(written on the back of a check prior to entering CompUSA)
"By cashing or depositing this check, CompUSA agrees to give me anything I want in the future for free, or, if they refuse to fulfill that requirement, to pay me five million dollars."
"If CompUSA does not agree to this requirement, they should send the check back to the address printed on it without cashing or depositing it. If they do so, they will not be bound by this agreement."
Raise your hand if you seriously think such a thing would stand up in court.
I'm sure your local retailer won't notice after you do this 50 times. However, this brings up an interesting issue...if you are disagreeing to the EULA, or never do agree to it, are you doing anything wrong by burning a copy and then returning it? After all, you never agreed to be bound by the terms that said you wouldn't...
Well, I could go on, but I don't think that either I am going to convince you or you are going to convince me. I will agree that there are those few users who use P2P to get everything free to the exclusion of ever buying anything. (These are probably the same people who previously were always borrowing tapes and the like from friends to make copies anyway.) There's always a mooch or two around, and no law that I know of will -ever- change that. However, the majority of P2P users I know use it more like I described, and do support the artists they like.
I've paid for several songs off of Magnatune, for example, despite the fact that they offer the entire thing absolutely free and payment is totally voluntary. (You can even pick how -much- you want to pay.) I'm willing to financially support artists I like, but I'm not willing to have a gun held to my head as to what I may and may not share.
In any case, though, thank you for keeping the tone of the debate reasonable and bringing up several interesting points in the process. I hope that you realize that not -everyone- who uses P2P, Bittorrent, is out to screw the artists and get everything for free. I don't think there's anyone who seriously argues that -that- model could work. What I do argue is that the current model could use some changes, and for better or for worse, filesharing is showing some pretty widespread dissatisfaction. I certainly hope that a solution can be found that would be equitable both to the consumers and to the artists. If the middlemen can be reduced or eliminated...well, so much the better. Generally, the middleman is the true leech.
Length isn't an issue, I've certainly pulled a few long ones myself. Not that you've probably noticed in this particular discussion or anything.
Anyway, as to the response...
You don't think the rapid decline in CD sales since 1999 has *anything* to do with mp3s?
Actually, no. In an earlier post, you had mentioned a decline since 1994, when mp3's weren't even around. (If this is not technically correct, they at least weren't around to any significant extent.)
I live in a college town, and I've witnessed both CD stores shrink, despite the fact that both of them carry high quality, off the beaten path CDs,
I saw that happen to a couple of excellent stores here as well, that tended to carry more offbeat stuff. Well before anyone knew what "mp3" meant, probably about 10-12 years ago. That's part of the risk of running a store like that-it might be a massive success, or it might just be a failure. Unfortunately, mainstream sells.
(In case you're wondering, I work full time for the networking department at a major college and full time in the music industry as well.)
And you have the time to post on/.? Impressive. (Had to throw that in there.)
Which way do you want it? Most bands can't write 80 minutes of great music in one year.
What is the arbitrary selection of a year? So wait until they write that much and then release the CD.
It's more expensive (per track) to record one song than five than ten.
Actually, distribution over the net can be done at effectively zero marginal cost. People are already doing it on a mass scale using their spare bandwidth, what makes you think they'd be unwilling to continue? And even if it's being downloaded from an "official" website, it takes proportionally less bandwidth to send one track then 10 or 15.
As for costing more money to -record-, presumably the same number of tracks per "album" would be being recorded, but rather than being required to buy the whole album, people could pick and choose the tracks they wish. This would be an excellent incentive not to distribute "filler", as it would just never get sold.
As to the thing of downloading individual tracks from "official" sites, I'm not paying a buck a song (effectively the same for an album as buying it in the store) for a far less-expensive distribution medium (sending over net, no physical media such as the CD, album cover, art, case, etc.) to pay for manufacturing, transport, middleman distributor, etc. costs on. Reduce it to 20-30 cents a track, see that half that (minimum) goes to the artist, and we'll talk.
Please demonstrate why you think that the masses will shift to a new business model rather than continuing to use "free" methods that exist now.
If we move to a collective license/automatic builtin royalty tax model, it'll happen automatically and few people will even notice. (How many people even KNOW that that's built in to the cost of a VCR or cassette deck?) It could be put in as a tax on CD/DVD burners just as easily, and solve the problem just as neatly as it has on those past issues.
I sure don't see "the masses" moving away from the current free methods voluntarily, so if they want it to happen, they can either embrace the collective license or similar, or just continue to deny reality and pretend they can change it.
Some of the people that do the copying at least admit that they're simply greedy. Others attempt to claim that they're part of some noble struggle.
