Unlikely, since big payouts draw big crowds buying huge numbers of tickets and any winner is likely to have to split the prize -- so your expected payoff will be a fraction of the jackpot.
You're not/compelled/ to do so. If you don't have Song X, life will still go on quite reasonably. I suspect that practically everybody has unfulfilled wants, and most of them manage to get by without going mucker...
Piracy is ok in my opinion provided its a learning experiance. Others may argue, and there will always be abusers, but look at the ages of those that never buy CDs, Look at there incomes. They probably would have never bought the cd anyway.
A lot of the file sharers/downloaders are probably college students, given the need for bandwidth... and most of them have/some/ budget for entertainment (be it alcohol, music, movies, books, games, vacations, road trips...). Many people accumulate CD collections starting in their pre-teens... and you're claiming that some have age as an excuse? Hell, they can just add it onto their credit card debt like just about everything/everyone else these days...
Hell, they have access to a computer, probably their own; either that, or they use a public machine and have some way of carrying the music around with them. They feel they can afford to spend the time downloading instead of working. They're probably not destitute.
The real threat is those trying to profit from piracy, What they really need is a different name to describe one or the others.
Imagine two competitors. One sells a physical product at a very low cost because he's bootlegging. Because it's a physical product, its distribution takes time and legwork, and has somewhat limited area. The other provides nigh-unlimited downloads anywhere in the world, for just the cost of time and bandwidth (the latter of which may not even be borne by the downloader, or at least he may see no marginal cost if he's not paying per byte and he doesn't need the network 24/7 for something else). Which do you really think is the greater threat to the owner of the IP?
Because it's the distributor's responsibility to check. He _could_ claim that he believed that EVERY SINGLE CLIENT which snarfed his PUBLICALLY SHARED files had a legit copy, and that said licenses permitted transfer (?), but... it'd almost always be wrong.
If he/really/ wanted to be distributing only to people who had the CDs, he wouldn't be putting them on a public share and letting them grab copies without any verification whatsoever.
Would you expect to get away with handing out porn mags to 4'-tall people with no facial hair, Pokemon shirts, and high-pitched prepubescent voices, taking their word for it that they were over 18? Probably not -- you'd have to be pretty stupid to believe them, and any judge would expect you to make a better effort than THAT.
Quote:...just because a few people are misusing something
Quote:...being abused by a few people.
And what proportion of transfers on KaZaA, Morpheus, Gnutella, et al, are actually made in compliance with copyright and contract law? Of the people "sharing" files, how many of those people actually either a) have the copyrights, or b) are only sharing files with permission (e.g. public domain or other explicit prior permission)?
And what important communications, prithee tell, did these networks facilitate? Do you hold conversations with people by exchanging Metallica songs?
Ah, so you subscribe to the labour theory of valuation, under which a good or service is valued primarily at the labour spent at it? Which, of course, ignores scarcity, demand, resources required, competence...
Keep in mind that the cash that they do make has/all/ been handed over voluntarily by the masses -- nobody, to my knowledge, has ever been kidnapped by the record companies and forced to buy music. I doubt that anybody should have the right to tell the masses that they/can't/ buy that music because those awful musicians are *gasp* making too much money.
P2P typically involves "public performance" by making a work available to the whole damn world.
And, if memory serves, "copying a CD from a friend" isn't fair use, either. Now, there may be some laws specific to audio tapes ala the Audio Home Recording Act...
1. Alter or remove the laws regarding copyright until it's legal to "share" other people's work without their consent.
2. Enforce the laws regarding copyright and those who violate them.
3. Tolerate an increasing disregard for the law, and have yet another law on the books which/might/ at some time be selectively prosecuted, but isn't often.
1, alteration or dropping, probably isn't going to happen until either the voters make it such a priority that they're willing to sacrifice their incumbents for it, or until SCOTUS says so.
2, is what they're going for.
