Simple, every legit MPAA movie I've ever acquired has had a copyright notice at the start. So if doesn't have one, it must be free to share.. right?
But how do you know there's a copyright notice at all in the file, if your bittorrent client first downloads all other chunks, and that copyright notice crap is downloaded last? Plus: most bt clients won't recreate the original file before they are complete, so you've got no chance to see the copyright notice before you've got the whole movie.
But this argumentation won't probably stand a chance in court, since copyright springs into effect due to the Berne Convention, even without any copyright notice attached. At least, that's the case in most countries that adhere to this Convention; and since most, if not all, RIAA/MPAA files are usually copyrighted, any court out there would simply tell you, that you should have assumed that the file was copyrighted by default. Which kind of sucks.
That is fucking hillarious. Lawyers, cops, judges, and politicians don't have ethics. They don't even know the meaning of the word.
Please don't put NewYorkCountryLawyer in the same basket as all those greedy bastards: he's a good guy (yet some may say, exceptions confirm the rule).
From those benchmarks the one thing that stuck out was that GCC is getting slower.
That's a well-known fact for us source-based distributions/OS users. Compiling everything from source on Gentoo, or the BSDs took a severe performance hit since GCC got more and more slow (for no apparent reason), esp. the C++ backend... But what's slowing Ubuntu down is probably the quality of ASM code generated by GCC, as well as programs being writting more and more sloppily by developers with very fast machines.
Maybe the source of the problem is actually GCC getting slower. This forces developers to use faster machines to shorten the compile runs; but those faster machines also hide the problem of software getting slower. Many devs simply don't care anymore for slower machines, because they simply don't see the problem on their own boxes. To them, the software is "fast enough."
Punishment will fit the crime, only if society demands it.
First, society defines what crime is and what isn't. How harsh a crime is punished follows from that.
What's shocking us in this special case is that the afghan society (or more generally traditional muslim societies) define(s) blasphemy as a crime. We used to do the same in medieval Europe, but were fortunate enough to overcome those dark ages... though it's not sooo long ago yet! But there are societies out there who didn't experience the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and all that, and who still cling to the (in our eyes) outdated concept of blasphemy-as-a-crime.
Obviously we must fight to overthrow this oppressive government that we set up!
It won't happen: the afghan government is in favor of draconian anti-"piracy" DMCA-style laws (anyone surprised here?), so everything's fine with it from an official US government's perspective...
There are many things that even supposedly free societies will not allow to be discussed.
The term for that is 'taboo'. It existed in societies from the very beginning, still exist today, and considering human nature, will still exist in the future in one form or another.
As George Carlin said, you don't have rights. You have privileges. Privileges that can be revoked at any time.
Absolutely! Rights are only rights as long as they are upheld by the mighty. Occasionally, they help the not-so-powerful average guys, but usually, rights are just one manifestation of the current balance of power in a society. Just look at the rights the US grants to the content industry w.r.t. the right the US grants to grannies and 7 year-olds who commited the unpardonable "crime" of copying a bunch of mp3s. Or the rights of big business, banks etc. to get a bailout, w.r.t. the "rights" of broke homeowners to be evicted and thrown on the street.
It's really that simple, but very few people realize it because the harsh truth hurts.
Considering that France's Sarkozy is heavily pushing for a "3 strike and you're out" right now, and that Quebecois may be influenced by french culture, is it a safe bet to assume that MPs from Quebec would be more hawkish w.r.t. copyright legislation than the other Canadian MPs?
They CANNOT do that with the contents of your mind
Of course they can. Nothing prevents them from applying torture until you break down. The definition of which has been watered and stretched in such a way as to allow a multitude of "harsh interrogation techniques". Why do you think did they suspend the original habeas corpus act under the pretense of anti-terrorism, giving police so many weeks (sic!) to "operate" on suspects? It may only apply to terror suspects now, but isn't it just a matter of time until everyone becomes potentially suspect to an increasingly paranoid state?
