So obvious question is how likely is it that the thieves will catch on that it's a special drive before it's too late. So long as Toshiba don't stick a great big label on it reading "Super-Secure Self-Erasing Drive", there's a good chance this drive will work as intended, isn't there?
Yep - those methods would be a lot more similar in effect to simply making a back up of your own. I think there's a good chance that it would make a difference in court. It might not get you off, but at least one of the big cases (and probably others) that gets bandied about wasn't because the woman was downloading the albums, but because she was distributing them via bit torrent. If you're just grabbing off Usenet then the damages that can be shown really are a lot less. At least in the US courts as I understand it. Naturally I'm not a lawyer;) but this is my understanding.
The good is just a license, which the supply of is inherently infinite if you control it.
No, the good is the movie / computer game / novel / recording / whatever. The licence is a means of getting payment for that good. It's only artificial scarcity if that movie or other content just somehow popped into existence for everyone to come and get if it weren't for someone artificially constraining them. But the content didn't just pop into existence. It was produced at a cost.
Everything else follows from you focusing on cost of reproduction, rather than cost of production.
You misunderstand completely. I never implied that it was "good and noble"
Ah, no, I was expressing my surprise because you weren't saying it was good and noble. I'm just tired of people on Slashdot arguing about how it is virtually a moral act to pirate a movie or song because the company is stealing from culture or something. Your position is more honest and slightly refreshing, imo.
People who have actually tried to compete with free or very low cost (because download times, blank media, HDD space etc do have a small cost) have found it is possible to do. In fact the movie and music industries have been doing that for years in China and other low wage countries where a CD at western prices is more than a month's wages.
Well keep in mind that those markets are subsidised by our own. You can be certain that sales of DVDs in China didn't pay for the Lord of the Rings trilogy alone! If prices in countries where copyright is more respected fell in line with countries where it's widely disregarded, that would be a major dink in the profitability of movies, computer games, ebooks, et al.
Let's be pragmatic here. Yeah, it is copyright infringement and no-one has a right to do it.
*falls off chair*
Sorry for that (all in good humour). The thing of it is that outside in the real world, I know loads of people who pirate movies (and quite a few who refuse to, but that's neither here nor there). What's relevant is that of these people, they all sort of shrug and say what you just said: "yeah, it's kind of wrong but I want to do it". The size of the shrug ranges from small and embarrassed to full on "who cares?". But it's only on Slashdot that I see reason tortured into fits in the most convoluted, double-thinking methods imaginable to proclaim that it's a good and noble act. It's the bizarre hypocrisy that does so many of our heads in, not the act itself.
Mechanisms which enforce artificial scarcity and reduce your ability to use your legitimately obtained good solely for the purpose of said mechanism suck. It's just that simple.
Artificial scarcity? You think movies just occur naturally in nature? Copyright is a means of ensuring producers get paid for their work. That you don't get to tell them how much they should charge isn't a problem. It only would be if you really needed their product (as opposed to wanted to watch a movie).
Yes, I think that is all exactly the sort of stuff the GP was talking about (and I use Slysoft's AnyDVD as well to watch my purchased Blu-Rays). But he was replying to someone who was complaining that they kept trashing their Ubuntu install, that it was too hard to compile a program and that Blu-ray on Linux should just work. That ain't the likes of you or me (took me approximately eight hours to get Blu-Ray working on Linux back when Doom9 first showed me the way). What you describe is awesome fun. But a long way from the "I want it to just work" attitude that the GP was criticising.
I haven't downloaded a movie off the Internet illegally in many moons (Over a year)
Forgive me, but when we compare the above to your earlier statement here which states:
I have a blu-ray player, but I run Linux. Playing Blu-ray in linux is difficult and error prone.
So I download the movies instead. I would happily buy them legally if I could pop them in and just play them in linux.
And the fact that the bluray rips are available with little to no effort on all the pirate sites would suggest to me that the copy protection isn't working anyway.
Well, your earlier post really, really seems to suggest that you are downloading blu-ray rips in place of buying them. There's a small amount of wiggle room for a lawyer, but I can't believe you didn't know what you were implying.
If you're torrenting a file, then you're assisting other people to download, not only for as long as you are downloading, but also for as long as you are seeding the file thereafter. Therefore torrenting is different in principle to backing up your own purchased copy.
