"For every customer that complains to you to get a problem fixed, there's 10 others that merely told everyone else they know to stop buying from you."
I take an intermediate approach - I try to fix it myself. If that fails, I try technical support. If that fails, after several attempts, then I tell everyone I know to stop buying from them.
Why don't they just give him whatever he wants. It's not like they are going to lose money on another of those films.
Because what he actually WANTS is to have an independent third party to look at their books and decide what is fair (he probably believes they owe him money, but he said he would be happy with whatever the auditors decide).
It is common industry practice to shuffle expenses around from one department to another, so that on paper, even a multi-billion-dollar movie never makes any profit, so the studios get away without paying any royalties. If they gave him what he wanted, these practices would be exposed for all to see. This is much more than a few hundred million from one blockbuster movie - it is about similar practices from every blockbuster movie ever made. No studio in their right minds would dare to have this kind of thing become publicly known (or worse, proven so that all the people they have defrauded out of royalties be able to sue them over it).
I'm not convinced that it was Paypal's mistake to begin with.
From TFA, it was Paypal who set up the account as a charitable account, even though they were not asked to do so. This makes it their fault to begin with.
they are holding the funds until mid April, probably due to somebody screwing up
Why do they need to hold it for 6 months, especially when they screwed up? Simple - this seems to be standard operating procedure in many dispute cases. It lets them milk the funds for 6 months of free interest while their customers twist in the wind with no recourse.
I had to read this several times before I realized that it does start to make sense if placed in a timeframe of 25 years ago. Doing this kind of manual work on today's graphics cards wouldn't just be pointless economically, but close to impossible (very tiny pads, etc).
Given the cost of hardware, and that of labour, it's usually cheaper to replace than repair, especially things like this.
Back in the 70s (when it was still funny), National Lampoon had a magazine parody "Popular Workbench" that parodied Popular Mechanics, Popular Electronics, etc. In it was one want ad saying "Earn big $$ in transistor repair!". Repairing surface-mount electronics today is about a ludicrous today as repairing transistors was back then.:)
The electrician/inspector did not have to order the conduit removed--it probably would'vebeen fine to paint a stripe down the side and stencil "comms cable only" at regular intervals...thus it is a suitable candidate for "silly hacks".
That would be a sensible approach. It all depends on whether the inspector is allowed to use common sense (and capable of doing so) rather than merely spouting regulations.
That's weird because UL rating and the national electric code always allow a higher class device or fixture the be substituted for a lower class one
The problem isn't with running a low-voltage wire through a high-voltage conduit - the problem is that someone could later run a high-voltage wire through the same conduit. What happens if the lines somehow cross? Can you imagine what would happen if a hot 220V line came into direct contact with an ethernet cable? It would probably fry the router, and every piece of equipment connected to the router.
About 25 years ago, in our lab we had a monitor with an odd connector - it had the usual digital signals at ground and +5 volt levels - as well as a +70 volt power pin for some unfathonable reason. One day my boss plugged the cable in slightly off, and this fried the graphics card - he had to manually de-solder and replace around 70 chips as a result. Putting high voltage and low voltage signals in close proximity is an accident waiting to happen.
Sites should be based on standards. If a site is standard-compliant, and a browser doesn't render it, the it is the browser's fault (or at least it's not the site's fault).
Unfortunately, non-technical end-users (and non-technical companies that put up web sites) don't care about standards. They care about products that work. The agument "I am right and the largest software company in the world is wrong" never wins, even when it is right.
Whoa, nasty college flashback... Poking around on a PDP-11/34 running V6 Unix...
I remember a story a friend used to tell (on a very similar environment), about how once the swapper somehow swapped itself out, but he was using db to debug a program at the time, so he used that instance of db to poke around in memory to recover it (since the swapper image was still present in memory) and get the system running again without forcing a reboot. (How sad that Microsoft has taught us to accept regular reboots as an "acceptable" systems operation procedure.)
You pass a pointer to a physical memory address to the hardware, and it writes data there
The way I understood DMA to work on x86 architectures is this: you programmed the DMA controller with a physical address on a specific DMA channel, then told the device to send data on that DMA channel. In a protected environment, the DMA controller would be accessible only to the kernel itself, and drivers would have to make calls to the kernel to "pretty please set up the DMA controller to go to {this virtual address}", which the kernel would range-check and realize.