This is particularly troubling and sad, considering that habeas corpus was effectively invented there in the first place.
though if we could do ZFS on Linux without jumping through scary hoops we'd happily to that instead!
How about test-driving the early ZFS support in FreeBSD 7? It's already there and can only get better with time and exposure, esp. from Wikipedia! Plus managing a bunch of FreeBSD ZFS hosts is (IMHO) way easier than managing OpenSolaris servers, esp. for people with a Linux admin background.
Could lead to a tyranny of the majority, what if a block of countries wanted censorship?
Which could happen all too fast and is really evil! Russia having a grudge with Georgia? Out goes the.ge ccTLD. The US having an issue with Iran? Out goes the.ir ccTLD. The Arab bloc having a problem with Israel? Out goes the.il ccTLD. And the list goes on and on and on... Good bye single root model and welcome multiple (disagreeing) roots?
How do companies like ICANN and VeriSign propose to protect such a crucial part of the internet from a potential attack? Consider both a physical and virtual attack.
Oh please, all this terrorism scare is getting old. Virtually, the root servers have been already subjected to a lot of quite heavy DDoS attacks, and they managed quite well, thanks to the Unicast infrastructure, and sufficient allocation of server resources. Physically, the root servers are just as secure as other important servers, namely in regular data centers around the world. What could some terrorists do here? Blow-up one data center? So what? Big deal: DNS will still work flawlessly because of redundancy.
Remember, the whole Internet infrastructure was designed in such a way that it would route around wholly nuked areas and still continue to function. If even nuclear powers can't wholly dismantle the Internet through the use of brute force, a little bunch of petty terrorists would not make a small dent into the global infrastructure (and not into the DNS infrastructure either), as it currently stands. That's the beauty of the Internet as a network designed with military resilience from the beginning.
You mean to an international body like the ISO? You could as well give it to Microsoft then...
Remember the faith of UN (ISO-) sponsored standards like the ISO-OSI standards w.r.t. the more ad-hoc IP protocol (I'm meaning the communications protocol which really existed a few decades ago as was sparsely deployed in some government networks, not the 7-layer OSI model)? Give something like an important piece of infrastructure to a multinational government body is the surest way to kill it outright. The Internet grew without (too much) bureaucracy, please keep it that way.
Why not just give them a free download of an MP3 for every song they already purchaced?
Maybe because they're unable to get a license for the corresponding MP3 songs from the labels? But nothing prevents them from issuing a refund, thus absorbing the cost of their mistake to go DRM in the first place.
Also, about that free showing on TV, I remember when we used to sit with our VCRs and record on VHS tapes to watch later so yeah, I guess I'm guilty of piracy in that respect too.
No, you're not, because you were watching stuff that has already been paid for by the TV station to the content owner. And the TV station, even free TV, got its money from ad-revenues (which you (collectively) paid for by buying stuff at the grocery store), or from state subsidies (which you pay through your taxes). Whatever: what has been sent on free TV has already been paid for, and it was meant for widespread dissemination.
The issue here is that the content industry is trying to move from the old model of being paid up-front by radio and TV stations on behalf of all viewers, to being paid individually by every single person interested in their stuff. And this doesn't work so well for them, because collecting the money from a swarm of hundreds of million people who can easily get their stuff for free on P2P will always be much harder than collecting money from a very few institutions like radios and TV stations. By moving from the collective model to the individual model, the content industry has shoot itself pretty badly in the foot.
Maybe the fairest move in all this would be for everyone to recognize that the current scare tactics just don't work, that the distribution cartel is broken beyond repair, and to finally introduce some kind of cultural flat rate. Collect, say, a few extra dollars from every broadband user, and consider broadband like modern new free TV, free radio etc... This money should be more than enough to replace the income of the content industry (they should find a way how to equitably distribute this money among themselves, that's another problem), and would stop the current insane spiral towards criminalizing the whole population for doing something as trivial and harmless as copying files across the net.