And all that means is that instead of paying a couple million in fines, he'll pay a couple of million in fines and the added insult of paying for the legitimate copy.
In the event that he gets prosecuted and it gets as far as an actual fine, and in the event that the fine is "a couple of million", then yes. Though if you're talking those sorts of figures, it's worth a $30 investment to show good will to the court. But in the actual and confirmed case of him saying he agrees with paying but pirates because of DRM, it would show that he really meant the part about the DRM being the reason for the decision. Saying "I'm willing to pay, but I want the DRM free pirated version so I downloaded it", looks really, really like just an excuse as he could, if he really meant the part about being willing to pay, buy it and download it, thus getting what he claims to need, not taking any greater risk and not having people go "yeah, right" at his claims.
If he's going to be labeled a criminal either way, why choose the option that he has to pay for?
Because then when he said that he was happy to pay, but that the DRM forced him to pirate, it would sound like he meant it, rather than him just making excuses.
Unless of course, you think we should do military strikes on France?
I think you're better off sticking to strikes against non-nuclear countries that don't have a modern military, effective anti-aircraft weaponry and the capability to sink US Carrier groups. Unless of course you think they'd just surrender?
Point of my comment is that making jokes about a country surrendering because their government stood up to your government, doesn't make a lot of sense to me and just because you "don't give a fuck" what France did for the US in the 1700's (i.e. help gain your countries independence) doesn't mean the rest of the world or your more history-aware countrymen don't remember and think it makes you sound ignorant when you act like you aren't aware of it.
Never met any English folks, huh? You think Americans rag on the French....
Brit here, and I don't hear many anti-French jokes here. But I've had business calls with Americans and been subjected to jokes about the French surrendering completely out of the blue. American culture seems to come out with vast amounts of anti-French jokes and they really seemed to ramp up when the French opposed the US invasion of Iraq.
Ever since the storming of the bastille, you guys have pretty much been bagette waving losers.
You'd think an American wouldn't be so fond of the rule of royalty. Seems odd that you consider overthrowing the King's rule as a sign of being a loser.
Funny how Americans (you're American, right?) started making so many jokes about the French surrendering the moment France became one of the most resistant to US behaviour over Iraq. Doubly amusing when you think how important French assistance was to the American forces in the war of independence.
The fact of the matter is that, with proper training and handling, a Taser device, when used in its intended setting against a deserving individual, is far safer to innocent bystanders, the environment, public safety personnel, and in most cases the suspects themselves than any other incapacitation method that I've ever heard of. So what if there's a slight risk of cardiac arrest if you're tasing a dangerous individual that's whacked out on meth? Would you rather he was shot by a firearm? Would you rather the police wrestle him to the ground by hand?
The primary argument against Tasers isn't that they are as dangerous as guns (which your points stating that properly used the risk of permanent harm is low), but that tasers are used in place of negotiation or other less harmful methods of restraint. I.e. we don't like the question "would you rather he was shot by a firearm" because it's the sales argument that proponents of tasers have repeatedly used to distract from what we consider to be the more apt question: "would you rather a police officer didn't just get to zap people with pain when he felt like it?"
And related to your question about whether we would prefer the police just wrestle him to the ground, there is some basis for this. That basis is not trusting the police. For many of us, tasers change the situation from "there's someone who might beat me up and maybe I can defend myself" to "there's someone who has a weapon that can put me on the ground in agony from a distance and he might use it on me and there's nothing I can do about that without carrying some sort of protection that will cause me to be shot instead". It's a simple matter of power-balance. If you don't trust the police, then granting them extra powers to make people do what they're told under threat of pain, is a big cause of unease.
Why do people always leave out the other power Eisenhower warns against (which he just so happens to mention in the sentence following the end of your excerpt)?
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Probably because it hasn't happened, so there's no need to use his words to highlight the danger. A rich section of society that exploits scientific and technological knowledge? Yes. But an actual ruling class of scientists and engineers dominating society through their specialist knowledge? Only in isolated areas such as academia which don't translate into general social influence very well.