Anyone who claims that P2Pers are even in the same -league- as the courage of Gandhi is on the good drugs, who the hell said that? I do, however, see it as something necessary and inevitable.
If Ghandi had used violent means within the system, he'd simply have been crushed and forgotten.
Please explain to me how the copying of information constitutes violence:
It looks more to me like you're crapflooding. How about, if you disagree with the person, maybe, somewhere in your disagreement, you should REFUTE THEIR POINT???
Or, of course, you could always post a load of crap bout people's previous posts while failing to have anything on-topic to say about the current one.
Oh, and for godsakes, when you're going to attack someone, if you want it to have a bit of credibility, please have the balls to put your name to it. AC doesn't impress anyone.
I would say that seven years worth of people duplicating a massive, multimillion dollar development project in their SPARE TIME is VERY impressive. If it works, more power to them, and even if it does not, I will certainly say it was an excellent attempt. Don't you remember when Linux was thought of as a "silly" OS?
I'm also not sure how NT4 is a "moving target", MS stopped development on that years ago. Please don't knock other people's work until you do something more worthwhile yourself. If you have, feel free to submit your own articles...
And finally, even if this particular project doesn't pan out, the project is opensource, and the implementations of the "base" API's and similar could easily be used to jumpstart an opensource reimplementation of a newer Windows version. So all in all...these people are doing something quite worthwhile, and I for one think they're due credit, not bullshit.
And that while sales were up, they were still well under that of every year since at least 1994.
Because, again, they are selling a lousy product (CD's which might contain one or two "radio songs" and the rest filler, and 45 minutes worth of music on a CD which we well know can hold about 80), at an inflated price.
Jobs that will be destroyed without copyright protection. Pretty simple.
Unfortunately, jobs are lost and gained every day. And going to a new distribution and marketing business model will simply shift the jobs, not destroy them. We don't government-mandate that anyone else has a right to profit competition-free off of their product to "save jobs".
And movies haven't even begun to be hit with big problems from downloading - bandwidth is still way too limited for most people.
So what are they yowling so loud about?
So, um, where in my post did I call anything "theft"?
"Gandhi didn't take British salt, he made his own." You equate an act of theft (stealing salt) with an act of copying (online sharing of music/movies). You do that again in your current post with the comparison of chop shops (theft) to copying.
Would you agree to work for your boss for a year and at the end of a year he or she would evaluate your work and decide if they felt it was worth paying for?
While I will grant you that most employees do not work this way, most businesses do. If I own a business, customers will come into my store, look at my stuff, and decide if it's worth buying. If they purchase it and find out it looked good but was really a turd, they'll request their money back. If my products, service, or presentation are poor, they won't buy. However, in this case, they'll have competitors they can buy from.
I've got a better idea - get away from the entire *AA groups and seek out independent artists who will gladly let you download their products to evaluate them.
Great idea, I fully agree and already do. However, not everything I like is on an indie label.
The RIAA is so far from having a monopoly at this point that it's laugable. If you really want a starting point, I'll give you a list of independent musicians who are well worth supporting.
Send the list to my email if you like, always glad for a good indie band recommendation. (This is not intended to be sarcastic at all, if you know some good ones please let me know.) However, your next point clearly states that the smaller labels -can't- deal with what is -for now- the dominant distribution medium (the stores). This, in theory or practice, gives the *AA's a virtual monopoly-no one else has near the major labels' resources or connections, and massively successful acts are almost always major label.
This applies even more to movies, indie filmmakers without major studio backing have vanishing to no chances of ending up in a theater or being marketed so that more than a handful hear about them.
The good news is that this internet thing has changed all that, so consumers can now buy music directly from the small artists.
Amen.
The reason that the RIAA has a grip on stores is the same reason that you'd have a very hard time selling a BBQ sauce that you manufacture directly to grocery stores - it's simply not feasible for retailers to deal directly with the tens of thousands of small manufacturers, hence the necessary evil of distributors.
Not so, most retailers -choose- to deal through a distributor so that they have to hire less people to oversee purchasing. I don't have much sympathy for that.
Movies are tricky because even an inexpensive indy film costs more than most people will earn in a decade to make. Have you worked making a movie? Do you actually know what the costs are when you say how much they *should* cost?
