You can only argue that a person deprived a copyright holder of money if you can prove that this act would have otherwise resulted in a sale.
This is an interesting idea. I think you're saying that it's only with pro pirates that you know the copyright holder was harmed (the buyer demonstrated willingness to pay), and with amateur pirates, you don't know whether or not harm occurred (the buyer hasn't sent any signal regarding their willingness to pay).
But I'd generalize that to say you don't know whether or not harm has occurred, any time the pirate offers greater value for less cost. If it's sold for less (e.g. $5 CDR instead of the $20 CD), or works better (e.g. DRM or ads removed) then that confuses the issue just as much as amateur piracy does.
You might say, "Since he torrented it for free, he didn't signal a willingness to buy the original for $30, therefore we don't know a sale was denied to the copyright holder." I might say, "Since he bought a ad-cleaned DRM-removed copy for $30, he didn't signal a willingness to buy ad-laden DRM-infected original for $30, therefore we don't know a sale was denied to the copyright holder." Just as valid.
So why draw the line between $0.00 and $0.01? Any way we make the distinction, is going to be arbitrary. The pirates always offer better value; we'll never really know when a sale has been prevented and when it hasn't. So why try to guess? People will successfully and convincingly poke holes in any of our guesses.
Benefit to the pirate is irrelevant. Society does not have an interest in preventing people from benefiting from things. It's about lack of benefit to the copyright holder. The copyright holder is what matters here, and the purpose of copyright is to give that party an edge.
If you're gonna get all idealistic, then in theory, laws are intended to help people and never intended to cause harm (though perhaps deter bad things, but even then, only for the purpose of helping others). Nobody gives a fuck that professional bootleggers make money; they care that bootleggers (pro or not) cost someone else money.
What does his hard drive contain that's so bloody important?
They don't know, yet. That's why they're willing to go to such extremes to get it. A boat is just a boat, but the mystery box could contain anything, even a boat!
When they figure out how to win, YOU win
on
Analyzing CAPTCHAs
·
· Score: 1
At the point that it becomes impossible to distinguish them, you will no longer need to. Why discriminate against a bot, if it's able to participate in discussions (to an on-topic degree as well as humans), has its mind influenced by ads, etc?
You'll also get real time decryption on a single Gulftown CPU: E.g, a Core i7-980X runs 3200MHz and has 6 cores.
Is this going to be the next decade's bragging rights? "My Tivolike's capture card continuously draws only 130 Watts whenever something is on! (not counting all the case fans)" "Oh yeah? Well mine only uses 73 Watts!!"
(Just kidding; I get it that we're talking proof-of-concept.)
Until it's decrypted, it contains virtually maximum entropy. You're not going to find any way to compress it. You might get lucky and reduce it to 99.95% of its size, but you probably won't.
Just wait for someone to figure out how to run this code at a decent speed on some affordable FPGA dongle that can then be sold unprogrammed with a hdmi-in and hdmi-out for stripping the HDCP encryption.
Surely you're confused about the primary purpose of such a device. The primary purpose of such a device would be to add HDCP to your computer's video output so that terrorists can't spy on your online banking.
Now wait a minute, before you say that is utterly 100% totally and absurdly useless bullshit application, remember that millions of media players on the market are already doing exactly that. If Intel's lawyers were to say that encryption is not a believable use (why would you want to encrypt your computer display?) then they'll be admitting HDCP does not effectively protect content.
This will only get worse over time, as media gets larger and media companies more aggressively cling to the old business model.
Don't you mean abandon the old business model? The old business model was that you sell un-DRMed content and make a billion dollars. This was deemed unacceptably profitable.
Don't think of DRM as clinging to the past. The past already proved that DRM is undesirable from the seller's point of view. The new business model is to tell people, "No you can't do that if you buy this; if you need to timeshift your TV, play your Bluray on an unapproved display, etc. then go download the pirates' version instead."
..which adds all Sony televisions to players' revocation lists. (Or is that signed with a different key?) The beauty of something like that, is that they are the ones who are distributing the malicious software. It would be hilarious if their own malware ended up biting them on their own asses, forcing the recall of millions of devices to have their keys reflashed.
