For instance, you could have attended a live performance -- if he's alive, of course. You could discuss the music with somebody with similar tastes. You might have heard it on the radio, or in a store, or coffee shop, or whatever. You might have read reviews of it in your favorite newspapers or magazines or discussion boards. You might borrow the CD from a friend -- and I do mean borrow, not copy. Point is, there are chances for legally doing due dilligence.
And in the long view, it's only $20, and if you're truly paranoid you could first check for the existence of a market in second-hand Joe Satriani CDs in case you'd like to have a chance to sell it if you end up not liking it; alternately, you could buy it second-hand from somebody who tried it and decided to sell.
It's not that much different from plunking down the money to see a movie, or attending a concert, or pre-ordering the latest novel from your favorite author. It's a more-or-less calculated risk.
On the other hand, you're probably asking for a countersuit if you sue or press charges -- after all, the odds might be pretty good that you have other content on your computer which actually *was* obtained by copyright infringement unless you're either the unluckiest P2Per in the 'net or were specifically looking for these cases.
In the former case, a decent computer forensics tech might notice if you had attempted to purge all infringing content before handing over the drives; and in the latter, your attempt to sue might be rather weakened if it's noticed that you had prior knowledge of these files and deliberately downloaded and attempted to play one anyway.
A cynic might suggest that Sophos is saying that more people should panic and buy its products. After all, it's not a disinterested party, is it?
As for Korea and China, Korean and Chinese fonts didn't make it into my blacklists for nothin' -- along with assorted Cyrillic alphabets. And for 0wn4ge, my office machine's SSH daemon gets probed an average of 5 times a day from around the world (a couple of probes from a Canadian machine today, a couple from Brazil, one from Hong Kong; and these are after black-hole-routing all of 61.*.*.*, 211.*.*.*, 219.*.*.*, 221.*.*.*, 24.*.*.*) -- a futile effort considering that it won't even allow a log-in attempt except from the local IP block.
The price of bringing people to that web site, however, may be high; given the millions of web pages, one cannot really hope that people merely stumble upon it.
Local bands may be able to attract local audiences and gain some word of mouth from that, but a musician who seeks to rise above the relative obscurity of a limited local audience needs some way to convince others to look at -his- stuff instead of the numerous other local musicians who may be benefiting from or astroturfing word-of-mouth.
If the RIAA members want the "free advertising", they could authorize it -- providing short sample clips and explicitly granting license to download, listen to, and redistribute them, for instance.
Fair commerce is normally grounded clearly on mutual consent; a proper transaction requires the informed agreement of both parties. To deliberately engage in a transaction and then breach the declared terms -- such as subsequently violating the normal copyright rules which govern intellectual property unless specified otherwise -- is in principle just as much a breach as engaging in a transaction in which one party accepts compensation for services promised but never performed, or performed inadequately.
The argument about free advertising in any case might be worse than murky here. Quite frequently it's not short samples that are downloaded, but entire songs or albums. It may be just as likely that a person says "bleah" upon listening to the contents of multiple albums that he decides NOT to buy several of them -- cutting out purchases that might be regretted either because they're superfluous (downloaded thousands of songs, burned a dozen CDs or uploaded them onto a player, don't really need to buy any more...) or allegedly due to quality reasons (avoiding a disappointing CD; of course, availability of samples may lead a person to raise his alleged standards and claim that he really wouldn't have bought those, ergo no $ damage).
Quite a few people have hobbies and interests that they'd LOVE to spend most of their time on, but cannot because of the need to pay for housing, food, and so forth. Claiming that people who love music will still make it, under a business model that's not their choice, is naive.
History is full of artists in all media who now would be considered pretty damn good, but died broke. That should suggest something about how difficult it is to get support merely based on quality instead of marketing and business acumen.
Of course, perhaps you're one of the few successful people who survives by writing shareware, in which case you might have the experience to suggest the model you'd so rapidly impose on others. If not, perhaps you should try it for several years and see whether people truly are willing to support quality work when they know that they can obtain it for free and let -other- people back it. It would be interesting to know what the failure rate is.
I thought the Fellowship movie was decent, although not huge; the second one had a few too many "Hollywood clich\'{e}" deviations to go down all that well: the reduction of Gimli the Dwarf into the victim of dwarf jokes, the just-in-time although not-in-book-at-all arrival of the Elves in the siege of Gondolin, and so forth. Tolkien, if memory serves, didn't seem to feel the need to rely on cheap comic relief.
Minor quibble: Lay, if memory serves, has not been charged, let alone convicted or sentenced. From what I've read, it's possible that he was mostly a figurehead instead of a major player, anyway.