From day one the handling of US Persons in the context of foreign intelligence is hammered into your head. But I guess sometimes immaturity and a cheap laugh at someone else's expense trumps common sense and the doing the right thing.
It's not the cheap laugh of some little monitoring guy (or gal) that's dangerous: let'em laugh at our expenses, if only as a little compensation for the incredibly boring work they've signed up to and are forced to do day in day out.
The problem isn't the little guy in the system, it's the whole surveillance mind set, as dreamed up by increasingly authoritarian and corrupt governments. In most dictatorships, governments use to monitor the populace, and (and this is where it really gets nasty), they also routinely archive all kinds of misbehavior they gather, that they wouldn't have been looking for in the first place.
E.g.: you talk with your buddy on the phone about how you managed to evade some kind of tax, or you are talking about your extra-marital affairs or whatever. All this is pretty harmless in itself, but it won't be any longer if this conversation gets monitored, recorded and archived. As long as you remain unpolitical, government wouldn't care, but suppose that, a few years down the road, you decide to politically oppose the government in some point. As soon as you gather enough followers, government officials WILL start to dig into the big archives of the surveillance apparatus for material that would shatter your credibility or to start a blackmail. Were you talking about tax-honesty? Good bye credibility. Are you still loving your wife? Good bye marriage, hello divorce.
That's why spying on the whole population as a pro-active measure is evil.
Uh yes, 25% VAT is really high, and I really hope Norway would find a way to lower it somewhat. In Germany, the electricity price tag above includes 19% VAT after the last 3% VAT increase...
Yep, you're right. Norway is in a remarkably good position w.r.t. home-grown natural energy (and it's a wonderful country as well!). But perhaps it's also because of lower taxes there? Electricity is one of the most surtaxed energy in some European countries. E.g.: in Germany, they're surtaxing electricity bills to provide funding for small alternative energy providers. It's good intentioned, but that's how you get to EUR 0.25/kWh...
Will more ISP's/Hosters refuse to do business with "questionable" parties?
Some parties are always considered questionable, e.g. when they actively disrupt the Net. Those parties have always been cut-off, even in the pre-IP times: a misbehaving USENET host was quickly blacklisted and it had a very hard time to find peers. This is "technical questionability".
Other parties are sometimes considered questionable, e.g. when they provide content that is deemed questionable in some areas and cultures (say, e.g. pr0n). This is "social/cultural questionability".
Cutting someone off because of technical reasons is absolutely justifiable, because not cutting him off would disrupt the system itself. Cutting someone off because of social/cultural reasons is not necessary from a technical point of view, and is open to political debate.
Now, Net Neutrality is essentially a political (and economical) debate, and has nothing to do with the first category (technical constraints). Cutting off Intercage/Atrivo seems to me like belonging to the first category: they were actively disrupting the Net on the technical level, and they had to go. IMHO.
Just make it clear to politicians that terrorists can hide their communications in the spam flow (to defeat traffic analysis), and you'll wonder how fast governments will scramble to not only outlaw spam, but also to target and prosecute spammers. It could be much more effective than any other technical solution. But is the benefit of catching the top-100 ROKSO spammers and sending them to Guantanamo worth the increased surveillance and governments' grip on the Internet?
Slashdot Mirror
Simple, every legit MPAA movie I've ever acquired has had a copyright notice at the start. So if doesn't have one, it must be free to share.. right?
But how do you know there's a copyright notice at all in the file, if your bittorrent client first downloads all other chunks, and that copyright notice crap is downloaded last? Plus: most bt clients won't recreate the original file before they are complete, so you've got no chance to see the copyright notice before you've got the whole movie.
