuff while I'm locked out may cause me to go TOTALLY FREAKING POSTAL.
and attracts the death penalty.
Because it is. It's very simplistic to consider a corporation no more than the sum of its parts. You're buying into the "bad apple" fallacy, whereby corporate misdeeds are blamed on one or two terrible individuals (who can then be fired and scapegoated). The thing is, if you look at enough of these, you find that the vast majority of corporate crimes against the community (as opposed to crimes against the corporation, like embezzlement) are not due to bad apples. They are the result of small decisions over years or decades from dozens or hundreds of different people, none of whom can be considered particularly evil or acted out of any motive other than to perform well in their job. In many cases, there are many people who should have known better but had no incentive to speak up, or to act on information received from those who did.
You can't blame the entire endless series of corporate misdeeds (tobacco, asbestos, chemicals...) on random bad apples. There is a systemic pressure on individuals within corporations to make small trade-offs of ethics for profitability. The beneficiary of these accumulated bad decisions, and the reason that pressure exists, is the corporation, and it should rightly be held accountable.
That's it! I can't take it any more! Every second Slashdot story tries to make something seem more evil and mysterious by saying it's been done "quietly." Now you can be quiet even when you make an announcement?
Only to people who pay attention.
You noticed this because it's tech. You don't notice most of the thousands of times it happens elsewhere.
Is that perhaps not the point, though? Some people think computers are as smart as human brains--even more so; infallible. Those of us more familiar with tech recognize it can be incredibly stupid. I would be inclined to react quickly if my passenger yelled, "Stop the car!"; less so if my on-board computer did.
Gotta point out that if the legal copyright owner gives permission for free use of its material, it's got nothing to do with "piracy."
It actually creeps me out a little whenever I see "pirating" used as a general term for "downloading something for free." That's only true if all media is locked up and restricted... and we're not there quite yet.
Yeah, but does it run Linux?
Hey Ray,
Couldn't agree more. My concern is that you're not seeing the strengths of Slashdot (the collective tech wisdom) but the weaknesses (groupthink and the tendency to assume that everything a RIAA stooge says must be wrong). I mean, seriously, let's not kid ourselves that the Slashdot crowd doesn't have biases.
If the aim here is to help you build your case, what you want to see is some dispassionate, disinterested evaluation. For example, from the transcript, you are clearly all over the fact that Jacobson didn't document his methods and that he doesn't have a clue whether the data he built his conclusion from is accurate. That's a great argument. But it's not enhanced by a dozen outraged, tub-thumping posts here saying the exact same thing, as far as I can see. What would help you is a reasoned evaluation of exactly how reliable that Kazaa private IP is likely to be, so you're well-equipped with the facts when you have to attack that at trial.
That's why I'm bothered by all those "It's possible to fake IPs/hack Kazaa, what a moron!" posts. Sure, it's possible, but is it likely? (Especially in this case, given the defendant.) I suspect that if these posters were trying to ID a random person over the web, they wouldn't waste too much time on the possibility that there was some advanced IP spoofing going on.
Again, happy and hoping to be corrected.
I'm not especially techy, but it seems that the general opinion here is much harsher on Jacobson than is really warranted. Obviously most of us here think he's on the wrong side of an important fight, but we need to actually address what he says, not dismiss him because we think he sucks.
The on-topic +5 posts here seem very biased to me. They are insulting towards Jacobsen but fail to identify anything like an actual error in anything he says. The general opinion as to why he's wrong seems to be (a) the RIAA could have faked their screenshots, (b) the application could have been custom-hacked to lie about its private IP address, (c) Jacobson doesn't know exactly how the sniffer technology works. Which is all true. But it's quite unlikely that the RIAA is faking up screenshots so they can accuse completely random people of illegal file sharing, or that the accused custom-hacked their Kazaa client, or that the sniffer tech is totally bogus.
If you're accused of illegal file sharing and you're innocent, I'd imagine plausible reasons why are:
(a) They identified the infringer's IP address correctly but are mistaken in thinking it was assigned to you during the relevant time window; or
(b) The infringement did take place on your IP address but you have an unsecured network (ideally a wireless router) and god knows who did it; or
(c) The infringement did take place on your computer but several people use that and who knows which of them did it.
Unless Verizon screwed up, (a) seems out. And despite what Ray seems hell-bent on establishing, so does (b), given the public IP/private IP match. That strongly suggests it was indeed a single computer with a direct connection to the internet. Now, I know it's not 100% proof. But it seems to be quite likely, and I'd think it certainly sounds plausible to a judge.
Now please correct me if and where I'm wrong! Can we actually find something Jacobson said that's plainly wrong, and not just possibly wrong under unlikely circumstances?
A few unhelpful observations.
This is my first real-life encounter with a deposition, and I've gotta say it's quite fascinating. I like how the opposing lawyer relentlessly objects to nearly every single question. And how Mr. Beckerman's first goal seems to be to show that the "expert" has a financial interest in what he's been claiming, coupled with that expert's bizarre claims that he doesn't have the foggiest idea about the commercial reality surrounding his work. For example:
I'm not sure how you can have "no idea" whether the RIAA is pleased, furious, or otherwise about the fact that your company is creating anti-P2P products, while being simultaneously "sure" that your company is referring to the RIAA in its press releases to help sell its products.
This is funny, too:
Hmm... you sure that isn't just an effect of NTSC/PAL transfer? Converting 24fps film to 25fps PAL can cause a 4% speedup.
But I'm totally with you on the networks doing everything they can to make Aussie TV not worth watching. One time I missed the end of "The Closer" because it was broadcast 20 minutes late. I downloaded the show for the last few minutes and discovered that in the US it had been a special ad-free episode. Channel 9 had decided that rather than (a) show it ad-free, or (b) schedule 90 minutes for the show plus ads, it would instead (c) cut around 15 minutes out of the show and replace with ads. No wonder I'd found the ep hard to follow!
Not to mention how Aussie TV stations routinely show episodes out-of-order, mix surprise repeats in with new episodes, throw up big ad banners during the show, never start on time...
There's an interesting view emerging that it's actually more accurate to view a corporation as a self-aware entity. The reason that corporations routinely engage in behavior that would be considered obscene by a human being is not that there just happen to be a few "bad eggs" in positions of power, but rather that the structure of a corporation encourages and extracts bad behavior from otherwise reasonable human beings.
There are endless examples of this, and an intriguing discussion in Wade Rowland's Greed, Inc.. It's convenient for corporations to blame "bad egg" individual employees, because people can be easily replaced, and ignores the reality that the true root of the problem is systemic.
Mate, I never said Google was a monopoly, or that they're illegal.