About the only evil thing you could do is to tell a device to use the same DMA channel that an in-progress DMA transfer on another channel is already using, perhaps duping the DMA controller chip into intermingling the data streams (I don't know enough about the protocols involved to say whether this is possible or not).
Unfortunately, this only became possible with x86 in the last few months. You could run the kernel in ring 0 and the drivers in ring 1, and this would give you some protection.
Well, I always thouguht that the 80386 architecture provided all the hardware you needed to do that. And even if you don't have that level of hardware protection, you could still do almost as well even on an 80286 or even 8088 - a Unix-like OS running on those architectures could easily terminate misbehaved user processes, as long as their misbehavior involved executing illegal instructions and accessing illegal memory (rather than writing garbage over other legitimate address spaces).
What do you do when the display driver trys to overwrite kernel memory? or the motherboard sata driver crashes with an exception, All any OS can do is stop
Not true. If an operating system is properly compartmentalized, it can merely shut off the offending part while allowing the other parts to continue running.
If my display driver tries to write to illegal memory, I would much rather that the OS shuts the displays off, and then signals an orderly shutdown, permitting applications to terminate (and perhaps auto-save work in progress), and the file system to be properly synchronized before shutdown.
If my sound driver freaks out, I would much rather have the OS continue running silently, allowing me the choices of what to do (since most critical UIs do not require sound).
If one disk driver fails, access to other disks could still continue (permitting work in progress to be saved temporarily to another device.)
If the system runs out of swap space, it should just refuse to allocate more memory, not allocate it and then realize in retrospect that it did not have the resources to do so.
Even if the swap device becomes inaccessible, it may still be possible to perform some reasonably orderly recovery and shutdown by permitting access to processes that are still in memory.
There are, of course, some problems that cannot be recovered from (memory corruption, errors in vital kernel components), but these should tend to be in the minority.
but what I suggest is that many people may not realize that listening to music they haven't paid for is stealing.
Actually, that isn't exactly what the law says (see below). In fact, there is a great deal of confusion between the verbs is and has been legislated to be (or is, according to the laws of {insert jurisdiction here}).
is implies an absolute state of equality, while copyright laws vary widely between jurisdictions. While p2p music sharing may be illegal in the United States, it isn't in Canada, for example.
The whole reason why society has always considered stealing to be such a heinous crime was NOT the fact that the thief acquired something of value that he wasn't entitled to, but rather that the victim LOST that thing. In previous centuries, horse theft in England carried the death penalty - because if a man made a living using his horse, and you stole it, he could starve to death. However, if you could sneak into his barn, take a skin sample, and clone the horse, the victim would not be inconvenienced.
This is an educated (master's degree) adult who was confused on the matter.
And with good reason. Most people do not take courses in law, and most of the nuances of such issues are discussed only in law school (not couting the FUD propaganda being spread by media companies, schools trying to indoctrine kids into a politically correct "don't share files" culture, etc.
Consider the following two examples:
1) I go to Wal*Mart, take a dozen CDs home (without paying for them), then leave them on my porch with a sign saying "Feel free to take home anything you want".
2) I go to Wal*Mart, take a dozen CDs home (but in order not to inconvenience Wal*Mart, I make copies and return the originals), then leave the copies on my porch instead.
In case 1, I can be charged with stealing for the CDs I took. However, nobody else will be charged with taking the CDs from my porch (well, they might be charged with possession of stolen property; however, since possesion of an item is usually considered as de-facto proof of ownership, especially for inexpensive items without serial numbers, nobody in their right minds would attempt to charge anyone for that).
In case 2, I couldn't be charged with taking the music (temporary breaking and entering aside, and even that would be moot if we were talking about art or books instead and I made copies by taking a camera into the store and photographing them). However, even though I would be considered lily white under the law for TAKING the initial copy, I could be prosecuted for every single CD that somebody ELSE took from my porch. And also remember that the charges here would not be for larceny, but rather for copyright infringement. Furthermore, under current laws, the second case would be considered MUCH more serious, even though less is actually "stolen" (since the music is, but the physical media, which is the bulk of the cost of manufacturing the music, is not.)