Now Andy Fastow, on the other hand, is likely to get the book thrown at him.
It's not very true anymore that people need to read the manuals to install Linux. Installations have been pretty automated for a while, and too frequently come with quite a few services installed combined with vaguely friendly GUIs.
Of course, then machines belonging to the careless get r00ted and used for DOSing / packet-sniffing / spamming.
...so long as they don't need any "formal" marketing campaigns. That is, word-of-mouth would need to suffice, since that's about all they'll be able to get. Just putting up a web page doesn't help if nobody knows about it; likewise, spreading.MP3 samples won't help unless people stumble upon them or know to search for 'em.
In addition, without a publishing company, all the initial costs of touring, first presses of CDs, et al, will fall on somebody else -- either the band, or some other entity willing to lend them money.
Risks and benefits -- *shrug* it's up to the artists (well, the ones not locked into contracts already) to decide.
After all, it's a LOT easier to find them -- those making files available for searching by any significant number of people, for instance, are necessarily opening themselves to detection by that same audience.
To be noticed downloading, either some ISP along the path has to notice the bandwidth spike (possible if you're consuming a disproportionate amount and they get curious as to why) or the ISP specifically checks network traffic for the relevant protocol (*shrug* but most probably wouldn't even when their ToSes ban copyright infringement; they want satisfied subscribers, so long as said users don't abuse bandwidth too much), or the downloading has to be done from an RIAA-controlled server, or a server gets seized and the logs (if any) get processed.
Heh. I get calls, probably from telemarketers, that NEVER use English -- they start in Mandarin, and ignore my responding in English. Since I don't speak Mandarin at all, and they pretend to not understand English -- or possibly they genuinely don't, although that strikes me as unlikely -- it's not a particularly productive conversation, and not one conducive to figuring out who the hell's calling. Screw 'em. Maybe I'll greet them in bad-grammar German next time -- "Sie sind ein bl\"{o}d Scheisskopf. Spreche ich keine Kinesich. Zum Teufel mit Sie." or something like that.
Gut feeling is that AT&T, not content with itself and AT&T Wireless telemarketing to me constantly, sold my name and that somebody wants to sell me either int'l long-distance phone service, or maybe some quackery in the form of "beneficial" herbs or something else meant to appeal to those with Oriental last names. That telemarketing's why I switched to Verizon.
Hm? Film has its advantages, but I'm not at all convinced that storage is one of them. It's trivial to store redundant backups of digital data, for instance. And transferring between media isn't too hard if both systems are networked...
For the price, I'd also expect that it completely lacks manual controls, and perhaps even programmed modes... in other words, a truly cheapy bottom-of-the-barrel camera. Hell, do we even know if that's a genuine 2MP sensor, or whether it's some smaller mess that's upsampled?
Without the LCD, 'though, a lot of that advantage goes away. Sure, if you get bumped or somebody moves in or out of your shot or you realize some other gross error you'll know... but if the automatic exposure overexposed some sunny surface, or if focus missed, or so forth... that won't be detectable without an LCD.
Sorting probably isn't THAT good, and you still need a way to slow down the deliberate email-bombs that they're almost certain to get, plus the hordes of threats from kooks and pranksters.
Not sure about the felony specification. Take a closer look at Sec. 301, 'tho; if I read it correctly, unauthorized placement of the file in a publicly-accessible manner automatically counts as the distribution, during a 180-day period, of at least 10 copies of that work with a retail value of more than $2500 with regards to USC 18 sec. 2319(b), which therefore entitles the offender to imprisonment of up to five years and/or fines as specified elsewhere in Title 18, for a first offense (and ten years for a second or subsequent). Checking... OK, that'd make it a felony given that it's an offense punishable by imprisonment exceeding one year.
Ignorance is rarely a valid defense. On the other hand, with regards to intrusions, a sharp lawyer would argue about who did the actual "placing of a copyrighted work".
Among other things, it clarifies the "is this contributory copyright infringement" issue. That is, when does it become illegal -- when the file is made available without authorization, or when somebody takes advantage of that availability? And in the latter case, is it only the downloader who's infringing, or only the provider, or both? This would make it explicit.
Fair use rarely covers distribution to the public. The closest example might be redistributing to a class in an academic environment for educational purposes, and that's a long ways away.
Slashdot Mirror
You're framing the possibilities too narrowly.
For instance, you could have attended a live performance -- if he's alive, of course. You could discuss the music with somebody with similar tastes. You might have heard it on the radio, or in a store, or coffee shop, or whatever. You might have read reviews of it in your favorite newspapers or magazines or discussion boards. You might borrow the CD from a friend -- and I do mean borrow, not copy. Point is, there are chances for legally doing due dilligence.