And those inexpensive movies are the ones that are most likely to die in the creation process, leaving the investors with nothi
On the one hand, people are quite often prohibited from normally-legal activity (such as leaving the state) during a probation or parole period. However, it would seem to me that, with the Internet taking over more and more everyday functions (VoIP, the wide use of email, IM, and videoconferencing in business, Web-based applications coming into wider use by corporations, in some companies, including the one I work for, you have to log into an online server just to punch in), this could effectively amount to a prohibition from holding any but the most menial jobs during your probation/parole period. I think that, looked at that way, that would certainly seem to be cruel, excessive punishment.
The arguments that "they can bust the hacker if he's caught again" seem somewhat specious to me. They can already bust him for committing the same crime again, and they can already punish a second offense more harshly than a first. They don't need some "violation of an internet ban" to do either.
In balance, while I can understand the reasoning behind this line of thought, I don't think it's an acceptable punishment. I can see why it might've been thought so in 1995, but this is not 1995 and it no longer is.
"The movie industry's share of the American economy is growing--faster than the rest of the economy. And the copyright industries are creating jobs at twice the rate of the rest of the economy." (excerpted from above)
I fail to see how you can call something "theft" when someone is seeing greater sales happen while the "theft" is occurring. Theft would presume a model in which, for every download which occurs, one sale is lost. This is quite simply not true, as many, many people download things to preview them and see if they are worth the money. Given the large amount of garbage put out by the **AA's and the inflated prices they charge for it, this does not seem an unreasonable precaution.
The true solution for the **AA's is one which is known to all businesses which don't have a virtual monopoly and routinely have to deal with competition: Improve your product, LOWER YOUR PRICES, and find innovative ways to market and deliver the product.
Don't put ads on something people have paid money for, it will turn them off very quickly. (A trailer or two generally won't turn a consumer off if placed on their DVD, but a non-skippable Pepsi commercial most certainly will.) There is NO quicker way to turn off a consumer than making it so that the product they purchased (their DVD and DVD player) do not do what they expect it to (fast-forward when they hit the fast-forward button.)
Imagine your car not starting for 5 minutes after you turned the key so that it could play ads over the car's stereo. If you wouldn't be extremely frustrated by this, and very unlikely to purchase that brand of car again, well then, you are the definition of corporate whore. But the reason car manufacturers -don't- do this is because other manufacturers exist, and would refrain from doing this and take away their business. However, the MPAA has no competition, at least not on anything even remotely approaching their scale. If it takes suprnova and Kazaa to create the competition, then I'm not sorry to see it, whether or not there's a technical violation of law.
If these companies are not willing to address the fact that CUSTOMERS ARE NOT SATISFIED, and the ONLY reason that they have stayed in business is a lack of real competition, they deserve to die off and I don't care if people do pirate the stuff.
If you want to have any type of programming aspect, you might want to consider doing something in terms of game design. I didn't know many in high school who didn't appreciate games, and "Learn how to make them!" certainly might get some attention.
1. The legality of -downloading- is still indeterminate, as thus far no one's been sued. (In fact, no one's -actually- been found against for uploading, they've all settled. However, chances are, if anyone tried to defend it in court the **AA in question would almost certainly win, which is likely why all the lawyers have advised settlement.)
2. If they just want to bust people for uploading, they could probably do that by logging into a torrent and getting you to send bits of the file to them. However, they would have to GET data, and a program like Peerguardian/Protowall would likely keep them from being able to do so, since it blocks all known "bad" IP's. Seeing your IP address wouldn't be enough, that doesn't prove distribution, only that you're connected. They would have to get data from you that they could identify as infringing. The size of that data, however, likely wouldn't matter-distributing a few KB of the file still shows you're involved in distribution.
3. If they wanted to go after people for DOWNLOADING, however, they're probably screwed so far as Bittorrent is concerned. The posts saying that they are the legal copyright holders and have the only right to distribute are correct, at least so far as US law is concerned. HOWEVER, if they log onto a tracker and distribute them, that distribution is lawful, and therefore you have every right to have every bit they send you, since it's being sent either by the copyright holder or a licensee thereof. Effectively, this would be similar to the MPAA putting a link on its website saying "Download the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy here for free!" and then suing everyone who clicked it and made the download. That would be laughed out of court. Since they or anyone they authorize to distribute (whether just for tracking purposes or anything else) is, by definition, a licensed distributor, then they are choosing to distribute the file to you via that medium if they log into a torrent and begin to upload it. (Or if they make it available on Kazaa, for that matter.) I suspect this is why there have been no lawsuits so far over downloading-I'm not sure if entrapment comes into play here, but it's easy to say "They're the authorized distributor, and if they know I downloaded it, they distributed it to me, therefore I have it legally!"