3, leads to a situation where people may get used to non-enforcement and then get burned later if, say, a prosecutor feels like raising his profile, and where people may feel free to start disregarding other laws as well.
And law enforcement is/big/. It's capable of multitasking, believe it or not...
Learn more about interpreting quotes out of context here on Slashdot...
You know full well what's the context of the discussion -- the networks "like Kazaa and Morpheus and the users who swap digital songs, video clips and other files without permission from artists or their record labels".
So, it would seem that either --
1. You read the article, but you're choosing to ignore the context in order to make that quote look bad. Result: you end up looking silly, since most of the readers here are probably sufficiently intelligent to figure out what was meant, and can see past your inane attempt at deceit.
2. You didn't read the article, chose interpret that statement in the broadest way possible, and look like a Chicken Little.
How the hell is the parent post "Redundant"? Is a moderator simply so narrow-minded as to want to slap-down any post which posits an explanation why a system might seem incredibly unstable instead of assuming that it's always Microsoft?
And yes, if it's crashing 26 times in a day, the obvious suspects are (a) bad hardware, (b) severe misconfiguration caused by manually editing the registry, mangling system files, et al, (c) worms, trojans and viruses, (d) a VERY badly written OS (and WinXP != DOS or Win9X...).
If the license were to build one car, no -- you've already built that one car. It wouldn't matter whether you wrecked it, sold it, gave it away, ate it, or transmuted it all to gold; none of those would magically change the world "one" into "as many as you like".
Now, it's a completely separate issue as to whether or not licenses for artistic content are valid -- such as whether or not a strict shrink-wrapped "Thou shalt not duplicate or play on an unlicensed player" EULA on a videotape would be permissible.
Hmmm. They want movies and recorded TV shows for free, without commercials. Given enough bandwidth and P2P users sharing the same tastes, and ignoring the bandwidth costs (suppose that they'd order it anyway, and that they're not paying per-byte), they may be able to get those soon, if not now.
It's pretty hard to beat "free". It's even harder to do so while actually paying costs, like advertising or rent and so forth. The customers still need to pay for the hardware, but that's 1-time-only; while they pay for the power and bandwidth, just about none of that's going to the media companies (except, perhaps, AOL-TW-RoadRunner).
Microsoft isn't a government entity, nor has the government in any way made agreeing to the EULA mandatory (since you aren't required to use MSFT products at all) -- thus, no First Amendment violation.
Rocket science won't help. It may, however, take a person with some familiarity of databases to realize that names, addresses, and many other identification methods are prone to variations, mistakes and coincidental near-matches (e.g. "John Q. Adams", "JOHN_ADAMS", "J. Q. Adams", "Adams, John Q.", "John Adams", "John Quincy Adams", "Jonathan Addams") that make many of them unsuitable for use as a join key -- at least with plain-jane algorithms and no preprocessing. Merging "intelligently" between heterogeneous databases is still an area of active research, as you might know if you glanced at all at the problem.
The main threat comes from unique numerical identifiers, because those make suitable primary keys and one might expect extremely few deliberate variations in their representations (IOW, mismatches would most likely be due to typos -- which might be minimal if the number is in a very sparse space and has checksumming so that random alterations are likely to be immediately detectable as invalid numbers).
You also have legal and practical issues with your examples; for instance, Visa is unlikely to share its CC data barring law enforcement action with regards to a specific card already under investigation. Much of the data on US citizens is commercial data, and is fairly well guarded in that the companies suspect that it's valuable; if a grocery store is offering discounts so it can data-mine your purchases, it's not going to want to give that information (or, even more so, what association rules it learns) freely to, say, its rivals, and the gov't has no business asking. It may sell your address to an advertiser as somebody possibly interested in their products, but that's about it. In fact, it's not unusual for a business to provide data to researchers, under a) nondisclosure rules, and b) a requirement that the business be treated as anonymous.
No, some of us live in representative republics, not democracies.