Anyone passingly familiar with the space program but not up-to-date is going to think the same thing.
It's not quite as bad as calling it "Apollo" or "The Space Shuttle" but still, they should have known it would confuse people.
Hey, I've got a great idea for an email virus scanner. I'll call it "Carnivore!" Ooh, and I have a way to detect if anyone has tampered with your computer, I'll call it "Palladium."
Because the DRM on the compressed stream hasn't been cracked yet. That's why I disagree with the theory that the cable companies released the keys to get more customers. If they did it just for themselves, they would have released the keys for their own transports instead of HDCP's. If you were Comcast, would you leak HDCP keys which make DirecTV just as much more attractive to users are your own service? No, you'd release a crack for your own service, so that people could timeshift Comcast but DirectTV users would still be fucked until they switched to Comcast.
Live encoding 720p or even 1080p content isn't really insane, BTW. 1080p is only, like what, 6.75 ((1080*1920)/(640*480)) times as many pixels as 480p? We had realtime analog digitizers in the 1990s. If you can't do 7 times as much work per second in 2010 silicon, something is terribly wrong. It may not be nearly as efficient and desirable as losslessly capturing the already-compressed video, but it's certainly acceptable.
To add HDCP encryption to unprotected HDMI video, of course. I was shocked, shocked, to learn my DVD player doesn't know how to speak HDCP. I have a "smart" TV, so smart that it can browse the web, show Yahoo widgets, etc. And of course it does know how to speak HDCP. What if hackers break into my smart TV and start stealing my video to use for piracy?
Solution: an HDCP-adder device. It tries to negotiate HDCP in both directions, but doesn't freak out and fail if one of the devices doesn't speak HDCP, and emulates HDCP from the other device's point of view. That way, the video becomes safely encrypted between this new box and the TV, in spite ot the fact that the DVD player doesn't really speak HDCP.
Engineering is about creating and realizing plans for getting things done, rather than just sitting there thinking, "What a shame that the world isn't the way I want it to be. If only there were a bridge over that river and a piece of software that does what I want with my spam. But there isnt. *sigh* Oh well, I'll just accept the world as it is."
An engineer with a political goal can vote for a representative, but that's more like hiring a political engineer than being one. Directly trying to personally cause a policy change is appealing, but most of the avenues for doing that, have high social barriers. Terrorism actually does too, but a stupid or naive engineer (i.e. a person who thinks terrorism is actually effective at persuading people to see things the terrorist's way) will see it as a way to personally get the job done, without having to rely on other people who will just drop the ball. "While you're all pointlessly talking, I can go shoot someone."
Few people care about Open Source, but more (still a minority, but it's a lot more) care about not-getting-fucked-over. Free Software is the solution to getting fucked over by the software that you use.
Why turn off wifi if it's so often useful? Hey, I appreciate being able to make a phone call from the middle of nowhere when I need to, as much as anyone else. But I also spend 99% of my life within a 10 yards of a wifi router, as do most people who live in cities.
Being able to access the internet without wifi: cool. Occasionally useful.
Not using cheaper wifi when it's there: inefficient and impractical.
If the cell network is your "main" connection to the net and you're using it by the gigabyte, you're either doing it wrong, or you're not in a city. Now, I got nothin' against you country-bumpkins, but you're the one who decided to live on a farm. So put down that cityboy phone gadget, stop twittertorrentmapping, and get back to your cow tipping, gator wrestling, and mountain climbing. You'll still be able to make that 911 phone call when your leg is caught in the wheat thresher or to brag about the big fish you caught. But don't fucking complain about your pirate movies costing fifty $10 cards to download when you're scaling the Matterhorn. Do your pirating at Base Camp 1 where the wifi is free, or better yet, have it all happening on your fiber-connected box back home.
So record the Corvette and play it on the Prius speakers.
Don't be silly. Users record things for the car to play? How do you know they'll pay the required royalties? If you want a Corvette cartone, then you can damn well pay $5 for it at the Toyota Store.
[This actually happened in real life. I am not making this up. The scene: government wanted to crack down on art, and some musicians journeyed to Washington DC to testify in a Senate hearing.]
