Reasoning: Because, at the maximum ever recorded in a modern election, about 100 people or about.005% of voters in an election are convicted of casting fraudulent ballots, we should keep about 11% of people who are entitled to cast a vote from making one.
And we aren't even getting into why we always hold our elections on work days...
I'm reserving judgement on this until facts come out but it certainly sounds ANY network community involving user contributed content would fall under the same axe.
Claiming that megaupload didn't intend to profit from copyrighted works is the new "Goldman Sachs didn't intend to profit from the failure of its mortgage-backed securities." Everybody knew exactly what it was for, to claim otherwise is tendentious bull.
I'm not convinced the way we are handling copyright these days is beneficial to society at all, I suspect a backlash is coming.
Millenarian exhortations of the revolution to come are millenarian. But yes, I'm sure the people will rise up and violently defend the rights of a Hong Kong server farm operator to sell you other people's movies, as long as they lies they're told are sufficient to the purpose.
Megaupload takes money and uses it to support reliability and consistency, much like how filmmakers and Big Media do with their services; that's where the money is at.
The reliability and consistency of what? Other people's movies? Having other people's stuff to offer was the necessary condition of their business, not the reliability.
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
A company that clears millions of dollars a year selling other people's movies is somehow the equivalent of the peace-loving Alderaan?
(Whatever you do, don't ask the guy who wrote that line what he thinks about file sharing. )
stanley kubric is akin to people like moliere in our time,
The Bourgeois Gentleman did not require $65 million in negative costs.
That you would handwave with "entertainment composers of their times," but you cannot name one of equivalent prestige or success to the Beatles, should tell you something.
How was their adherence to DMCA a sham? They adhered to it.
One of the big differences was evidence that megaupload payed people to upload infringing content, one particular person, an American, made hundreds dollars doing this. It's also alleged that the people who ran megaupload intentionally and knowingly put copyrighted material on their servers.
Megaupload also had paid subscriptions, that were offered expressly for the purpose of making copyrighted works available.
OTOH, I think you're right, it's pretty clear that Youtube makes money off of infringing content on a regular basis and the government would be within its rights to prosecute them; however, it's not at all clear Youtube infringes works intentionally to the extent that Megaupload did. Intention and malice are really what separate the two.
The problem is that you're just going to end up with laws that protect the new status quo. Mark my word, someday, Google or Hulu is going to advocate a "SOPA for Ads" which will let the government take down any site or service that lets you surf the Internet without seeing ads.
If they want to prevent more SOPAs, they shouldn't kill Hollywood. That's not where the problem lies.
Megaupload (like Youtube) also responded to any DMCA takedown notices and was used by plenty of legitimate services as well. Bad example.
It's a great example. Their nominal adherence to DMCA was an sham; you can only claim safe harbor from DMCA if and only if you do not profit from the sharing. The fact that they were able to profit from infringing content, despite abiding by the letter of the DMCA, indicates the fundamental weakness of the DMCA enforcement provisions.
They made money, shitloads of money, literally a small studio's annual profit worth of money, off of other people's stuff, period. If they follow all the rules and are still able to do this, the rules are bad rules and must be changed.
I got no problem with people copying stuff to each other for free -- I don't think it's something people should do, but I realize this happens and there isn't really anything you can do about this. But I have serious problems with people turning that sort of thing into an industry, where they're making tens of millions of dollars a year by doing nothing more than provisioning servers. It's pretty clear these guys were just rentiers in the worst sense of the word.
most lively and active period in music was in between 1700-1850. this is the era exclusively almost ALL great composers born and died, and a number of them totally shaped what 'music' is and how is done.
The position that all of these people were somehow "better" composers and musicians than the people working today is highly speculative. They all worked for patrons, and generally died poor. Beethoven began to break the trend in the 1820s by aggressively selling his written works through publishers, at which time he became a staunch copyright advocate. It's clear that patronage could create great sacred music, and great dance and entertaining music, but the people who worked under these constraints were constantly trying to work around them and spent a great deal of their lives go around begging rich people for commissions.
Jaron Lanier once made the good point that patronage was capable of creating a Michelangelo or a Bach, but it's very questionable if patronage could have ever created a Stanley Kubrick or a Beatles.
When people pay for entertainment directly the n people paying for the artwork is at its maximum; paying for art with patronage or ads always reduces n.
Copyright isnt intended to be a free pass to print money, its meant to incentivize the creation process for a LIMITED time.
This is a substantially different position from "let's kill Hollywood because SOPA wouldn't let us put a Mad Men episode on Tumblr." The "piracy," such as it is, is heavily tilted toward new content, stuff made in the last few years. Most people are in favor of reducing copyright lengths, even most artists, because they generally never see the benefit themselves, personally -- but equating this position with being against SOPA/PIPA/DMCA/whatever is specious.