And in the long view, it's only $20, and if you're truly paranoid you could first check for the existence of a market in second-hand Joe Satriani CDs in case you'd like to have a chance to sell it if you end up not liking it; alternately, you could buy it second-hand from somebody who tried it and decided to sell.
It's not that much different from plunking down the money to see a movie, or attending a concert, or pre-ordering the latest novel from your favorite author. It's a more-or-less calculated risk.
Quite possibly.
On the other hand, you're probably asking for a countersuit if you sue or press charges -- after all, the odds might be pretty good that you have other content on your computer which actually *was* obtained by copyright infringement unless you're either the unluckiest P2Per in the 'net or were specifically looking for these cases.
In the former case, a decent computer forensics tech might notice if you had attempted to purge all infringing content before handing over the drives; and in the latter, your attempt to sue might be rather weakened if it's noticed that you had prior knowledge of these files and deliberately downloaded and attempted to play one anyway.
A cynic might suggest that Sophos is saying that more people should panic and buy its products. After all, it's not a disinterested party, is it?
As for Korea and China, Korean and Chinese fonts didn't make it into my blacklists for nothin' -- along with assorted Cyrillic alphabets. And for 0wn4ge, my office machine's SSH daemon gets probed an average of 5 times a day from around the world (a couple of probes from a Canadian machine today, a couple from Brazil, one from Hong Kong; and these are after black-hole-routing all of 61.*.*.*, 211.*.*.*, 219.*.*.*, 221.*.*.*, 24.*.*.*) -- a futile effort considering that it won't even allow a log-in attempt except from the local IP block.
The price of bringing people to that web site, however, may be high; given the millions of web pages, one cannot really hope that people merely stumble upon it.
Local bands may be able to attract local audiences and gain some word of mouth from that, but a musician who seeks to rise above the relative obscurity of a limited local audience needs some way to convince others to look at -his- stuff instead of the numerous other local musicians who may be benefiting from or astroturfing word-of-mouth.
If the RIAA members want the "free advertising", they could authorize it -- providing short sample clips and explicitly granting license to download, listen to, and redistribute them, for instance.
Fair commerce is normally grounded clearly on mutual consent; a proper transaction requires the informed agreement of both parties. To deliberately engage in a transaction and then breach the declared terms -- such as subsequently violating the normal copyright rules which govern intellectual property unless specified otherwise -- is in principle just as much a breach as engaging in a transaction in which one party accepts compensation for services promised but never performed, or performed inadequately.
The argument about free advertising in any case might be worse than murky here. Quite frequently it's not short samples that are downloaded, but entire songs or albums. It may be just as likely that a person says "bleah" upon listening to the contents of multiple albums that he decides NOT to buy several of them -- cutting out purchases that might be regretted either because they're superfluous (downloaded thousands of songs, burned a dozen CDs or uploaded them onto a player, don't really need to buy any more...) or allegedly due to quality reasons (avoiding a disappointing CD; of course, availability of samples may lead a person to raise his alleged standards and claim that he really wouldn't have bought those, ergo no $ damage).
Quite a few people have hobbies and interests that they'd LOVE to spend most of their time on, but cannot because of the need to pay for housing, food, and so forth. Claiming that people who love music will still make it, under a business model that's not their choice, is naive.
History is full of artists in all media who now would be considered pretty damn good, but died broke. That should suggest something about how difficult it is to get support merely based on quality instead of marketing and business acumen.
Of course, perhaps you're one of the few successful people who survives by writing shareware, in which case you might have the experience to suggest the model you'd so rapidly impose on others. If not, perhaps you should try it for several years and see whether people truly are willing to support quality work when they know that they can obtain it for free and let -other- people back it. It would be interesting to know what the failure rate is.
Even Sen. Kerry, whose campaign is hardly a paragon of honesty, likely knows better than to claim that a draft is imminent. It's rather unlikely.
And that would be... the _Godfather_ trilogy?
I thought the Fellowship movie was decent, although not huge; the second one had a few too many "Hollywood clich\'{e}" deviations to go down all that well: the reduction of Gimli the Dwarf into the victim of dwarf jokes, the just-in-time although not-in-book-at-all arrival of the Elves in the siege of Gondolin, and so forth. Tolkien, if memory serves, didn't seem to feel the need to rely on cheap comic relief.
Minor quibble: Lay, if memory serves, has not been charged, let alone convicted or sentenced. From what I've read, it's possible that he was mostly a figurehead instead of a major player, anyway.
Now Andy Fastow, on the other hand, is likely to get the book thrown at him.