My point is that in the case of physical theft, act A is punishable, but act B is not. In the case of copying, act A is not punishable, but act B is.
Furthermore, the victim in case 1 is Wal*Mart, while the victim in case 2 is the RIAA.
So while you may think of copyright infringement as theft, and while the two may be similar in some ways (and are viewed as the same by society), under the law they are COMPLETELY different. The RIAA and MPAA never go after peoplf for downloading content - only for uploadingcontent. (Compare web sites that offer unauthorized downloads - they can shut down the web sites, but have no legal leg to stand on vs. the web site's visitors.)
These people rightly argue "Well... I listen to it on the radio without paying for it, is that stealing? If not, how is it stealing when I listen on my computer?". What is not clear to them, however, is that if they are using a P2P network, the analogy is more like them listening to the radio, and then piping the music through to another unlicensed transmitter - something that would get them into trouble.
If you are in a bathroom, alone, you have a certain expectation of privacy. But in a room with 30 other people? Just what kind of privacy can you reasonably expect?
This needs to be a civil offense, not a criminal offense.
The problem with this is that if some snot-nosed 12-year old shuts down a chat server because he is pissed off at getting kicked for being obnoxious, a civil suit won't do squat, since he won't have any resource to go after. However, if it's a criminal offense, at least he might have his computer access revoked.
My computer system is configured to only allow file transfers to computers that have the appropriate rights granted by the copyright holder(s).
How can you configure it to do this? Is there some universal standard by which files can be marked as "I have the rights to distribute this file"? Or that says "I have the rights to distribute this to you, but you don't have the rights to distribute this further"?
(Of course, pirates will, of course, find a way to forge this, so its validity becomes moot).
The appearance of the files in the search result only proves that the requestor did, in fact, have the appropriate rights.
This assumes that nobody ever shares files that they do not have rights to. Thus, piracy does not exist. What a wonderfully safe and non-controversial world we all live in!
You can't be sure whether he told you about all the doors he found
But you're still better off, since the day before, you had a whole bunch of open doors and you didn't know about any of them.
Maybe some doors have broken locks, and you can't get a craftsmen within 3 weeks because they're all busy. During that time, you're a sitting duck, wondering what the "professional service" provider might do to your house during that period. Better pay up.
If he had wanted to rob you, he could have done so before telling you of the vulnerabilities. The doors were open, regardless of his telling you, and regardless of the availabilit of locksmiths.
You lived in a trusting neighborhood (or at least it was trusting, until that helpful provider of "professional service" walked by), and felt quite comfortable deliberately leaving your doors open. Now, you're no longer as confident
You are suggesting that ignorance is bliss.
In this case, I disagree. In this case, it is the other way around.
He isn't a researcher... If you had read the article, you'd have known he's an ex-con. Obviously his ethical compass is still bent.
In TFA it mentions that he USED to be a con - 10 years ago. Since that time he was a security consultant who kept is nose clean. In this case, he made no threats to hack them or divulge their vulnerabilities to third parties if they didn't pay. He only wanted comensation for the time he spent (and it probably would have cost them a lot more if they had actually HIRED a security consultant to give them a "report" about their system security). Granted, they were under no legal obligation to pay, but it's like the "cutting grass" analogy someone posted earlier - They would have to pay SOMEBODY to do this analysis (or SHOULD - since they obviously have security concerns that would bite them in the ass big-time if not addressed), so why not this guy, since he has already done the work?
I spent an hour walking around your house and found that you had some unlocked doors. Please pay me $5000 and I will tell you where they are, rather than your enemies.
is blackmail.
I spent an hour walking around your house and found that you had the following unlocked doors... Please pay me $50 for one hour's work.
If you take this premise to its logical conclusion, then shouldn't the same thing apply to elections? Your participation in elections should be weighted by the amount of money you contribute. Pay $1, receive one vote. Pay $1,000,000, receive one million votes. How do you think the government would be run then? (Then again, with all the lobbyists and thier campaign contributions, this already pretty much the case. Sigh.)