I'm not sure if this is a mistake or intentional but Bing is the default search for Win 7 and IE 8 in the toolbar. Now according to all the documentation, replacing it with Yahoo or Google is as easy as Right-click on the triangle and selecting Find More Providers. But all that does is load google's homepage on your active tab. Searching online only shows the same documentation. Only after careful research do you find a link on Microsoft that allows you to do it.
That's not true in IE9 (don't remember having any trouble with IE8 either, but don't have it installed at present so can't offer anything other than my recollection). I've just tried it on Win 7 with IE9 and it was a case of left click on the drop-down icon for seach engine selection, click on Find More Providers..., and on the page that comes up click on Google. There is then displayed a link saying "Click to install". Very simple.
I've found Bing and Google to be roughly equivalent for searching with two main differences that I care about. I find Bing's video and image results UI cleaner and better than Googles. I find Google's searching of Usenet newsgroups infinitely superior to Bing's.
It does seem that way. Or at least the governments believe that the companies would move elsewhere if they budged the rates up a bit. I imagine there's a little bit of brinkmanship that goes on - with the companies and the governments seeing who blinks first.
And that's the other half of the equation. You can compete by being cheaper, or by being better. What does "better" mean in today's world economy? The answer to that is complicated. But education is a big part of it. Produce a well-educated population, and you have something valuable to offer. But it only applies to some industries, not all. Cheap labour - that's going to be off-shored by any wealthy country. You can only fix that with tarrifs or oppression, both of which have negative overall consequences for a country. (The latter I hope I don't have to explain. The former results in gaining less from the net efficiencies that international trade brings). So if off-shoring of cheap labour jobs follows naturally from a country being wealthy, a country has to either choose not to be wealthy, or to make the off-shoring not a problem. And one way of doing the latter is to build up a jobs sector based around highly-skilled work.
That's the real problem. It's not the off-shoring of jobs. It's that those jobs aren't being replaced with anything better. It's fine and good for a society to progress beyond farming and making clothes as the focus of its activity. But we should move on to other things, not just nothing.
Go out of business, because your foreign competitors have lower costs (in the form of taxes) which means you can't win in the competition for customers, investors, etc.
So basically, countries compete with each other to sell themselves the cheapest to the corporations. I think our nations need to unionize.
Slashdot Mirror
So obvious question is how likely is it that the thieves will catch on that it's a special drive before it's too late. So long as Toshiba don't stick a great big label on it reading "Super-Secure Self-Erasing Drive", there's a good chance this drive will work as intended, isn't there?
Of course, with the abuses regularly commuted by our various 'law enforcement' agencies, do you really trust them with anything?
The only people I trust less than law enforcement, are the people who do trust law enforcement.
Yep - those methods would be a lot more similar in effect to simply making a back up of your own. I think there's a good chance that it would make a difference in court. It might not get you off, but at least one of the big cases (and probably others) that gets bandied about wasn't because the woman was downloading the albums, but because she was distributing them via bit torrent. If you're just grabbing off Usenet then the damages that can be shown really are a lot less. At least in the US courts as I understand it. Naturally I'm not a lawyer ;) but this is my understanding.
The good is just a license, which the supply of is inherently infinite if you control it.
No, the good is the movie / computer game / novel / recording / whatever. The licence is a means of getting payment for that good. It's only artificial scarcity if that movie or other content just somehow popped into existence for everyone to come and get if it weren't for someone artificially constraining them. But the content didn't just pop into existence. It was produced at a cost.
Everything else follows from you focusing on cost of reproduction, rather than cost of production.
You misunderstand completely. I never implied that it was "good and noble"
Ah, no, I was expressing my surprise because you weren't saying it was good and noble. I'm just tired of people on Slashdot arguing about how it is virtually a moral act to pirate a movie or song because the company is stealing from culture or something. Your position is more honest and slightly refreshing, imo.
People who have actually tried to compete with free or very low cost (because download times, blank media, HDD space etc do have a small cost) have found it is possible to do. In fact the movie and music industries have been doing that for years in China and other low wage countries where a CD at western prices is more than a month's wages.
Well keep in mind that those markets are subsidised by our own. You can be certain that sales of DVDs in China didn't pay for the Lord of the Rings trilogy alone! If prices in countries where copyright is more respected fell in line with countries where it's widely disregarded, that would be a major dink in the profitability of movies, computer games, ebooks, et al.