4. It wasn't in parent, but I saw somewhere about the "police breaking down your door and finding the evidence on your hard drive." Police do not break down your door to discover evidence of a civil offense, and thus far, have been largely unwilling to criminally pursue anyone but large pirate syndicates who are making and SELLING pirated copies. Quite frankly, they're right in this, the police and FBI have better things to do with their time. (Of course, the argument could be made that the RIAA and MPAA could also make better use of their time and money to make and market products that people would WANT to buy, instead of every tenth movie being halfway worthwhile and 40-45 minute CD's on discs we all well know can hold about 80 with one or two radio songs and the rest "filler." They might also consider lowering the price of their products. You know-making better products, lowering price, the stuff non-monopolies have to deal with every day.)
I'm not about to try and say how or why it works. A friend did suggest enabling some different settings in about:config on firefox (no, don't ask me what, I don't have the log anymore), and it starts far faster. I don't ask how it works when it does, I ask why not when it doesn't.
As for IE, once again, it just didn't start quickly. I'm running an AMD XP 2100+ with 1 GB PC 2500 DDR so I don't think it would qualify as a "low memory machine". I just know that Firefox works better than IE, as it was told to me it would, and so I'll use it whenever possible.
Oh, technically, I could install it quite easily. I have admin rights to that system. However, I would not have to worry about using -any- system at work shortly thereafter, since, for one, our POS system currently relies on connecting through an ActiveX interface, and, secondly, my boss gets pissy if I change -anything- on the system unless it is obviously and totally broken.
So, short answer is, 1, we're tied to it, for now, and 2, I would prefer to use IE at work then have no work.
Three copies for me, one for each of my systems. Unfortunately still have to use IE at work, but working on that.:(.
Before Firefox, I would routinely, between Ad-Aware and Spybot, be cleaning up 50-100 spyware/adware infections a week between the machines. (This was with IE set to high security.) After switching to Firefox, the highest weekly total (between all the systems) has been five.
Firefox typically opens within a couple seconds of clicking whatever needs to use it. I routinely had IE take half a minute. If I needed any proof that Firefox is a superior, faster, more secure browser, this has certainly been it. I'll never use IE again.
Why sure, I would encourage someone who didn't even know how to use ad-aware to go anywhere NEAR regedit. That is, in the odd case that I really, really didn't like them but they still trusted my advice.
Much as I hate to defend this turd of an organization in any manner, it looks to me like they are only showing snippets of a show in order to present criticism. This is defensible under fair use, the same as a book critic quoting a passage of a book in a review.
Seems to me a pretty slippery-slope argument. Helping to run a distributed network (or any type of network) does not, to my way of thinking, implicate you in a crime committed on it if you had no reasonable way of knowing that.
This is the exact same reason that ISP's are exempt from liability. It is not your responsibility to "police" data which is just flowing through your system as in a pipeline. Nor should it be.
Well, I'd certainly not expect to be able to, say, get a credit card without the credit card company wishing to know who I am and about my credit history. However, in that case, I do indeed have the option to not use a credit card and instead to pay using cash. The same applies to other types of loans and such.
I do have the problem with the way that identifying information is used, effectively unwillingly. Creditors are allowed to disclose your information to "credit bureaus", without your knowledge and consent, and with only limited recourses if they screw up.
This information is available, not only to those who have a legitimate reason to access it (potential creditors who wish to know if you have a history of paying back loans or not), but also to employers. (I cannot think of a single reason that a potential employer should be accessing your credit history, unless you're also applying to borrow money from them in some capacity.)
This is just a small example of the way in which identification for anyone is used effectively without consent. Your solution of living in a cabin in Montana is really not a valid or effective one. I would like to see a more valid option for remaining anonymous, except to those you want to know you.
I did, in fact, read your comment, which requested to know why such things are a harm. I responded to that that an invasion of privacy (which, in many cases, making identification "easier" is), is in itself a harm.
Certainly, some might disagree with me, and you might disagree with me, but I was responding to what you said. Ease and pervasiveness of identification, for example, makes both the ease and the severity of identity theft proportionately greater. This is only one harm that is built-in and inherent to any type of mass ID system. Potential for abuse by government is another. I personally believe in the right to anonymity, even if many do not.
Slashdot Mirror
(written on the back of a check prior to entering CompUSA)
"By cashing or depositing this check, CompUSA agrees to give me anything I want in the future for free, or, if they refuse to fulfill that requirement, to pay me five million dollars."
"If CompUSA does not agree to this requirement, they should send the check back to the address printed on it without cashing or depositing it. If they do so, they will not be bound by this agreement."
Raise your hand if you seriously think such a thing would stand up in court.