HOWEVER, they are fully aware of the uses of the P2P network. Its very purpose is to enable more people to download and share files, offloading the bandwidth from you to others that have already downloaded the file. One could argue that the sharing of a file on a P2P network gave implicit permission for others to upload it to users of the same network.
The purpose of a P2P network has no relevance under the law. Copyright law permits them to share the file with you, but forbids you to share it with anyone else unless they give you permission (which they don't). Their sharinng of files in this way is a flagrant abuse of the P2P network, but the law has nothing to say about that.
It is quite possible for companies to put files on web sites for free download, but the rights to those files must be acquired (usually purchased) elsewhere. For example, you download an encrypted file and they email you the key, or they download a program that won't run until you activate it, and they mail you the activation key. The fact that they put the file on a publicly-accessible medium (web, p2p, etc.) does not give you any implicit rights per se.
Wait, so if I download a song from someone who actually works for the RIAA, or a movie from someone who works for the MPAA, I'm asking them to make me a copy of the file, and they do - and being the holders of copyright, there's nothing illegal here, right?
Assuming they own the rights to that file, that is absolutely correct. HOWEVER, unless they also have given you explicit reproduction rights, that does not allow you to re-share it. And if you are using a P2P network, chances are, while downloading one half of the file, you will be sharing the other half. So they will catch you red-handed. What will likely happen in this case is they will upload a file that is 1) poisoned (you won't want to listen to it, and will likely trash it as soon as you hear it, so it's useless to you) 2) copyrighted (has identifiable fragments of copyrighted material) and 3) traceable (it might have a message such as "We don't approve of file thieves - signed the RIAA", so you have no excuse that "I didn't know it was copyrighted")
Shoudn't the RIAA start to sue themselves ? They downloaded copies of songs to there computer, and now they are shareing them with a judge...
First of all, copyright protects the right to make copies. So, technically, if I download a file from you, I am asking for you to make me a copy, and you do so. You are the one violating copyright, not I. So if the RIAA gets a file from your computer, they aren't getting you for downloading it, they are getting you for sending it.
Second of all, the copyright holder has the right to make whatever copies they want, and to provide permission to anyone they choose to do the same. So if they or their agents download, or upload, or do anything else they want to do with their own data, they have the right to do so.
Our economic system is based on the idea of "profit at all costs." I mean, isn't this what we wanted and fought the cold war for?
Um, no. Our economic system is based on the idea of economic freedom -- which does include the freedom for people and organisations to pursue "profit at all costs" (as long as it's within the law).
Actually, the previous poster is mostly correct in practice. By law, all publicly-held corporations are required to put the interests of their stockholders first, rather than the interests of their consumers, employees, government, society, etc. When human beings espouse such values, we call them sociopathic. Our economic system is being run by multi-billion-dollar sociopaths, and we wonder why it is going down the tubes.
By that same logic, is a n athlete entitled to break the rules and use steroids, just because he/she has a day job? After all, a pro athlete has the entire season to train in - why shouldn't a working man who want's to compete be able to skip that? Be careful with that line of reasoning.
No - because athletes compete in an officially-adjudicated competition with real-world prizes and rewards.
In the real world, if you play a game for real-world prizes (such as professional baseball, professional golf, chess, etc.), the rules of competition are usually quite strict, explicitly spelled out, and rigidly enforced. On the other hand, if you are just playing for your own enjoyment, you are free to adjust the rules of the games for your own convenience.
The same applies to computer games - if you play in a competition with real-world prizes (such as a ladder tournament), competition rules are usually quite strict and well enforced. However, if you are just playing for your own enjoyment, what is the big deal? It is not as if you are giving yourself powers that are not available to other players (unlike some "cheat programs" available for some games) - you are merely chosing to give money to other players on (say) eBay, rather than the same money (plus many hours of your own precious time) to the people who run the game servers.
In fact, they have a vested interest in making the acquisition of levels and wealth as difficult as power, in order to force players to play for many many hours to achieve small gains (and thus incur larger usage fees). This is similar to 1-900 numbers that have complicated menus with long and slow explanations - so you basically pay them lots of money just to hear their menus over and over again.
Slashdot Mirror
"For every customer that complains to you to get a problem fixed, there's 10 others that merely told everyone else they know to stop buying from you."