Oh, and in most systems, the vast majority government employees aren't elected; they're civil servants either hired through the civil service program or appointed for reasons of competence, skirt length, random die rolls, patronage, or nepotism. You generally don't know {\em who} they are, let alone whether they are trustworthy.
Oh? So you'd take away the 'delete' command, and the registry editor, and the control panel, and the ability to overwrite files when saving, because they can all badly damage a system or its data?
Unless you castrate the computer to the point where all the code's in ROM and old data is always recoverable (e.g. WORM storage only), a user will practically always be able to FUBAR his system, even without anybody's malicious intent (e.g. "cleaning up" by deleting files that he doesn't understand, misconfiguring his system, et al)... and that's not going to happen in any "general purpose" computer, I'd think.
For a safer, more user-robust system for, say, writing documents -- get a word processor or a good typewriter.
I don't know about you, but most of the spam I get originates from non-US servers, with the big offenders being
1. Korea 2. China 3. Burma 4. Taiwan
with the first two accounting for the bulk. Most of my spam is now in Korean, Chinese or (increasingly) German, as far as I can tell. The admins of their ISPs don't give a damn about US laws, and clearly don't care about pissing off people across the oceans as they're mostly repeat offenders.
I'll concur in that it's pretty good -- There are still some cliches (bizarrely retaining a clearly derivative title 'Ser', for instance, and there's a pretty decent resemblance to medieval European culture overall, esp. technology wise) but the characters are nicely done, in general. At times it's unclear who gets the "good", "evil" and "plain misguided tool of Eeeeeeeeevil" labels, and that's a good thing in this case; the characters aren't unidimensional caricatures out of a simple cowboy/Western flick.
I don't often go for serials, but I've been pretty happy with this one so far.
Well, OK. "Snow Crash" I liked for a literary snack. "Cryptonomicon" bothered me as sprawling, and with having a certain strange continuity problem (namely, a character who at one point dies in.. Finland? but is still active later...). "The Diamond Age" had some interesting characters, but a rambling plot and completely gratuitous sex.
Gibson hasn't impressed me either -- "Neuromancer" seemed a bit shallow, and his short works (e.g. the one that got turned into the regretably unforgettable trash "Johnny Mnemonic") haven't struck me as anything special, either.
I suppose I'm more of a fan of John Brunner (notably, "Stand on Zanzibar" and "The Shockwave Rider"), KSR ("Red|Green|Blue Mars"), and a smattering of others ("A Canticle for Leibowitz", "The Stars My Destination" {a.k.a. "Tiger Tiger!"}, "Brave New World", "1984") and so forth. Gaiman got my interest with "Neverwhere" enough to try a second look ("American Gods").
'k. That's not much, but my tastes are pretty odd at times; I'd sacrifice laser beams, cheesy "vision" and other flashy technology for intriguing characters and deep plots most days of the week. Some of those particular choices probably appeal to the Kafka / Dostoevsky / Camus fan in me.
Wouldn't the binaries (including any modified versions you created from the source) be considered derivative works, and therefore covered by the original and ordinary copyright?
Concur. A fair amount of my code actually is mathematics, actually, since it's the computer that's a glorified calculator, not I.
The first step of programming, in my view, has always been to analyze the problem I'm trying to solve so as to break it down into manageable components with reasonably intuitive interactions. Often the problem itself -- including constraints with regards to required performance, permissible resources, the need to provide an API that others can easily use, or limited programming time -- strongly suggests what data structures or algorithms apply.
I don't write code to entertain or express; I write code to solve problems, and form tends to follow function. Leave the "artsy" code to the Perl poets and the IOCCC contestants, and other situations in which style is paramount.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlikely, since big payouts draw big crowds buying huge numbers of tickets and any winner is likely to have to split the prize -- so your expected payoff will be a fraction of the jackpot.
The choice is not to buy Song X at all.
/compelled/ to do so. If you don't have Song X, life will still go on quite reasonably. I suspect that practically everybody has unfulfilled wants, and most of them manage to get by without going mucker...