But this argumentation won't probably stand a chance in court, since copyright springs into effect due to the Berne Convention, even without any copyright notice attached. At least, that's the case in most countries that adhere to this Convention; and since most, if not all, RIAA/MPAA files are usually copyrighted, any court out there would simply tell you, that you should have assumed that the file was copyrighted by default. Which kind of sucks.
That is fucking hillarious. Lawyers, cops, judges, and politicians don't have ethics. They don't even know the meaning of the word.
Please don't put NewYorkCountryLawyer in the same basket as all those greedy bastards: he's a good guy (yet some may say, exceptions confirm the rule).
From those benchmarks the one thing that stuck out was that GCC is getting slower.
That's a well-known fact for us source-based distributions/OS users. Compiling everything from source on Gentoo, or the BSDs took a severe performance hit since GCC got more and more slow (for no apparent reason), esp. the C++ backend... But what's slowing Ubuntu down is probably the quality of ASM code generated by GCC, as well as programs being writting more and more sloppily by developers with very fast machines.
Maybe the source of the problem is actually GCC getting slower. This forces developers to use faster machines to shorten the compile runs; but those faster machines also hide the problem of software getting slower. Many devs simply don't care anymore for slower machines, because they simply don't see the problem on their own boxes. To them, the software is "fast enough."
Punishment will fit the crime, only if society demands it.
First, society defines what crime is and what isn't. How harsh a crime is punished follows from that.
What's shocking us in this special case is that the afghan society (or more generally traditional muslim societies) define(s) blasphemy as a crime. We used to do the same in medieval Europe, but were fortunate enough to overcome those dark ages... though it's not sooo long ago yet! But there are societies out there who didn't experience the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and all that, and who still cling to the (in our eyes) outdated concept of blasphemy-as-a-crime.
Obviously we must fight to overthrow this oppressive government that we set up!
It won't happen: the afghan government is in favor of draconian anti-"piracy" DMCA-style laws (anyone surprised here?), so everything's fine with it from an official US government's perspective...
There are many things that even supposedly free societies will not allow to be discussed.
The term for that is 'taboo'. It existed in societies from the very beginning, still exist today, and considering human nature, will still exist in the future in one form or another.
As George Carlin said, you don't have rights. You have privileges. Privileges that can be revoked at any time.
Absolutely! Rights are only rights as long as they are upheld by the mighty. Occasionally, they help the not-so-powerful average guys, but usually, rights are just one manifestation of the current balance of power in a society. Just look at the rights the US grants to the content industry w.r.t. the right the US grants to grannies and 7 year-olds who commited the unpardonable "crime" of copying a bunch of mp3s. Or the rights of big business, banks etc. to get a bailout, w.r.t. the "rights" of broke homeowners to be evicted and thrown on the street.
It's really that simple, but very few people realize it because the harsh truth hurts.
Can the old Japanese people handle the ride on a train that fast?
Well, it's much safer for old people to ride a train than to drive a car themselves...
Considering that France's Sarkozy is heavily pushing for a "3 strike and you're out" right now, and that Quebecois may be influenced by french culture, is it a safe bet to assume that MPs from Quebec would be more hawkish w.r.t. copyright legislation than the other Canadian MPs?
I think all parties will concentrate on the economic mess for a while
Or rather: They'll sneak it back in, while everybody else is concentrating on the economic mess for a while.
Test your logic:
A. Stealing == mv(1). (as in: mv /riaa/somefile.mp3 /home/mycollection)
B. Infringing copyright == cp(1). (as in: cp /riaa/somefile.mp3 /home/mycollection)
C. mv(1) != cp(1). (because with mv, /riaa/somefile.mp3 is gone, while with cp, it's still there)
Ergo: Stealing != Infringing copyright.
They CANNOT do that with the contents of your mind
Of course they can. Nothing prevents them from applying torture until you break down. The definition of which has been watered and stretched in such a way as to allow a multitude of "harsh interrogation techniques". Why do you think did they suspend the original habeas corpus act under the pretense of anti-terrorism, giving police so many weeks (sic!) to "operate" on suspects? It may only apply to terror suspects now, but isn't it just a matter of time until everyone becomes potentially suspect to an increasingly paranoid state?