I take an intermediate approach - I try to fix it myself. If that fails, I try technical support. If that fails, after several attempts, then I tell everyone I know to stop buying from them.
Why don't they just give him whatever he wants. It's not like they are going to lose money on another of those films.
Because what he actually WANTS is to have an independent third party to look at their books and decide what is fair (he probably believes they owe him money, but he said he would be happy with whatever the auditors decide).
It is common industry practice to shuffle expenses around from one department to another, so that on paper, even a multi-billion-dollar movie never makes any profit, so the studios get away without paying any royalties. If they gave him what he wanted, these practices would be exposed for all to see. This is much more than a few hundred million from one blockbuster movie - it is about similar practices from every blockbuster movie ever made. No studio in their right minds would dare to have this kind of thing become publicly known (or worse, proven so that all the people they have defrauded out of royalties be able to sue them over it).
I'm not convinced that it was Paypal's mistake to begin with.
From TFA, it was Paypal who set up the account as a charitable account, even though they were not asked to do so. This makes it their fault to begin with.
they are holding the funds until mid April, probably due to somebody screwing up
Why do they need to hold it for 6 months, especially when they screwed up? Simple - this seems to be standard operating procedure in many dispute cases. It lets them milk the funds for 6 months of free interest while their customers twist in the wind with no recourse.
The earth is actually older than 6,000 years.
;)
Yes, according to Archbishop Ussher's calculations, it is 6011
I had to read this several times before I realized that it does start to make sense if placed in a timeframe of 25 years ago. Doing this kind of manual work on today's graphics cards wouldn't just be pointless economically, but close to impossible (very tiny pads, etc).
:)
Given the cost of hardware, and that of labour, it's usually cheaper to replace than repair, especially things like this.
Back in the 70s (when it was still funny), National Lampoon had a magazine parody "Popular Workbench" that parodied Popular Mechanics, Popular Electronics, etc. In it was one want ad saying "Earn big $$ in transistor repair!". Repairing surface-mount electronics today is about a ludicrous today as repairing transistors was back then.
The electrician/inspector did not have to order the conduit removed--it probably would'vebeen fine to paint a stripe down the side and stencil "comms cable only" at regular intervals...thus it is a suitable candidate for "silly hacks".
That would be a sensible approach. It all depends on whether the inspector is allowed to use common sense (and capable of doing so) rather than merely spouting regulations.
That's weird because UL rating and the national electric code always allow a higher class device or fixture the be substituted for a lower class one
The problem isn't with running a low-voltage wire through a high-voltage conduit - the problem is that someone could later run a high-voltage wire through the same conduit. What happens if the lines somehow cross? Can you imagine what would happen if a hot 220V line came into direct contact with an ethernet cable? It would probably fry the router, and every piece of equipment connected to the router.
About 25 years ago, in our lab we had a monitor with an odd connector - it had the usual digital signals at ground and +5 volt levels - as well as a +70 volt power pin for some unfathonable reason. One day my boss plugged the cable in slightly off, and this fried the graphics card - he had to manually de-solder and replace around 70 chips as a result. Putting high voltage and low voltage signals in close proximity is an accident waiting to happen.
Sites should be based on standards. If a site is standard-compliant, and a browser doesn't render it, the it is the browser's fault (or at least it's not the site's fault).
Unfortunately, non-technical end-users (and non-technical companies that put up web sites) don't care about standards. They care about products that work. The agument "I am right and the largest software company in the world is wrong" never wins, even when it is right.
Whoa, nasty college flashback... Poking around on a PDP-11/34 running V6 Unix...
I remember a story a friend used to tell (on a very similar environment), about how once the swapper somehow swapped itself out, but he was using db to debug a program at the time, so he used that instance of db to poke around in memory to recover it (since the swapper image was still present in memory) and get the system running again without forcing a reboot. (How sad that Microsoft has taught us to accept regular reboots as an "acceptable" systems operation procedure.)
You pass a pointer to a physical memory address to the hardware, and it writes data there
The way I understood DMA to work on x86 architectures is this: you programmed the DMA controller with a physical address on a specific DMA channel, then told the device to send data on that DMA channel. In a protected environment, the DMA controller would be accessible only to the kernel itself, and drivers would have to make calls to the kernel to "pretty please set up the DMA controller to go to {this virtual address}", which the kernel would range-check and realize.