(As a commercial artist, I don't know many professional artists/artisans/creative professionals who feel this way, unless they've already made a mound of money on TV and film and now use that popularity as a platform to market stuff on the Internet, but let's just roll with what you're saying for the moment.)
Most artists who support copying generally are satisfied to do so as long as no one else is selling their work for profit.
[...] money was mainly routed through US-based PayPal, which is how Megaupload collected subscriptions from users looking for premium accounts. This wasn't chump change; the government claims that the Megaupload PayPal account has "received in excess of $110,000,000 from subscribers and other persons associated with Mega Conspiracy."
Megaupload made at least a hundred million dollars distributing other people's stuff -- it was really just about taking money that would have gone to filmmakers and Big Media and shifting the revenue to people who owned servers and sold ads.
People would like to pretend that the "pirate economy," as such, is just some people that run a box somewhere that are just connecting people together, when in fact it's billions of dollars a year that are flying around, not one dime of it going back to people that actually made the stuff. Megaupload ran entire server farms in Virginia at a cost of millions of dollars year just to make sure its ads and premium subscription reach was sufficient in North America. Filesharing is absolutely not free of a Big Corporate aspect.
Fuck you for thinking you know better than The People.
One vote by the people in 1978 now basically dictates the shape of California government for evermore. It's made elections worthless, because no matter who you vote for they can't actually change anything. It was some dork's idea of the night watchman state, where inner city schools would magically pay for themselves and the evil government had to be stopped from fixing too many streets in a year.
Yeah, it's been baby steps of progress. Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Hulu, Microsoft, Roku, Nintendo
Who exactly are you trying to kill? All of these entities are deeply enmeshed with, if not outright owned and operated by "old media."
In the end it's going to be approximately the same people doing the same sort of business under the same names, they're just going to get their money from ads instead of from sales, subscribers and tickets. Progress?
A lot of those companies are pro-SOPA or SOPA-neutral. Lucasfilm and Pixar are certainly pro-SOPA; Apple and Adobe have been pro-SOPA but are now merely quiet on the issue.
The actual ISO 9001 standard only costs about $130 on the ISO's website, the verification labor is by far a bigger part of the cost. Nobody foregoes ISO 9001 certification on account of the non-libre status of the standard.
iBooks are ePubs but it's hard to see how these demonstrated books aren't supersets of ePub. I'm not sure ePub supports multiple-choice quizzes, Keynote animations or embedding OS X dashboard widgets (they are just javascript, but the dependencies might not align).
It's not just the actors. A Pixar/Sony Pix Animation/Dreamworks film can have 500 people in the credits list; Pixar itself, for example, has about 700 full-time employees, many of the artists who do the shows are freelance.
In the credits, 10-20 of the 500 are actors, and maybe a dozen are sysadmins and maintenance of the farm. If you want to make a film, you've gotta hire the rest. A server farm won't do character design for you, or animate, or do sound effects, or record the voices, or write the music, or perform it. It won't light your scenes for you, let along design the sets, backgrounds, or do the color. The server farm won't write your shaders for you, won't develop and support your toolchain for you, it won't give you an army of TDs to tech support all of these other people for you.
Technology has always been a necessary but deceptively small part of filmmaking. The primary constraint is assembling enough talented people.
(1) is sortof an engineering problem, more of a social engineering problem, making paying just easy enough and copying just annoying enough.
Note that at any point I never claimed that "People have a right to copy any and everything they please". What I'm claiming is that in order to remove this right, you also need to remove the right to communicate.
I don't see the distinction you're making here, you're just making the negative argument for the positive alternative. Also, I wouldn't necessarily agree that people are entitled to a mandatory government protection to communicate on the Internet -- if the state doesn't cut the lines, Time Warner and Comcast are well within their rights to build whatever computer network suits their business objectives. They're the last mile in most of the United States, they get final cut.
It isn't all "just" communication. The Internet is at its best when people are expressing original ideas, about the way they see the world; using it as a pipe to ship other people's ideas because you want to save $3 on video rental is really a bastardization. It's a fallacy to claim both acts have equivalent moral or social value.
It's important to distinguish between the two claims:
1. Sustaining creative work by getting people to pay for electronic copies of things, without coercion, is a solvable engineering problem.
2. People have a right to copy any and everything they please, to transmit those to whomever they please, without any kind of sanction, and this right has either no effect or a positive effect on the availability of new creative work.
Most people tend to agree with the first one at this point. People who make positive arguments against DMCA and SOPA tend to make them on the basis of the second point.
The current term limits + options to extend are absolutely unreasonable, and they drive people to rebellion.
Yeah, the kids are running their BT peers ragged downloading 20 year old movies and TV shows. Or maybe the fact that the terms are so long somehow breeds this sort of amorphous, diffuse resentment that causes them to copy movies for free when they know they'd rather pay for them. Yeah that's what it is, it's really an elaborate social protest movement.