This is particularly troubling and sad, considering that habeas corpus was effectively invented there in the first place.
Another possibility would be to use Flash and make you uncover portions with a mouse to see the code?
And what about us FreeBSD users, who are stuck with abysmal Flash (non-)support? What about the blind and sight-impaired, you use speaking software?
though if we could do ZFS on Linux without jumping through scary hoops we'd happily to that instead!
How about test-driving the early ZFS support in FreeBSD 7? It's already there and can only get better with time and exposure, esp. from Wikipedia! Plus managing a bunch of FreeBSD ZFS hosts is (IMHO) way easier than managing OpenSolaris servers, esp. for people with a Linux admin background.
Could lead to a tyranny of the majority, what if a block of countries wanted censorship?
Which could happen all too fast and is really evil! Russia having a grudge with Georgia? Out goes the .ge ccTLD. The US having an issue with Iran? Out goes the .ir ccTLD. The Arab bloc having a problem with Israel? Out goes the .il ccTLD. And the list goes on and on and on... Good bye single root model and welcome multiple (disagreeing) roots?
How do companies like ICANN and VeriSign propose to protect such a crucial part of the internet from a potential attack? Consider both a physical and virtual attack.
Oh please, all this terrorism scare is getting old. Virtually, the root servers have been already subjected to a lot of quite heavy DDoS attacks, and they managed quite well, thanks to the Unicast infrastructure, and sufficient allocation of server resources. Physically, the root servers are just as secure as other important servers, namely in regular data centers around the world. What could some terrorists do here? Blow-up one data center? So what? Big deal: DNS will still work flawlessly because of redundancy.
Remember, the whole Internet infrastructure was designed in such a way that it would route around wholly nuked areas and still continue to function. If even nuclear powers can't wholly dismantle the Internet through the use of brute force, a little bunch of petty terrorists would not make a small dent into the global infrastructure (and not into the DNS infrastructure either), as it currently stands. That's the beauty of the Internet as a network designed with military resilience from the beginning.
Give it to the UN, not just 1 country.
You mean to an international body like the ISO? You could as well give it to Microsoft then...
Remember the faith of UN (ISO-) sponsored standards like the ISO-OSI standards w.r.t. the more ad-hoc IP protocol (I'm meaning the communications protocol which really existed a few decades ago as was sparsely deployed in some government networks, not the 7-layer OSI model)? Give something like an important piece of infrastructure to a multinational government body is the surest way to kill it outright. The Internet grew without (too much) bureaucracy, please keep it that way.
Why not just give them a free download of an MP3 for every song they already purchaced?
Maybe because they're unable to get a license for the corresponding MP3 songs from the labels? But nothing prevents them from issuing a refund, thus absorbing the cost of their mistake to go DRM in the first place.
Also, about that free showing on TV, I remember when we used to sit with our VCRs and record on VHS tapes to watch later so yeah, I guess I'm guilty of piracy in that respect too.
No, you're not, because you were watching stuff that has already been paid for by the TV station to the content owner. And the TV station, even free TV, got its money from ad-revenues (which you (collectively) paid for by buying stuff at the grocery store), or from state subsidies (which you pay through your taxes). Whatever: what has been sent on free TV has already been paid for, and it was meant for widespread dissemination.
The issue here is that the content industry is trying to move from the old model of being paid up-front by radio and TV stations on behalf of all viewers, to being paid individually by every single person interested in their stuff. And this doesn't work so well for them, because collecting the money from a swarm of hundreds of million people who can easily get their stuff for free on P2P will always be much harder than collecting money from a very few institutions like radios and TV stations. By moving from the collective model to the individual model, the content industry has shoot itself pretty badly in the foot.