I'm sure your local retailer won't notice after you do this 50 times. However, this brings up an interesting issue...if you are disagreeing to the EULA, or never do agree to it, are you doing anything wrong by burning a copy and then returning it? After all, you never agreed to be bound by the terms that said you wouldn't...
Well, I could go on, but I don't think that either I am going to convince you or you are going to convince me. I will agree that there are those few users who use P2P to get everything free to the exclusion of ever buying anything. (These are probably the same people who previously were always borrowing tapes and the like from friends to make copies anyway.) There's always a mooch or two around, and no law that I know of will -ever- change that. However, the majority of P2P users I know use it more like I described, and do support the artists they like.
I've paid for several songs off of Magnatune, for example, despite the fact that they offer the entire thing absolutely free and payment is totally voluntary. (You can even pick how -much- you want to pay.) I'm willing to financially support artists I like, but I'm not willing to have a gun held to my head as to what I may and may not share.
In any case, though, thank you for keeping the tone of the debate reasonable and bringing up several interesting points in the process. I hope that you realize that not -everyone- who uses P2P, Bittorrent, is out to screw the artists and get everything for free. I don't think there's anyone who seriously argues that -that- model could work. What I do argue is that the current model could use some changes, and for better or for worse, filesharing is showing some pretty widespread dissatisfaction. I certainly hope that a solution can be found that would be equitable both to the consumers and to the artists. If the middlemen can be reduced or eliminated...well, so much the better. Generally, the middleman is the true leech.
Length isn't an issue, I've certainly pulled a few long ones myself. Not that you've probably noticed in this particular discussion or anything.
Anyway, as to the response...
You don't think the rapid decline in CD sales since 1999 has *anything* to do with mp3s?
Actually, no. In an earlier post, you had mentioned a decline since 1994, when mp3's weren't even around. (If this is not technically correct, they at least weren't around to any significant extent.)
I live in a college town, and I've witnessed both CD stores shrink, despite the fact that both of them carry high quality, off the beaten path CDs,
I saw that happen to a couple of excellent stores here as well, that tended to carry more offbeat stuff. Well before anyone knew what "mp3" meant, probably about 10-12 years ago. That's part of the risk of running a store like that-it might be a massive success, or it might just be a failure. Unfortunately, mainstream sells.
(In case you're wondering, I work full time for the networking department at a major college and full time in the music industry as well.)
And you have the time to post on /.? Impressive. (Had to throw that in there.)
Which way do you want it? Most bands can't write 80 minutes of great music in one year.
What is the arbitrary selection of a year? So wait until they write that much and then release the CD.
It's more expensive (per track) to record one song than five than ten.
Actually, distribution over the net can be done at effectively zero marginal cost. People are already doing it on a mass scale using their spare bandwidth, what makes you think they'd be unwilling to continue? And even if it's being downloaded from an "official" website, it takes proportionally less bandwidth to send one track then 10 or 15.
As for costing more money to -record-, presumably the same number of tracks per "album" would be being recorded, but rather than being required to buy the whole album, people could pick and choose the tracks they wish. This would be an excellent incentive not to distribute "filler", as it would just never get sold.
As to the thing of downloading individual tracks from "official" sites, I'm not paying a buck a song (effectively the same for an album as buying it in the store) for a far less-expensive distribution medium (sending over net, no physical media such as the CD, album cover, art, case, etc.) to pay for manufacturing, transport, middleman distributor, etc. costs on. Reduce it to 20-30 cents a track, see that half that (minimum) goes to the artist, and we'll talk.
Please demonstrate why you think that the masses will shift to a new business model rather than continuing to use "free" methods that exist now.
If we move to a collective license/automatic builtin royalty tax model, it'll happen automatically and few people will even notice. (How many people even KNOW that that's built in to the cost of a VCR or cassette deck?) It could be put in as a tax on CD/DVD burners just as easily, and solve the problem just as neatly as it has on those past issues.
I sure don't see "the masses" moving away from the current free methods voluntarily, so if they want it to happen, they can either embrace the collective license or similar, or just continue to deny reality and pretend they can change it.
Some of the people that do the copying at least admit that they're simply greedy. Others attempt to claim that they're part of some noble struggle.
Anyone who claims that P2Pers are even in the same -league- as the courage of Gandhi is on the good drugs, who the hell said that? I do, however, see it as something necessary and inevitable.
If Ghandi had used violent means within the system, he'd simply have been crushed and forgotten.
Please explain to me how the copying of information constitutes violence:
Violence: Physical force exerted for the pu
The post you cited looks...ridiculously easy to refute to me.