About the only evil thing you could do is to tell a device to use the same DMA channel that an in-progress DMA transfer on another channel is already using, perhaps duping the DMA controller chip into intermingling the data streams (I don't know enough about the protocols involved to say whether this is possible or not).
Unfortunately, this only became possible with x86 in the last few months. You could run the kernel in ring 0 and the drivers in ring 1, and this would give you some protection.
Well, I always thouguht that the 80386 architecture provided all the hardware you needed to do that. And even if you don't have that level of hardware protection, you could still do almost as well even on an 80286 or even 8088 - a Unix-like OS running on those architectures could easily terminate misbehaved user processes, as long as their misbehavior involved executing illegal instructions and accessing illegal memory (rather than writing garbage over other legitimate address spaces).
What do you do when the display driver trys to overwrite kernel memory? or the motherboard sata driver crashes with an exception, All any OS can do is stop
Not true. If an operating system is properly compartmentalized, it can merely shut off the offending part while allowing the other parts to continue running.
If my display driver tries to write to illegal memory, I would much rather that the OS shuts the displays off, and then signals an orderly shutdown, permitting applications to terminate (and perhaps auto-save work in progress), and the file system to be properly synchronized before shutdown.
If my sound driver freaks out, I would much rather have the OS continue running silently, allowing me the choices of what to do (since most critical UIs do not require sound).
If one disk driver fails, access to other disks could still continue (permitting work in progress to be saved temporarily to another device.)
If the system runs out of swap space, it should just refuse to allocate more memory, not allocate it and then realize in retrospect that it did not have the resources to do so.
Even if the swap device becomes inaccessible, it may still be possible to perform some reasonably orderly recovery and shutdown by permitting access to processes that are still in memory.
There are, of course, some problems that cannot be recovered from (memory corruption, errors in vital kernel components), but these should tend to be in the minority.
but what I suggest is that many people may not realize that listening to music they haven't paid for is stealing.
Actually, that isn't exactly what the law says (see below). In fact, there is a great deal of confusion between the verbs is and has been legislated to be (or is, according to the laws of {insert jurisdiction here}).
is implies an absolute state of equality, while copyright laws vary widely between jurisdictions. While p2p music sharing may be illegal in the United States, it isn't in Canada, for example.
The whole reason why society has always considered stealing to be such a heinous crime was NOT the fact that the thief acquired something of value that he wasn't entitled to, but rather that the victim LOST that thing. In previous centuries, horse theft in England carried the death penalty - because if a man made a living using his horse, and you stole it, he could starve to death. However, if you could sneak into his barn, take a skin sample, and clone the horse, the victim would not be inconvenienced.
This is an educated (master's degree) adult who was confused on the matter.
And with good reason. Most people do not take courses in law, and most of the nuances of such issues are discussed only in law school (not couting the FUD propaganda being spread by media companies, schools trying to indoctrine kids into a politically correct "don't share files" culture, etc.
Consider the following two examples:
1) I go to Wal*Mart, take a dozen CDs home (without paying for them), then leave them on my porch with a sign saying "Feel free to take home anything you want".
2) I go to Wal*Mart, take a dozen CDs home (but in order not to inconvenience Wal*Mart, I make copies and return the originals), then leave the copies on my porch instead.
In case 1, I can be charged with stealing for the CDs I took. However, nobody else will be charged with taking the CDs from my porch (well, they might be charged with possession of stolen property; however, since possesion of an item is usually considered as de-facto proof of ownership, especially for inexpensive items without serial numbers, nobody in their right minds would attempt to charge anyone for that).
In case 2, I couldn't be charged with taking the music (temporary breaking and entering aside, and even that would be moot if we were talking about art or books instead and I made copies by taking a camera into the store and photographing them). However, even though I would be considered lily white under the law for TAKING the initial copy, I could be prosecuted for every single CD that somebody ELSE took from my porch. And also remember that the charges here would not be for larceny, but rather for copyright infringement. Furthermore, under current laws, the second case would be considered MUCH more serious, even though less is actually "stolen" (since the music is, but the physical media, which is the bulk of the cost of manufacturing the music, is not.)