Let's be pragmatic here. Yeah, it is copyright infringement and no-one has a right to do it.
*falls off chair*
Sorry for that (all in good humour). The thing of it is that outside in the real world, I know loads of people who pirate movies (and quite a few who refuse to, but that's neither here nor there). What's relevant is that of these people, they all sort of shrug and say what you just said: "yeah, it's kind of wrong but I want to do it". The size of the shrug ranges from small and embarrassed to full on "who cares?". But it's only on Slashdot that I see reason tortured into fits in the most convoluted, double-thinking methods imaginable to proclaim that it's a good and noble act. It's the bizarre hypocrisy that does so many of our heads in, not the act itself.
Mechanisms which enforce artificial scarcity and reduce your ability to use your legitimately obtained good solely for the purpose of said mechanism suck. It's just that simple.
Artificial scarcity? You think movies just occur naturally in nature? Copyright is a means of ensuring producers get paid for their work. That you don't get to tell them how much they should charge isn't a problem. It only would be if you really needed their product (as opposed to wanted to watch a movie).
Yes, I think that is all exactly the sort of stuff the GP was talking about (and I use Slysoft's AnyDVD as well to watch my purchased Blu-Rays). But he was replying to someone who was complaining that they kept trashing their Ubuntu install, that it was too hard to compile a program and that Blu-ray on Linux should just work. That ain't the likes of you or me (took me approximately eight hours to get Blu-Ray working on Linux back when Doom9 first showed me the way). What you describe is awesome fun. But a long way from the "I want it to just work" attitude that the GP was criticising.
I haven't downloaded a movie off the Internet illegally in many moons (Over a year)
Forgive me, but when we compare the above to your earlier statement here which states:
Well, your earlier post really, really seems to suggest that you are downloading blu-ray rips in place of buying them. There's a small amount of wiggle room for a lawyer, but I can't believe you didn't know what you were implying.
If you're torrenting a file, then you're assisting other people to download, not only for as long as you are downloading, but also for as long as you are seeding the file thereafter. Therefore torrenting is different in principle to backing up your own purchased copy.
And all that means is that instead of paying a couple million in fines, he'll pay a couple of million in fines and the added insult of paying for the legitimate copy.
In the event that he gets prosecuted and it gets as far as an actual fine, and in the event that the fine is "a couple of million", then yes. Though if you're talking those sorts of figures, it's worth a $30 investment to show good will to the court. But in the actual and confirmed case of him saying he agrees with paying but pirates because of DRM, it would show that he really meant the part about the DRM being the reason for the decision. Saying "I'm willing to pay, but I want the DRM free pirated version so I downloaded it", looks really, really like just an excuse as he could, if he really meant the part about being willing to pay, buy it and download it, thus getting what he claims to need, not taking any greater risk and not having people go "yeah, right" at his claims.
If he's going to be labeled a criminal either way, why choose the option that he has to pay for?
Because then when he said that he was happy to pay, but that the DRM forced him to pirate, it would sound like he meant it, rather than him just making excuses.
Unless of course, you think we should do military strikes on France?
I think you're better off sticking to strikes against non-nuclear countries that don't have a modern military, effective anti-aircraft weaponry and the capability to sink US Carrier groups. Unless of course you think they'd just surrender?
Point of my comment is that making jokes about a country surrendering because their government stood up to your government, doesn't make a lot of sense to me and just because you "don't give a fuck" what France did for the US in the 1700's (i.e. help gain your countries independence) doesn't mean the rest of the world or your more history-aware countrymen don't remember and think it makes you sound ignorant when you act like you aren't aware of it.
Never met any English folks, huh? You think Americans rag on the French....
Brit here, and I don't hear many anti-French jokes here. But I've had business calls with Americans and been subjected to jokes about the French surrendering completely out of the blue. American culture seems to come out with vast amounts of anti-French jokes and they really seemed to ramp up when the French opposed the US invasion of Iraq.
Ever since the storming of the bastille, you guys have pretty much been bagette waving losers.
You'd think an American wouldn't be so fond of the rule of royalty. Seems odd that you consider overthrowing the King's rule as a sign of being a loser.
Funny how Americans (you're American, right?) started making so many jokes about the French surrendering the moment France became one of the most resistant to US behaviour over Iraq. Doubly amusing when you think how important French assistance was to the American forces in the war of independence.