It looks more to me like you're crapflooding. How about, if you disagree with the person, maybe, somewhere in your disagreement, you should REFUTE THEIR POINT???
Or, of course, you could always post a load of crap bout people's previous posts while failing to have anything on-topic to say about the current one.
Oh, and for godsakes, when you're going to attack someone, if you want it to have a bit of credibility, please have the balls to put your name to it. AC doesn't impress anyone.
Pardon me for rudeness...but are you stupid?
I would say that seven years worth of people duplicating a massive, multimillion dollar development project in their SPARE TIME is VERY impressive. If it works, more power to them, and even if it does not, I will certainly say it was an excellent attempt. Don't you remember when Linux was thought of as a "silly" OS?
I'm also not sure how NT4 is a "moving target", MS stopped development on that years ago. Please don't knock other people's work until you do something more worthwhile yourself. If you have, feel free to submit your own articles...
And finally, even if this particular project doesn't pan out, the project is opensource, and the implementations of the "base" API's and similar could easily be used to jumpstart an opensource reimplementation of a newer Windows version. So all in all...these people are doing something quite worthwhile, and I for one think they're due credit, not bullshit.
And that while sales were up, they were still well under that of every year since at least 1994.
Because, again, they are selling a lousy product (CD's which might contain one or two "radio songs" and the rest filler, and 45 minutes worth of music on a CD which we well know can hold about 80), at an inflated price.
Jobs that will be destroyed without copyright protection. Pretty simple.
Unfortunately, jobs are lost and gained every day. And going to a new distribution and marketing business model will simply shift the jobs, not destroy them. We don't government-mandate that anyone else has a right to profit competition-free off of their product to "save jobs".
And movies haven't even begun to be hit with big problems from downloading - bandwidth is still way too limited for most people.
So what are they yowling so loud about?
So, um, where in my post did I call anything "theft"?
"Gandhi didn't take British salt, he made his own." You equate an act of theft (stealing salt) with an act of copying (online sharing of music/movies). You do that again in your current post with the comparison of chop shops (theft) to copying.
Would you agree to work for your boss for a year and at the end of a year he or she would evaluate your work and decide if they felt it was worth paying for?
While I will grant you that most employees do not work this way, most businesses do. If I own a business, customers will come into my store, look at my stuff, and decide if it's worth buying. If they purchase it and find out it looked good but was really a turd, they'll request their money back. If my products, service, or presentation are poor, they won't buy. However, in this case, they'll have competitors they can buy from.
I've got a better idea - get away from the entire *AA groups and seek out independent artists who will gladly let you download their products to evaluate them.
Great idea, I fully agree and already do. However, not everything I like is on an indie label.
The RIAA is so far from having a monopoly at this point that it's laugable. If you really want a starting point, I'll give you a list of independent musicians who are well worth supporting.
Send the list to my email if you like, always glad for a good indie band recommendation. (This is not intended to be sarcastic at all, if you know some good ones please let me know.) However, your next point clearly states that the smaller labels -can't- deal with what is -for now- the dominant distribution medium (the stores). This, in theory or practice, gives the *AA's a virtual monopoly-no one else has near the major labels' resources or connections, and massively successful acts are almost always major label.
This applies even more to movies, indie filmmakers without major studio backing have vanishing to no chances of ending up in a theater or being marketed so that more than a handful hear about them.
The good news is that this internet thing has changed all that, so consumers can now buy music directly from the small artists.
Amen.
The reason that the RIAA has a grip on stores is the same reason that you'd have a very hard time selling a BBQ sauce that you manufacture directly to grocery stores - it's simply not feasible for retailers to deal directly with the tens of thousands of small manufacturers, hence the necessary evil of distributors.
Not so, most retailers -choose- to deal through a distributor so that they have to hire less people to oversee purchasing. I don't have much sympathy for that.
Movies are tricky because even an inexpensive indy film costs more than most people will earn in a decade to make. Have you worked making a movie? Do you actually know what the costs are when you say how much they *should* cost? And those inexpensive movies are the ones that are most likely to die in the creation process, leaving the investors with nothi
On the one hand, people are quite often prohibited from normally-legal activity (such as leaving the state) during a probation or parole period. However, it would seem to me that, with the Internet taking over more and more everyday functions (VoIP, the wide use of email, IM, and videoconferencing in business, Web-based applications coming into wider use by corporations, in some companies, including the one I work for, you have to log into an online server just to punch in), this could effectively amount to a prohibition from holding any but the most menial jobs during your probation/parole period. I think that, looked at that way, that would certainly seem to be cruel, excessive punishment.