It's not very true anymore that people need to read the manuals to install Linux. Installations have been pretty automated for a while, and too frequently come with quite a few services installed combined with vaguely friendly GUIs.
Of course, then machines belonging to the careless get r00ted and used for DOSing / packet-sniffing / spamming.
...so long as they don't need any "formal" marketing campaigns. That is, word-of-mouth would need to suffice, since that's about all they'll be able to get. Just putting up a web page doesn't help if nobody knows about it; likewise, spreading .MP3 samples won't help unless people stumble upon them or know to search for 'em.
In addition, without a publishing company, all the initial costs of touring, first presses of CDs, et al, will fall on somebody else -- either the band, or some other entity willing to lend them money.
Risks and benefits -- *shrug* it's up to the artists (well, the ones not locked into contracts already) to decide.
It's probably uploaders.
After all, it's a LOT easier to find them -- those making files available for searching by any significant number of people, for instance, are necessarily opening themselves to detection by that same audience.
To be noticed downloading, either some ISP along the path has to notice the bandwidth spike (possible if you're consuming a disproportionate amount and they get curious as to why) or the ISP specifically checks network traffic for the relevant protocol (*shrug* but most probably wouldn't even when their ToSes ban copyright infringement; they want satisfied subscribers, so long as said users don't abuse bandwidth too much), or the downloading has to be done from an RIAA-controlled server, or a server gets seized and the logs (if any) get processed.
As it happens, having your own collection of music is not a right.
Heh. I get calls, probably from telemarketers, that NEVER use English -- they start in Mandarin, and ignore my responding in English. Since I don't speak Mandarin at all, and they pretend to not understand English -- or possibly they genuinely don't, although that strikes me as unlikely -- it's not a particularly productive conversation, and not one conducive to figuring out who the hell's calling. Screw 'em. Maybe I'll greet them in bad-grammar German next time -- "Sie sind ein bl\"{o}d Scheisskopf. Spreche ich keine Kinesich. Zum Teufel mit Sie." or something like that.
Gut feeling is that AT&T, not content with itself and AT&T Wireless telemarketing to me constantly, sold my name and that somebody wants to sell me either int'l long-distance phone service, or maybe some quackery in the form of "beneficial" herbs or something else meant to appeal to those with Oriental last names. That telemarketing's why I switched to Verizon.
Hm? Film has its advantages, but I'm not at all convinced that storage is one of them. It's trivial to store redundant backups of digital data, for instance. And transferring between media isn't too hard if both systems are networked...
No LCD and no zoom, either.
For the price, I'd also expect that it completely lacks manual controls, and perhaps even programmed modes... in other words, a truly cheapy bottom-of-the-barrel camera. Hell, do we even know if that's a genuine 2MP sensor, or whether it's some smaller mess that's upsampled?
Without the LCD, 'though, a lot of that advantage goes away. Sure, if you get bumped or somebody moves in or out of your shot or you realize some other gross error you'll know... but if the automatic exposure overexposed some sunny surface, or if focus missed, or so forth... that won't be detectable without an LCD.
Sorting probably isn't THAT good, and you still need a way to slow down the deliberate email-bombs that they're almost certain to get, plus the hordes of threats from kooks and pranksters.
Read the bill next time. Advocacy groups, after all, frequently have an axe to grind -- as does Slashdot itself.
Not sure about the felony specification. Take a closer look at Sec. 301, 'tho; if I read it correctly, unauthorized placement of the file in a publicly-accessible manner automatically counts as the distribution, during a 180-day period, of at least 10 copies of that work with a retail value of more than $2500 with regards to USC 18 sec. 2319(b), which therefore entitles the offender to imprisonment of up to five years and/or fines as specified elsewhere in Title 18, for a first offense (and ten years for a second or subsequent). Checking... OK, that'd make it a felony given that it's an offense punishable by imprisonment exceeding one year.
Ignorance is rarely a valid defense. On the other hand, with regards to intrusions, a sharp lawyer would argue about who did the actual "placing of a copyrighted work".
Among other things, it clarifies the "is this contributory copyright infringement" issue. That is, when does it become illegal -- when the file is made available without authorization, or when somebody takes advantage of that availability? And in the latter case, is it only the downloader who's infringing, or only the provider, or both? This would make it explicit.
Not unless it's "open" in such a minor way that you're not allowed to redistribute it. Read the bill, for cryin' out loud.
Then work on your reading comprehension skills. Unless SourceForge is distributing *without permission*, they're fine.
Fair use rarely covers distribution to the public. The closest example might be redistributing to a class in an academic environment for educational purposes, and that's a long ways away.