First time the joke actually has been, then.
The fact of the matter is that, with proper training and handling, a Taser device, when used in its intended setting against a deserving individual, is far safer to innocent bystanders, the environment, public safety personnel, and in most cases the suspects themselves than any other incapacitation method that I've ever heard of. So what if there's a slight risk of cardiac arrest if you're tasing a dangerous individual that's whacked out on meth? Would you rather he was shot by a firearm? Would you rather the police wrestle him to the ground by hand?
The primary argument against Tasers isn't that they are as dangerous as guns (which your points stating that properly used the risk of permanent harm is low), but that tasers are used in place of negotiation or other less harmful methods of restraint. I.e. we don't like the question "would you rather he was shot by a firearm" because it's the sales argument that proponents of tasers have repeatedly used to distract from what we consider to be the more apt question: "would you rather a police officer didn't just get to zap people with pain when he felt like it?"
And related to your question about whether we would prefer the police just wrestle him to the ground, there is some basis for this. That basis is not trusting the police. For many of us, tasers change the situation from "there's someone who might beat me up and maybe I can defend myself" to "there's someone who has a weapon that can put me on the ground in agony from a distance and he might use it on me and there's nothing I can do about that without carrying some sort of protection that will cause me to be shot instead". It's a simple matter of power-balance. If you don't trust the police, then granting them extra powers to make people do what they're told under threat of pain, is a big cause of unease.
Why do people always leave out the other power Eisenhower warns against (which he just so happens to mention in the sentence following the end of your excerpt)?
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Probably because it hasn't happened, so there's no need to use his words to highlight the danger. A rich section of society that exploits scientific and technological knowledge? Yes. But an actual ruling class of scientists and engineers dominating society through their specialist knowledge? Only in isolated areas such as academia which don't translate into general social influence very well.
I'm not sure if this is a mistake or intentional but Bing is the default search for Win 7 and IE 8 in the toolbar. Now according to all the documentation, replacing it with Yahoo or Google is as easy as Right-click on the triangle and selecting Find More Providers. But all that does is load google's homepage on your active tab. Searching online only shows the same documentation. Only after careful research do you find a link on Microsoft that allows you to do it.
That's not true in IE9 (don't remember having any trouble with IE8 either, but don't have it installed at present so can't offer anything other than my recollection). I've just tried it on Win 7 with IE9 and it was a case of left click on the drop-down icon for seach engine selection, click on Find More Providers..., and on the page that comes up click on Google. There is then displayed a link saying "Click to install". Very simple.
I've found Bing and Google to be roughly equivalent for searching with two main differences that I care about. I find Bing's video and image results UI cleaner and better than Googles. I find Google's searching of Usenet newsgroups infinitely superior to Bing's.
It does seem that way. Or at least the governments believe that the companies would move elsewhere if they budged the rates up a bit. I imagine there's a little bit of brinkmanship that goes on - with the companies and the governments seeing who blinks first.
You mean like the United Nations?
That's not a trade organization. More like the EU, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Eurasian Economic Community.
And that's the other half of the equation. You can compete by being cheaper, or by being better. What does "better" mean in today's world economy? The answer to that is complicated. But education is a big part of it. Produce a well-educated population, and you have something valuable to offer. But it only applies to some industries, not all. Cheap labour - that's going to be off-shored by any wealthy country. You can only fix that with tarrifs or oppression, both of which have negative overall consequences for a country. (The latter I hope I don't have to explain. The former results in gaining less from the net efficiencies that international trade brings). So if off-shoring of cheap labour jobs follows naturally from a country being wealthy, a country has to either choose not to be wealthy, or to make the off-shoring not a problem. And one way of doing the latter is to build up a jobs sector based around highly-skilled work.
That's the real problem. It's not the off-shoring of jobs. It's that those jobs aren't being replaced with anything better. It's fine and good for a society to progress beyond farming and making clothes as the focus of its activity. But we should move on to other things, not just nothing.
Go out of business, because your foreign competitors have lower costs (in the form of taxes) which means you can't win in the competition for customers, investors, etc.
So basically, countries compete with each other to sell themselves the cheapest to the corporations. I think our nations need to unionize.
Fair enough.