The arguments that "they can bust the hacker if he's caught again" seem somewhat specious to me. They can already bust him for committing the same crime again, and they can already punish a second offense more harshly than a first. They don't need some "violation of an internet ban" to do either.
In balance, while I can understand the reasoning behind this line of thought, I don't think it's an acceptable punishment. I can see why it might've been thought so in 1995, but this is not 1995 and it no longer is.
Actually, despite all this "piracy", the RIAA's sales continue to increase, as shown. The November 11, 2004 press release from the MPAA shows similarly for the MPAA:
"The movie industry's share of the American economy is growing--faster than the rest of the economy. And the copyright industries are creating jobs at twice the rate of the rest of the economy." (excerpted from above)
I fail to see how you can call something "theft" when someone is seeing greater sales happen while the "theft" is occurring. Theft would presume a model in which, for every download which occurs, one sale is lost. This is quite simply not true, as many, many people download things to preview them and see if they are worth the money. Given the large amount of garbage put out by the **AA's and the inflated prices they charge for it, this does not seem an unreasonable precaution.
The true solution for the **AA's is one which is known to all businesses which don't have a virtual monopoly and routinely have to deal with competition: Improve your product, LOWER YOUR PRICES, and find innovative ways to market and deliver the product.
Don't put ads on something people have paid money for, it will turn them off very quickly. (A trailer or two generally won't turn a consumer off if placed on their DVD, but a non-skippable Pepsi commercial most certainly will.) There is NO quicker way to turn off a consumer than making it so that the product they purchased (their DVD and DVD player) do not do what they expect it to (fast-forward when they hit the fast-forward button.)
Imagine your car not starting for 5 minutes after you turned the key so that it could play ads over the car's stereo. If you wouldn't be extremely frustrated by this, and very unlikely to purchase that brand of car again, well then, you are the definition of corporate whore. But the reason car manufacturers -don't- do this is because other manufacturers exist, and would refrain from doing this and take away their business. However, the MPAA has no competition, at least not on anything even remotely approaching their scale. If it takes suprnova and Kazaa to create the competition, then I'm not sorry to see it, whether or not there's a technical violation of law.
If these companies are not willing to address the fact that CUSTOMERS ARE NOT SATISFIED, and the ONLY reason that they have stayed in business is a lack of real competition, they deserve to die off and I don't care if people do pirate the stuff.
If you want to have any type of programming aspect, you might want to consider doing something in terms of game design. I didn't know many in high school who didn't appreciate games, and "Learn how to make them!" certainly might get some attention.
Does your dictionary also contain the correct spelling of "eidetic", or is that one of those watermark mistakes mentioned earlier?
IANAL, but my read on this issue is:
1. The legality of -downloading- is still indeterminate, as thus far no one's been sued. (In fact, no one's -actually- been found against for uploading, they've all settled. However, chances are, if anyone tried to defend it in court the **AA in question would almost certainly win, which is likely why all the lawyers have advised settlement.)
2. If they just want to bust people for uploading, they could probably do that by logging into a torrent and getting you to send bits of the file to them. However, they would have to GET data, and a program like Peerguardian/Protowall would likely keep them from being able to do so, since it blocks all known "bad" IP's. Seeing your IP address wouldn't be enough, that doesn't prove distribution, only that you're connected. They would have to get data from you that they could identify as infringing. The size of that data, however, likely wouldn't matter-distributing a few KB of the file still shows you're involved in distribution.
3. If they wanted to go after people for DOWNLOADING, however, they're probably screwed so far as Bittorrent is concerned. The posts saying that they are the legal copyright holders and have the only right to distribute are correct, at least so far as US law is concerned. HOWEVER, if they log onto a tracker and distribute them, that distribution is lawful, and therefore you have every right to have every bit they send you, since it's being sent either by the copyright holder or a licensee thereof. Effectively, this would be similar to the MPAA putting a link on its website saying "Download the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy here for free!" and then suing everyone who clicked it and made the download. That would be laughed out of court. Since they or anyone they authorize to distribute (whether just for tracking purposes or anything else) is, by definition, a licensed distributor, then they are choosing to distribute the file to you via that medium if they log into a torrent and begin to upload it. (Or if they make it available on Kazaa, for that matter.) I suspect this is why there have been no lawsuits so far over downloading-I'm not sure if entrapment comes into play here, but it's easy to say "They're the authorized distributor, and if they know I downloaded it, they distributed it to me, therefore I have it legally!"