Either that, or they just do it because they can. One of those.
People deserve to get paid for their work. Those efforts, however, shouldn't undermine technological infrastructure.
Why is the technological infrastructure, or rather, a particular group of people's vision for how the infrastructure should work, more important than people getting paid for their work? The important point is that you have a right to stop people making a copy of your work, at least the law the way it is now, but you don't have a right to expect the Internet to work a particular way. Your assertion basically is that an enumerated, Article 1 power of the United States Congress should be enforceable as long as it doesn't conflict with RFC 1034. Where does that rule come from exactly?
Obj-C's biggest failing is its tendency to fail at runtime rather than during compilation.
Are you sure this isn't just a matter of taste? It gives it scripting-language agility and introspection with compiled language speeds, and still most of the type checking features are available when you want them, it just doesn't compel them.
The people who hate really Objective-C the most seem to be the people who are paid to write IEnumeratesEveryOddThursday interfaces and AbstractClassFactoryIntegerSerializationDataFactory classes for a living. Also, people who expect garbage collection on every platform, they aren't crazy about it either:)
Slashdot Mirror
The original currently_awake comment wasn't informative, it was merely a correct guess, and an extremely fuzzy one at that.
Slashdot comment threads will always be more accurate than authoritative information, as long as you grade them relative to a stopped clock.
Bavarian illuminati, freemasons, elders of zion, the psyops corps of the PLA and the shade of Osama bin Laden.
Reasoning: Because, at the maximum ever recorded in a modern election, about 100 people or about .005% of voters in an election are convicted of casting fraudulent ballots, we should keep about 11% of people who are entitled to cast a vote from making one.
And we aren't even getting into why we always hold our elections on work days...
Claiming that megaupload didn't intend to profit from copyrighted works is the new "Goldman Sachs didn't intend to profit from the failure of its mortgage-backed securities." Everybody knew exactly what it was for, to claim otherwise is tendentious bull.
Millenarian exhortations of the revolution to come are millenarian. But yes, I'm sure the people will rise up and violently defend the rights of a Hong Kong server farm operator to sell you other people's movies, as long as they lies they're told are sufficient to the purpose.
The reliability and consistency of what? Other people's movies? Having other people's stuff to offer was the necessary condition of their business, not the reliability.
A company that clears millions of dollars a year selling other people's movies is somehow the equivalent of the peace-loving Alderaan?
(Whatever you do, don't ask the guy who wrote that line what he thinks about file sharing. )
The Bourgeois Gentleman did not require $65 million in negative costs.
That you would handwave with "entertainment composers of their times," but you cannot name one of equivalent prestige or success to the Beatles, should tell you something.
One of the big differences was evidence that megaupload payed people to upload infringing content, one particular person, an American, made hundreds dollars doing this. It's also alleged that the people who ran megaupload intentionally and knowingly put copyrighted material on their servers.
Megaupload also had paid subscriptions, that were offered expressly for the purpose of making copyrighted works available.
OTOH, I think you're right, it's pretty clear that Youtube makes money off of infringing content on a regular basis and the government would be within its rights to prosecute them; however, it's not at all clear Youtube infringes works intentionally to the extent that Megaupload did. Intention and malice are really what separate the two.
The problem is that you're just going to end up with laws that protect the new status quo. Mark my word, someday, Google or Hulu is going to advocate a "SOPA for Ads" which will let the government take down any site or service that lets you surf the Internet without seeing ads.
If they want to prevent more SOPAs, they shouldn't kill Hollywood. That's not where the problem lies.
It's a great example. Their nominal adherence to DMCA was an sham; you can only claim safe harbor from DMCA if and only if you do not profit from the sharing. The fact that they were able to profit from infringing content, despite abiding by the letter of the DMCA, indicates the fundamental weakness of the DMCA enforcement provisions.
They made money, shitloads of money, literally a small studio's annual profit worth of money, off of other people's stuff, period. If they follow all the rules and are still able to do this, the rules are bad rules and must be changed.
I got no problem with people copying stuff to each other for free -- I don't think it's something people should do, but I realize this happens and there isn't really anything you can do about this. But I have serious problems with people turning that sort of thing into an industry, where they're making tens of millions of dollars a year by doing nothing more than provisioning servers. It's pretty clear these guys were just rentiers in the worst sense of the word.
The position that all of these people were somehow "better" composers and musicians than the people working today is highly speculative. They all worked for patrons, and generally died poor. Beethoven began to break the trend in the 1820s by aggressively selling his written works through publishers, at which time he became a staunch copyright advocate. It's clear that patronage could create great sacred music, and great dance and entertaining music, but the people who worked under these constraints were constantly trying to work around them and spent a great deal of their lives go around begging rich people for commissions.