You're not
Piracy is ok in my opinion provided its a learning experiance. Others may argue, and there will always be abusers, but look at the ages of those that never buy CDs, Look at there incomes. They probably would have never bought the cd anyway.
A lot of the file sharers/downloaders are probably college students, given the need for bandwidth... and most of them have
Hell, they have access to a computer, probably their own; either that, or they use a public machine and have some way of carrying the music around with them. They feel they can afford to spend the time downloading instead of working. They're probably not destitute.
The real threat is those trying to profit from piracy, What they really need is a different name to describe one or the others.
Imagine two competitors. One sells a physical product at a very low cost because he's bootlegging. Because it's a physical product, its distribution takes time and legwork, and has somewhat limited area. The other provides nigh-unlimited downloads anywhere in the world, for just the cost of time and bandwidth (the latter of which may not even be borne by the downloader, or at least he may see no marginal cost if he's not paying per byte and he doesn't need the network 24/7 for something else). Which do you really think is the greater threat to the owner of the IP?
Hm. I don't see how, unless
...and the data recovery gurus actually /find/ the swapped out data in the partition or file, and
...they find enough to break whatever encryption's there. /or/
1- The Freenet software doesn't lock the pages in memory, and some got swapped out (...or archived by a system save/restore utility)
2-
3-
4- The Freenet software itself gets banned somehow, and is found on the disk.
Title 17 of the US Code has explicit exemptions regarding libraries -- really. Hence, they can do things you're not allowed to do so. Go look it up.
Of course, the definition of "library" might have to be left to a "reasonable person" standard or something...
*sigh*
/really/ wanted to be distributing only to people who had the CDs, he wouldn't be putting them on a public share and letting them grab copies without any verification whatsoever.
Because it's the distributor's responsibility to check. He _could_ claim that he believed that EVERY SINGLE CLIENT which snarfed his PUBLICALLY SHARED files had a legit copy, and that said licenses permitted transfer (?), but... it'd almost always be wrong.
If he
Would you expect to get away with handing out porn mags to 4'-tall people with no facial hair, Pokemon shirts, and high-pitched prepubescent voices, taking their word for it that they were over 18? Probably not -- you'd have to be pretty stupid to believe them, and any judge would expect you to make a better effort than THAT.
Quote: ...just because a few people are misusing something
...being abused by a few people.
Quote:
And what proportion of transfers on KaZaA, Morpheus, Gnutella, et al, are actually made in compliance with copyright and contract law? Of the people "sharing" files, how many of those people actually either a) have the copyrights, or b) are only sharing files with permission (e.g. public domain or other explicit prior permission)?
And what important communications, prithee tell, did these networks facilitate? Do you hold conversations with people by exchanging Metallica songs?
Ah, so you subscribe to the labour theory of valuation, under which a good or service is valued primarily at the labour spent at it? Which, of course, ignores scarcity, demand, resources required, competence...
/all/ been handed over voluntarily by the masses -- nobody, to my knowledge, has ever been kidnapped by the record companies and forced to buy music. I doubt that anybody should have the right to tell the masses that they /can't/ buy that music because those awful musicians are *gasp* making too much money.
Keep in mind that the cash that they do make has
P2P typically involves "public performance" by making a work available to the whole damn world.
And, if memory serves, "copying a CD from a friend" isn't fair use, either. Now, there may be some laws specific to audio tapes ala the Audio Home Recording Act...
They've got three choices, really.
/might/ at some time be selectively prosecuted, but isn't often.
/big/. It's capable of multitasking, believe it or not...
1. Alter or remove the laws regarding copyright until it's legal to "share" other people's work without their consent.
2. Enforce the laws regarding copyright and those who violate them.
3. Tolerate an increasing disregard for the law, and have yet another law on the books which
1, alteration or dropping, probably isn't going to happen until either the voters make it such a priority that they're willing to sacrifice their incumbents for it, or until SCOTUS says so.