4. It wasn't in parent, but I saw somewhere about the "police breaking down your door and finding the evidence on your hard drive." Police do not break down your door to discover evidence of a civil offense, and thus far, have been largely unwilling to criminally pursue anyone but large pirate syndicates who are making and SELLING pirated copies. Quite frankly, they're right in this, the police and FBI have better things to do with their time. (Of course, the argument could be made that the RIAA and MPAA could also make better use of their time and money to make and market products that people would WANT to buy, instead of every tenth movie being halfway worthwhile and 40-45 minute CD's on discs we all well know can hold about 80 with one or two radio songs and the rest "filler." They might also consider lowering the price of their products. You know-making better products, lowering price, the stuff non-monopolies have to deal with every day.)
I'm not about to try and say how or why it works. A friend did suggest enabling some different settings in about:config on firefox (no, don't ask me what, I don't have the log anymore), and it starts far faster. I don't ask how it works when it does, I ask why not when it doesn't.
As for IE, once again, it just didn't start quickly. I'm running an AMD XP 2100+ with 1 GB PC 2500 DDR so I don't think it would qualify as a "low memory machine". I just know that Firefox works better than IE, as it was told to me it would, and so I'll use it whenever possible.
...
For the sake of clarity, I will not use IE again, when I will not get fired for not doing so. Happy now?
Sshhhh, dammit, you said you wouldn't tell everyone!
I mean...erm...lies, all of it!
Oh, technically, I could install it quite easily. I have admin rights to that system. However, I would not have to worry about using -any- system at work shortly thereafter, since, for one, our POS system currently relies on connecting through an ActiveX interface, and, secondly, my boss gets pissy if I change -anything- on the system unless it is obviously and totally broken.
So, short answer is, 1, we're tied to it, for now, and 2, I would prefer to use IE at work then have no work.
Three copies for me, one for each of my systems. Unfortunately still have to use IE at work, but working on that. :(.
Before Firefox, I would routinely, between Ad-Aware and Spybot, be cleaning up 50-100 spyware/adware infections a week between the machines. (This was with IE set to high security.) After switching to Firefox, the highest weekly total (between all the systems) has been five.
Firefox typically opens within a couple seconds of clicking whatever needs to use it. I routinely had IE take half a minute. If I needed any proof that Firefox is a superior, faster, more secure browser, this has certainly been it. I'll never use IE again.
If I had some mod points this one'd be at +5. It almost makes dealing with the masses of morons appear worthwhile.
Why sure, I would encourage someone who didn't even know how to use ad-aware to go anywhere NEAR regedit. That is, in the odd case that I really, really didn't like them but they still trusted my advice.
Much as I hate to defend this turd of an organization in any manner, it looks to me like they are only showing snippets of a show in order to present criticism. This is defensible under fair use, the same as a book critic quoting a passage of a book in a review.
Seems to me a pretty slippery-slope argument. Helping to run a distributed network (or any type of network) does not, to my way of thinking, implicate you in a crime committed on it if you had no reasonable way of knowing that.
This is the exact same reason that ISP's are exempt from liability. It is not your responsibility to "police" data which is just flowing through your system as in a pipeline. Nor should it be.
Apparently, you can go to college and still not know how to spell "cannon".
Well, I'd certainly not expect to be able to, say, get a credit card without the credit card company wishing to know who I am and about my credit history. However, in that case, I do indeed have the option to not use a credit card and instead to pay using cash. The same applies to other types of loans and such.
I do have the problem with the way that identifying information is used, effectively unwillingly. Creditors are allowed to disclose your information to "credit bureaus", without your knowledge and consent, and with only limited recourses if they screw up.
This information is available, not only to those who have a legitimate reason to access it (potential creditors who wish to know if you have a history of paying back loans or not), but also to employers. (I cannot think of a single reason that a potential employer should be accessing your credit history, unless you're also applying to borrow money from them in some capacity.)
This is just a small example of the way in which identification for anyone is used effectively without consent. Your solution of living in a cabin in Montana is really not a valid or effective one. I would like to see a more valid option for remaining anonymous, except to those you want to know you.
I did, in fact, read your comment, which requested to know why such things are a harm. I responded to that that an invasion of privacy (which, in many cases, making identification "easier" is), is in itself a harm.
Certainly, some might disagree with me, and you might disagree with me, but I was responding to what you said. Ease and pervasiveness of identification, for example, makes both the ease and the severity of identity theft proportionately greater. This is only one harm that is built-in and inherent to any type of mass ID system. Potential for abuse by government is another. I personally believe in the right to anonymity, even if many do not.