Maybe the fairest move in all this would be for everyone to recognize that the current scare tactics just don't work, that the distribution cartel is broken beyond repair, and to finally introduce some kind of cultural flat rate. Collect, say, a few extra dollars from every broadband user, and consider broadband like modern new free TV, free radio etc... This money should be more than enough to replace the income of the content industry (they should find a way how to equitably distribute this money among themselves, that's another problem), and would stop the current insane spiral towards criminalizing the whole population for doing something as trivial and harmless as copying files across the net.
From day one the handling of US Persons in the context of foreign intelligence is hammered into your head. But I guess sometimes immaturity and a cheap laugh at someone else's expense trumps common sense and the doing the right thing.
It's not the cheap laugh of some little monitoring guy (or gal) that's dangerous: let'em laugh at our expenses, if only as a little compensation for the incredibly boring work they've signed up to and are forced to do day in day out.
The problem isn't the little guy in the system, it's the whole surveillance mind set, as dreamed up by increasingly authoritarian and corrupt governments. In most dictatorships, governments use to monitor the populace, and (and this is where it really gets nasty), they also routinely archive all kinds of misbehavior they gather, that they wouldn't have been looking for in the first place.
E.g.: you talk with your buddy on the phone about how you managed to evade some kind of tax, or you are talking about your extra-marital affairs or whatever. All this is pretty harmless in itself, but it won't be any longer if this conversation gets monitored, recorded and archived. As long as you remain unpolitical, government wouldn't care, but suppose that, a few years down the road, you decide to politically oppose the government in some point. As soon as you gather enough followers, government officials WILL start to dig into the big archives of the surveillance apparatus for material that would shatter your credibility or to start a blackmail. Were you talking about tax-honesty? Good bye credibility. Are you still loving your wife? Good bye marriage, hello divorce.
That's why spying on the whole population as a pro-active measure is evil.
Uh yes, 25% VAT is really high, and I really hope Norway would find a way to lower it somewhat. In Germany, the electricity price tag above includes 19% VAT after the last 3% VAT increase...
Yep, you're right. Norway is in a remarkably good position w.r.t. home-grown natural energy (and it's a wonderful country as well!). But perhaps it's also because of lower taxes there? Electricity is one of the most surtaxed energy in some European countries. E.g.: in Germany, they're surtaxing electricity bills to provide funding for small alternative energy providers. It's good intentioned, but that's how you get to EUR 0.25/kWh...
140W is a lot of juice in the land of $0.18/kWh.
It's even a lot more in Europe, at approx. EUR 0.25/kWh ($0.34/kWh)...
Check out the NANOG thread on this here: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg11573.html.
Will more ISP's/Hosters refuse to do business with "questionable" parties?
Some parties are always considered questionable, e.g. when they actively disrupt the Net. Those parties have always been cut-off, even in the pre-IP times: a misbehaving USENET host was quickly blacklisted and it had a very hard time to find peers. This is "technical questionability".
Other parties are sometimes considered questionable, e.g. when they provide content that is deemed questionable in some areas and cultures (say, e.g. pr0n). This is "social/cultural questionability".
Cutting someone off because of technical reasons is absolutely justifiable, because not cutting him off would disrupt the system itself. Cutting someone off because of social/cultural reasons is not necessary from a technical point of view, and is open to political debate.
Now, Net Neutrality is essentially a political (and economical) debate, and has nothing to do with the first category (technical constraints). Cutting off Intercage/Atrivo seems to me like belonging to the first category: they were actively disrupting the Net on the technical level, and they had to go. IMHO.
Just make it clear to politicians that terrorists can hide their communications in the spam flow (to defeat traffic analysis), and you'll wonder how fast governments will scramble to not only outlaw spam, but also to target and prosecute spammers. It could be much more effective than any other technical solution. But is the benefit of catching the top-100 ROKSO spammers and sending them to Guantanamo worth the increased surveillance and governments' grip on the Internet?