Senator Gorton: Mr. Zappa, I am astounded at the courtesy and soft-voiced nature of the comments of my friend, the Senator from Tennessee. I can only say that I found your statement to be boorish, incredibly and insensitively insulting to the people that were here previously; that you could manage to give the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States a bad name, if I felt that you had the slightest understanding of it, which I do not.
You do not have the slightest understanding of the difference between Government action and private action, and you have certainly destroyed any case you might otherwise have had with this Senator.
I was amazed with the concept that I could download multiple files at once!
Which just goes to show that Windows95 was impressive to people, as long as those people had only used other Microsoft platforms. You're talking about something Amiga users were doing a decade earlier. A decade, and this is in the context of the computer business.
Windows '95 really did kind of revolutionize computing.
Windows95 evolved MS-DOS from a 1970s style platform to a mid-1980s style. That would have been "revolutionary" ten years earlier, but in in 1995, the entire non-Microsoft world was laughing about it. 1995's OS revolution (along with some pretty nifty hardware) that would really wake everyone up to what they needed to be doing, would happen a few months later, in early October. But that's another story.
It was shoddy product and ridiculously unreliable.
What it did contribute, though, was that it showed the Apple Menu to the whole world. Mac OS has now moved away from that, but pretty much everyone else is now using some sort of logo, in the upper or lower left corner of the screen, to access a menu of applications and/or OS settings. And I think Windows 95 (not MacOS) really gets the credit for that. If they hadn't used the idea, I really just can't help but wonder if anyone would be doing it anymore. Maybe, maybe not.
Of course, Windows95 managed to get it wrong by labeling it "start," leading to maximum user-astonishment when people wanted to shutdown or reboot, but I assume that was just a joke. The idea behind it, wasn't.
The Empire Strikes Back. It's just possible that the droid who put Luke in the tank and gave him a hand, was used so often that the amortized cost of its purchase approached a negligible figure, and it's pretty clear that energy itself (i.e. droid food) is already free (or likewise cheap to the point of absurdity) in the scenario.
even if someone could read the tags, they wouldn't get much information.
I'm no RFID-hater, but this is a totally bullshit argument. A hash key is a hash key; you don't need it to contain any meaning in itself. RFID keys are the real-world analog of cookies, and pretty much have the same risks. If you ever tie that meaningless blob to someone, you've got 'em.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an interesting idea. I think you're saying that it's only with pro pirates that you know the copyright holder was harmed (the buyer demonstrated willingness to pay), and with amateur pirates, you don't know whether or not harm occurred (the buyer hasn't sent any signal regarding their willingness to pay).
But I'd generalize that to say you don't know whether or not harm has occurred, any time the pirate offers greater value for less cost. If it's sold for less (e.g. $5 CDR instead of the $20 CD), or works better (e.g. DRM or ads removed) then that confuses the issue just as much as amateur piracy does.
You might say, "Since he torrented it for free, he didn't signal a willingness to buy the original for $30, therefore we don't know a sale was denied to the copyright holder." I might say, "Since he bought a ad-cleaned DRM-removed copy for $30, he didn't signal a willingness to buy ad-laden DRM-infected original for $30, therefore we don't know a sale was denied to the copyright holder." Just as valid.
So why draw the line between $0.00 and $0.01? Any way we make the distinction, is going to be arbitrary. The pirates always offer better value; we'll never really know when a sale has been prevented and when it hasn't. So why try to guess? People will successfully and convincingly poke holes in any of our guesses.
Sure, they changed certain aspects of the system, but they never strayed from the core design assumption: the husband must die.
Benefit to the pirate is irrelevant. Society does not have an interest in preventing people from benefiting from things. It's about lack of benefit to the copyright holder. The copyright holder is what matters here, and the purpose of copyright is to give that party an edge.
If you're gonna get all idealistic, then in theory, laws are intended to help people and never intended to cause harm (though perhaps deter bad things, but even then, only for the purpose of helping others). Nobody gives a fuck that professional bootleggers make money; they care that bootleggers (pro or not) cost someone else money.
They don't know, yet. That's why they're willing to go to such extremes to get it. A boat is just a boat, but the mystery box could contain anything, even a boat!