My point is that in the case of physical theft, act A is punishable, but act B is not. In the case of copying, act A is not punishable, but act B is. Furthermore, the victim in case 1 is Wal*Mart, while the victim in case 2 is the RIAA. So while you may think of copyright infringement as theft, and while the two may be similar in some ways (and are viewed as the same by society), under the law they are COMPLETELY different. The RIAA and MPAA never go after peoplf for downloading content - only for uploadingcontent. (Compare web sites that offer unauthorized downloads - they can shut down the web sites, but have no legal leg to stand on vs. the web site's visitors.)
These people rightly argue "Well... I listen to it on the radio without paying for it, is that stealing? If not, how is it stealing when I listen on my computer?". What is not clear to them, however, is that if they are using a P2P network, the analogy is more like them listening to the radio, and then piping the music through to another unlicensed transmitter - something that would get them into trouble.
People have a fundamental right to privacy
If you are in a bathroom, alone, you have a certain expectation of privacy. But in a room with 30 other people? Just what kind of privacy can you reasonably expect?
This needs to be a civil offense, not a criminal offense.
The problem with this is that if some snot-nosed 12-year old shuts down a chat server because he is pissed off at getting kicked for being obnoxious, a civil suit won't do squat, since he won't have any resource to go after. However, if it's a criminal offense, at least he might have his computer access revoked.
My computer system is configured to only allow file transfers to computers that have the appropriate rights granted by the copyright holder(s).
How can you configure it to do this? Is there some universal standard by which files can be marked as "I have the rights to distribute this file"? Or that says "I have the rights to distribute this to you, but you don't have the rights to distribute this further"? (Of course, pirates will, of course, find a way to forge this, so its validity becomes moot).
The appearance of the files in the search result only proves that the requestor did, in fact, have the appropriate rights.
This assumes that nobody ever shares files that they do not have rights to. Thus, piracy does not exist. What a wonderfully safe and non-controversial world we all live in!
NOT.
You can't be sure whether he told you about all the doors he found
But you're still better off, since the day before, you had a whole bunch of open doors and you didn't know about any of them.
Maybe some doors have broken locks, and you can't get a craftsmen within 3 weeks because they're all busy. During that time, you're a sitting duck, wondering what the "professional service" provider might do to your house during that period. Better pay up. If he had wanted to rob you, he could have done so before telling you of the vulnerabilities. The doors were open, regardless of his telling you, and regardless of the availabilit of locksmiths.
You lived in a trusting neighborhood (or at least it was trusting, until that helpful provider of "professional service" walked by), and felt quite comfortable deliberately leaving your doors open. Now, you're no longer as confident
You are suggesting that ignorance is bliss.
In this case, I disagree. In this case, it is the other way around.
He isn't a researcher ... If you had read the article, you'd have known he's an ex-con. Obviously his ethical compass is still bent.
In TFA it mentions that he USED to be a con - 10 years ago. Since that time he was a security consultant who kept is nose clean. In this case, he made no threats to hack them or divulge their vulnerabilities to third parties if they didn't pay. He only wanted comensation for the time he spent (and it probably would have cost them a lot more if they had actually HIRED a security consultant to give them a "report" about their system security). Granted, they were under no legal obligation to pay, but it's like the "cutting grass" analogy someone posted earlier - They would have to pay SOMEBODY to do this analysis (or SHOULD - since they obviously have security concerns that would bite them in the ass big-time if not addressed), so why not this guy, since he has already done the work?
I spent an hour walking around your house and found that you had some unlocked doors. Please pay me $5000 and I will tell you where they are, rather than your enemies.
is blackmail.
I spent an hour walking around your house and found that you had the following unlocked doors... Please pay me $50 for one hour's work.
is a bill for professional services rendered.
If you take this premise to its logical conclusion, then shouldn't the same thing apply to elections? Your participation in elections should be weighted by the amount of money you contribute. Pay $1, receive one vote. Pay $1,000,000, receive one million votes. How do you think the government would be run then? (Then again, with all the lobbyists and thier campaign contributions, this already pretty much the case. Sigh.)