2, is what they're going for.
3, leads to a situation where people may get used to non-enforcement and then get burned later if, say, a prosecutor feels like raising his profile, and where people may feel free to start disregarding other laws as well.
And law enforcement is
Learn more about interpreting quotes out of context here on Slashdot...
You know full well what's the context of the discussion -- the networks "like Kazaa and Morpheus and the users who swap digital songs, video clips and other files without permission from artists or their record labels".
So, it would seem that either --
1. You read the article, but you're choosing to ignore the context in order to make that quote look bad. Result: you end up looking silly, since most of the readers here are probably sufficiently intelligent to figure out what was meant, and can see past your inane attempt at deceit.
2. You didn't read the article, chose interpret that statement in the broadest way possible, and look like a Chicken Little.
How the hell is the parent post "Redundant"? Is a moderator simply so narrow-minded as to want to slap-down any post which posits an explanation why a system might seem incredibly unstable instead of assuming that it's always Microsoft?
And yes, if it's crashing 26 times in a day, the obvious suspects are (a) bad hardware, (b) severe misconfiguration caused by manually editing the registry, mangling system files, et al, (c) worms, trojans and viruses, (d) a VERY badly written OS (and WinXP != DOS or Win9X...).
If the license were to build one car, no -- you've already built that one car. It wouldn't matter whether you wrecked it, sold it, gave it away, ate it, or transmuted it all to gold; none of those would magically change the world "one" into "as many as you like".
Now, it's a completely separate issue as to whether or not licenses for artistic content are valid -- such as whether or not a strict shrink-wrapped "Thou shalt not duplicate or play on an unlicensed player" EULA on a videotape would be permissible.
Hmmm. They want movies and recorded TV shows for free, without commercials. Given enough bandwidth and P2P users sharing the same tastes, and ignoring the bandwidth costs (suppose that they'd order it anyway, and that they're not paying per-byte), they may be able to get those soon, if not now.
It's pretty hard to beat "free". It's even harder to do so while actually paying costs, like advertising or rent and so forth. The customers still need to pay for the hardware, but that's 1-time-only; while they pay for the power and bandwidth, just about none of that's going to the media companies (except, perhaps, AOL-TW-RoadRunner).
Microsoft isn't a government entity, nor has the government in any way made agreeing to the EULA mandatory (since you aren't required to use MSFT products at all) -- thus, no First Amendment violation.
And then you go to jail for fraud, if memory serves. I might be wrong about this, 'tho.
Rocket science won't help. It may, however, take a person with some familiarity of databases to realize that names, addresses, and many other identification methods are prone to variations, mistakes and coincidental near-matches (e.g. "John Q. Adams", "JOHN_ADAMS", "J. Q. Adams", "Adams, John Q.", "John Adams", "John Quincy Adams", "Jonathan Addams") that make many of them unsuitable for use as a join key -- at least with plain-jane algorithms and no preprocessing. Merging "intelligently" between heterogeneous databases is still an area of active research, as you might know if you glanced at all at the problem.
The main threat comes from unique numerical identifiers, because those make suitable primary keys and one might expect extremely few deliberate variations in their representations (IOW, mismatches would most likely be due to typos -- which might be minimal if the number is in a very sparse space and has checksumming so that random alterations are likely to be immediately detectable as invalid numbers).
You also have legal and practical issues with your examples; for instance, Visa is unlikely to share its CC data barring law enforcement action with regards to a specific card already under investigation. Much of the data on US citizens is commercial data, and is fairly well guarded in that the companies suspect that it's valuable; if a grocery store is offering discounts so it can data-mine your purchases, it's not going to want to give that information (or, even more so, what association rules it learns) freely to, say, its rivals, and the gov't has no business asking. It may sell your address to an advertiser as somebody possibly interested in their products, but that's about it. In fact, it's not unusual for a business to provide data to researchers, under a) nondisclosure rules, and b) a requirement that the business be treated as anonymous.