Tell me more about this "the wheel."
At the point that it becomes impossible to distinguish them, you will no longer need to. Why discriminate against a bot, if it's able to participate in discussions (to an on-topic degree as well as humans), has its mind influenced by ads, etc?
Is this going to be the next decade's bragging rights? "My Tivolike's capture card continuously draws only 130 Watts whenever something is on! (not counting all the case fans)" "Oh yeah? Well mine only uses 73 Watts!!"
(Just kidding; I get it that we're talking proof-of-concept.)
Until it's decrypted, it contains virtually maximum entropy. You're not going to find any way to compress it. You might get lucky and reduce it to 99.95% of its size, but you probably won't.
Surely you're confused about the primary purpose of such a device. The primary purpose of such a device would be to add HDCP to your computer's video output so that terrorists can't spy on your online banking.
Now wait a minute, before you say that is utterly 100% totally and absurdly useless bullshit application, remember that millions of media players on the market are already doing exactly that. If Intel's lawyers were to say that encryption is not a believable use (why would you want to encrypt your computer display?) then they'll be admitting HDCP does not effectively protect content.
Don't you mean abandon the old business model? The old business model was that you sell un-DRMed content and make a billion dollars. This was deemed unacceptably profitable.
Don't think of DRM as clinging to the past. The past already proved that DRM is undesirable from the seller's point of view. The new business model is to tell people, "No you can't do that if you buy this; if you need to timeshift your TV, play your Bluray on an unapproved display, etc. then go download the pirates' version instead."
..which adds all Sony televisions to players' revocation lists. (Or is that signed with a different key?) The beauty of something like that, is that they are the ones who are distributing the malicious software. It would be hilarious if their own malware ended up biting them on their own asses, forcing the recall of millions of devices to have their keys reflashed.
Anyone passingly familiar with the space program but not up-to-date is going to think the same thing.
It's not quite as bad as calling it "Apollo" or "The Space Shuttle" but still, they should have known it would confuse people.
Hey, I've got a great idea for an email virus scanner. I'll call it "Carnivore!" Ooh, and I have a way to detect if anyone has tampered with your computer, I'll call it "Palladium."
Because the DRM on the compressed stream hasn't been cracked yet. That's why I disagree with the theory that the cable companies released the keys to get more customers. If they did it just for themselves, they would have released the keys for their own transports instead of HDCP's. If you were Comcast, would you leak HDCP keys which make DirecTV just as much more attractive to users are your own service? No, you'd release a crack for your own service, so that people could timeshift Comcast but DirectTV users would still be fucked until they switched to Comcast.
Live encoding 720p or even 1080p content isn't really insane, BTW. 1080p is only, like what, 6.75 ((1080*1920)/(640*480)) times as many pixels as 480p? We had realtime analog digitizers in the 1990s. If you can't do 7 times as much work per second in 2010 silicon, something is terribly wrong. It may not be nearly as efficient and desirable as losslessly capturing the already-compressed video, but it's certainly acceptable.
To add HDCP encryption to unprotected HDMI video, of course. I was shocked, shocked, to learn my DVD player doesn't know how to speak HDCP. I have a "smart" TV, so smart that it can browse the web, show Yahoo widgets, etc. And of course it does know how to speak HDCP. What if hackers break into my smart TV and start stealing my video to use for piracy?
Solution: an HDCP-adder device. It tries to negotiate HDCP in both directions, but doesn't freak out and fail if one of the devices doesn't speak HDCP, and emulates HDCP from the other device's point of view. That way, the video becomes safely encrypted between this new box and the TV, in spite ot the fact that the DVD player doesn't really speak HDCP.
Engineering is about creating and realizing plans for getting things done, rather than just sitting there thinking, "What a shame that the world isn't the way I want it to be. If only there were a bridge over that river and a piece of software that does what I want with my spam. But there isnt. *sigh* Oh well, I'll just accept the world as it is."