HOWEVER, they are fully aware of the uses of the P2P network. Its very purpose is to enable more people to download and share files, offloading the bandwidth from you to others that have already downloaded the file. One could argue that the sharing of a file on a P2P network gave implicit permission for others to upload it to users of the same network.
The purpose of a P2P network has no relevance under the law. Copyright law permits them to share the file with you, but forbids you to share it with anyone else unless they give you permission (which they don't). Their sharinng of files in this way is a flagrant abuse of the P2P network, but the law has nothing to say about that.
It is quite possible for companies to put files on web sites for free download, but the rights to those files must be acquired (usually purchased) elsewhere. For example, you download an encrypted file and they email you the key, or they download a program that won't run until you activate it, and they mail you the activation key. The fact that they put the file on a publicly-accessible medium (web, p2p, etc.) does not give you any implicit rights per se.
Wait, so if I download a song from someone who actually works for the RIAA, or a movie from someone who works for the MPAA, I'm asking them to make me a copy of the file, and they do - and being the holders of copyright, there's nothing illegal here, right?
Assuming they own the rights to that file, that is absolutely correct. HOWEVER, unless they also have given you explicit reproduction rights, that does not allow you to re-share it. And if you are using a P2P network, chances are, while downloading one half of the file, you will be sharing the other half. So they will catch you red-handed. What will likely happen in this case is they will upload a file that is 1) poisoned (you won't want to listen to it, and will likely trash it as soon as you hear it, so it's useless to you) 2) copyrighted (has identifiable fragments of copyrighted material) and 3) traceable (it might have a message such as "We don't approve of file thieves - signed the RIAA", so you have no excuse that "I didn't know it was copyrighted")
Shoudn't the RIAA start to sue themselves ? They downloaded copies of songs to there computer, and now they are shareing them with a judge...
First of all, copyright protects the right to make copies. So, technically, if I download a file from you, I am asking for you to make me a copy, and you do so. You are the one violating copyright, not I. So if the RIAA gets a file from your computer, they aren't getting you for downloading it, they are getting you for sending it.
Second of all, the copyright holder has the right to make whatever copies they want, and to provide permission to anyone they choose to do the same. So if they or their agents download, or upload, or do anything else they want to do with their own data, they have the right to do so.
Our economic system is based on the idea of "profit at all costs." I mean, isn't this what we wanted and fought the cold war for?
Um, no. Our economic system is based on the idea of economic freedom -- which does include the freedom for people and organisations to pursue "profit at all costs" (as long as it's within the law).
Actually, the previous poster is mostly correct in practice. By law, all publicly-held corporations are required to put the interests of their stockholders first, rather than the interests of their consumers, employees, government, society, etc. When human beings espouse such values, we call them sociopathic. Our economic system is being run by multi-billion-dollar sociopaths, and we wonder why it is going down the tubes.
By that same logic, is a n athlete entitled to break the rules and use steroids, just because he/she has a day job? After all, a pro athlete has the entire season to train in - why shouldn't a working man who want's to compete be able to skip that? Be careful with that line of reasoning.
No - because athletes compete in an officially-adjudicated competition with real-world prizes and rewards.
In the real world, if you play a game for real-world prizes (such as professional baseball, professional golf, chess, etc.), the rules of competition are usually quite strict, explicitly spelled out, and rigidly enforced. On the other hand, if you are just playing for your own enjoyment, you are free to adjust the rules of the games for your own convenience.
The same applies to computer games - if you play in a competition with real-world prizes (such as a ladder tournament), competition rules are usually quite strict and well enforced. However, if you are just playing for your own enjoyment, what is the big deal? It is not as if you are giving yourself powers that are not available to other players (unlike some "cheat programs" available for some games) - you are merely chosing to give money to other players on (say) eBay, rather than the same money (plus many hours of your own precious time) to the people who run the game servers.
In fact, they have a vested interest in making the acquisition of levels and wealth as difficult as power, in order to force players to play for many many hours to achieve small gains (and thus incur larger usage fees). This is similar to 1-900 numbers that have complicated menus with long and slow explanations - so you basically pay them lots of money just to hear their menus over and over again.