No, some of us live in representative republics, not democracies.
Oh, and in most systems, the vast majority government employees aren't elected; they're civil servants either hired through the civil service program or appointed for reasons of competence, skirt length, random die rolls, patronage, or nepotism. You generally don't know {\em who} they are, let alone whether they are trustworthy.
Oh? So you'd take away the 'delete' command, and the registry editor, and the control panel, and the ability to overwrite files when saving, because they can all badly damage a system or its data?
Unless you castrate the computer to the point where all the code's in ROM and old data is always recoverable (e.g. WORM storage only), a user will practically always be able to FUBAR his system, even without anybody's malicious intent (e.g. "cleaning up" by deleting files that he doesn't understand, misconfiguring his system, et al)... and that's not going to happen in any "general purpose" computer, I'd think.
For a safer, more user-robust system for, say, writing documents -- get a word processor or a good typewriter.
I don't know about you, but most of the spam I get originates from non-US servers, with the big offenders being
1. Korea
2. China
3. Burma
4. Taiwan
with the first two accounting for the bulk. Most of my spam is now in Korean, Chinese or (increasingly) German, as far as I can tell. The admins of their ISPs don't give a damn about US laws, and clearly don't care about pissing off people across the oceans as they're mostly repeat offenders.
I'll concur in that it's pretty good -- There are still some cliches (bizarrely retaining a clearly derivative title 'Ser', for instance, and there's a pretty decent resemblance to medieval European culture overall, esp. technology wise) but the characters are nicely done, in general. At times it's unclear who gets the "good", "evil" and "plain misguided tool of Eeeeeeeeevil" labels, and that's a good thing in this case; the characters aren't unidimensional caricatures out of a simple cowboy/Western flick.
I don't often go for serials, but I've been pretty happy with this one so far.
Stephenson? Gibson? Aiiieee.
Well, OK. "Snow Crash" I liked for a literary snack. "Cryptonomicon" bothered me as sprawling, and with having a certain strange continuity problem (namely, a character who at one point dies in.. Finland? but is still active later...). "The Diamond Age" had some interesting characters, but a rambling plot and completely gratuitous sex.
Gibson hasn't impressed me either -- "Neuromancer" seemed a bit shallow, and his short works (e.g. the one that got turned into the regretably unforgettable trash "Johnny Mnemonic") haven't struck me as anything special, either.
I suppose I'm more of a fan of John Brunner (notably, "Stand on Zanzibar" and "The Shockwave Rider"), KSR ("Red|Green|Blue Mars"), and a smattering of others ("A Canticle for Leibowitz", "The Stars My Destination" {a.k.a. "Tiger Tiger!"}, "Brave New World", "1984") and so forth. Gaiman got my interest with "Neverwhere" enough to try a second look ("American Gods").
'k. That's not much, but my tastes are pretty odd at times; I'd sacrifice laser beams, cheesy "vision" and other flashy technology for intriguing characters and deep plots most days of the week. Some of those particular choices probably appeal to the Kafka / Dostoevsky / Camus fan in me.
How about the right to sue if the author was somehow negligent?
Wouldn't the binaries (including any modified versions you created from the source) be considered derivative works, and therefore covered by the original and ordinary copyright?
Concur. A fair amount of my code actually is mathematics, actually, since it's the computer that's a glorified calculator, not I.
The first step of programming, in my view, has always been to analyze the problem I'm trying to solve so as to break it down into manageable components with reasonably intuitive interactions. Often the problem itself -- including constraints with regards to required performance, permissible resources, the need to provide an API that others can easily use, or limited programming time -- strongly suggests what data structures or algorithms apply.
I don't write code to entertain or express; I write code to solve problems, and form tends to follow function. Leave the "artsy" code to the Perl poets and the IOCCC contestants, and other situations in which style is paramount.