An engineer with a political goal can vote for a representative, but that's more like hiring a political engineer than being one. Directly trying to personally cause a policy change is appealing, but most of the avenues for doing that, have high social barriers. Terrorism actually does too, but a stupid or naive engineer (i.e. a person who thinks terrorism is actually effective at persuading people to see things the terrorist's way) will see it as a way to personally get the job done, without having to rely on other people who will just drop the ball. "While you're all pointlessly talking, I can go shoot someone."
Few people care about Open Source, but more (still a minority, but it's a lot more) care about not-getting-fucked-over. Free Software is the solution to getting fucked over by the software that you use.
Why turn off wifi if it's so often useful? Hey, I appreciate being able to make a phone call from the middle of nowhere when I need to, as much as anyone else. But I also spend 99% of my life within a 10 yards of a wifi router, as do most people who live in cities.
Being able to access the internet without wifi: cool. Occasionally useful.
Not using cheaper wifi when it's there: inefficient and impractical.
If the cell network is your "main" connection to the net and you're using it by the gigabyte, you're either doing it wrong, or you're not in a city. Now, I got nothin' against you country-bumpkins, but you're the one who decided to live on a farm. So put down that cityboy phone gadget, stop twittertorrentmapping, and get back to your cow tipping, gator wrestling, and mountain climbing. You'll still be able to make that 911 phone call when your leg is caught in the wheat thresher or to brag about the big fish you caught. But don't fucking complain about your pirate movies costing fifty $10 cards to download when you're scaling the Matterhorn. Do your pirating at Base Camp 1 where the wifi is free, or better yet, have it all happening on your fiber-connected box back home.
Don't be silly. Users record things for the car to play? How do you know they'll pay the required royalties? If you want a Corvette cartone, then you can damn well pay $5 for it at the Toyota Store.
[This actually happened in real life. I am not making this up. The scene: government wanted to crack down on art, and some musicians journeyed to Washington DC to testify in a Senate hearing.]
Senator Gorton: Mr. Zappa, I am astounded at the courtesy and soft-voiced nature of the comments of my friend, the Senator from Tennessee. I can only say that I found your statement to be boorish, incredibly and insensitively insulting to the people that were here previously; that you could manage to give the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States a bad name, if I felt that you had the slightest understanding of it, which I do not.
You do not have the slightest understanding of the difference between Government action and private action, and you have certainly destroyed any case you might otherwise have had with this Senator.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Frank Zappa: Is this private action?
Which just goes to show that Windows95 was impressive to people, as long as those people had only used other Microsoft platforms. You're talking about something Amiga users were doing a decade earlier. A decade, and this is in the context of the computer business.
Windows95 evolved MS-DOS from a 1970s style platform to a mid-1980s style. That would have been "revolutionary" ten years earlier, but in in 1995, the entire non-Microsoft world was laughing about it. 1995's OS revolution (along with some pretty nifty hardware) that would really wake everyone up to what they needed to be doing, would happen a few months later, in early October. But that's another story.
It was shoddy product and ridiculously unreliable.
What it did contribute, though, was that it showed the Apple Menu to the whole world. Mac OS has now moved away from that, but pretty much everyone else is now using some sort of logo, in the upper or lower left corner of the screen, to access a menu of applications and/or OS settings. And I think Windows 95 (not MacOS) really gets the credit for that. If they hadn't used the idea, I really just can't help but wonder if anyone would be doing it anymore. Maybe, maybe not.
Of course, Windows95 managed to get it wrong by labeling it "start," leading to maximum user-astonishment when people wanted to shutdown or reboot, but I assume that was just a joke. The idea behind it, wasn't.
The Empire Strikes Back. It's just possible that the droid who put Luke in the tank and gave him a hand, was used so often that the amortized cost of its purchase approached a negligible figure, and it's pretty clear that energy itself (i.e. droid food) is already free (or likewise cheap to the point of absurdity) in the scenario.
Unicorns: wrong genre.
I'm no RFID-hater, but this is a totally bullshit argument. A hash key is a hash key; you don't need it to contain any meaning in itself. RFID keys are the real-world analog of cookies, and pretty much have the same risks. If you ever tie that meaningless blob to someone, you've got 'em.
It could succeed or fail to deliver the 0s and 1s with their souls intact.
Ok, write it. And I'll run it on a 24-core 64GB machine. It'll be awesome.