Jaron Lanier once made the good point that patronage was capable of creating a Michelangelo or a Bach, but it's very questionable if patronage could have ever created a Stanley Kubrick or a Beatles.
When people pay for entertainment directly the n people paying for the artwork is at its maximum; paying for art with patronage or ads always reduces n.
This is a substantially different position from "let's kill Hollywood because SOPA wouldn't let us put a Mad Men episode on Tumblr." The "piracy," such as it is, is heavily tilted toward new content, stuff made in the last few years. Most people are in favor of reducing copyright lengths, even most artists, because they generally never see the benefit themselves, personally -- but equating this position with being against SOPA/PIPA/DMCA/whatever is specious.
(As a commercial artist, I don't know many professional artists/artisans/creative professionals who feel this way, unless they've already made a mound of money on TV and film and now use that popularity as a platform to market stuff on the Internet, but let's just roll with what you're saying for the moment.)
Most artists who support copying generally are satisfied to do so as long as no one else is selling their work for profit.
Thus, we'd better have better solutions than torrents and trackers:
Megaupload made at least a hundred million dollars distributing other people's stuff -- it was really just about taking money that would have gone to filmmakers and Big Media and shifting the revenue to people who owned servers and sold ads.
People would like to pretend that the "pirate economy," as such, is just some people that run a box somewhere that are just connecting people together, when in fact it's billions of dollars a year that are flying around, not one dime of it going back to people that actually made the stuff. Megaupload ran entire server farms in Virginia at a cost of millions of dollars year just to make sure its ads and premium subscription reach was sufficient in North America. Filesharing is absolutely not free of a Big Corporate aspect.
One vote by the people in 1978 now basically dictates the shape of California government for evermore. It's made elections worthless, because no matter who you vote for they can't actually change anything. It was some dork's idea of the night watchman state, where inner city schools would magically pay for themselves and the evil government had to be stopped from fixing too many streets in a year.
Who exactly are you trying to kill? All of these entities are deeply enmeshed with, if not outright owned and operated by "old media."
In the end it's going to be approximately the same people doing the same sort of business under the same names, they're just going to get their money from ads instead of from sales, subscribers and tickets. Progress?
A lot of those companies are pro-SOPA or SOPA-neutral. Lucasfilm and Pixar are certainly pro-SOPA; Apple and Adobe have been pro-SOPA but are now merely quiet on the issue.
... Big Data.
The actual ISO 9001 standard only costs about $130 on the ISO's website, the verification labor is by far a bigger part of the cost. Nobody foregoes ISO 9001 certification on account of the non-libre status of the standard.
iBooks are ePubs but it's hard to see how these demonstrated books aren't supersets of ePub. I'm not sure ePub supports multiple-choice quizzes, Keynote animations or embedding OS X dashboard widgets (they are just javascript, but the dependencies might not align).
That's the thing where dollars vote, right?
It's not just the actors. A Pixar/Sony Pix Animation/Dreamworks film can have 500 people in the credits list; Pixar itself, for example, has about 700 full-time employees, many of the artists who do the shows are freelance.
In the credits, 10-20 of the 500 are actors, and maybe a dozen are sysadmins and maintenance of the farm. If you want to make a film, you've gotta hire the rest. A server farm won't do character design for you, or animate, or do sound effects, or record the voices, or write the music, or perform it. It won't light your scenes for you, let along design the sets, backgrounds, or do the color. The server farm won't write your shaders for you, won't develop and support your toolchain for you, it won't give you an army of TDs to tech support all of these other people for you.
Technology has always been a necessary but deceptively small part of filmmaking. The primary constraint is assembling enough talented people.
(1) is sortof an engineering problem, more of a social engineering problem, making paying just easy enough and copying just annoying enough.
Note that at any point I never claimed that "People have a right to copy any and everything they please". What I'm claiming is that in order to remove this right, you also need to remove the right to communicate.
I don't see the distinction you're making here, you're just making the negative argument for the positive alternative. Also, I wouldn't necessarily agree that people are entitled to a mandatory government protection to communicate on the Internet -- if the state doesn't cut the lines, Time Warner and Comcast are well within their rights to build whatever computer network suits their business objectives. They're the last mile in most of the United States, they get final cut.
It isn't all "just" communication. The Internet is at its best when people are expressing original ideas, about the way they see the world; using it as a pipe to ship other people's ideas because you want to save $3 on video rental is really a bastardization. It's a fallacy to claim both acts have equivalent moral or social value.
It's important to distinguish between the two claims:
Most people tend to agree with the first one at this point. People who make positive arguments against DMCA and SOPA tend to make them on the basis of the second point.
The current term limits + options to extend are absolutely unreasonable, and they drive people to rebellion.
Yeah, the kids are running their BT peers ragged downloading 20 year old movies and TV shows. Or maybe the fact that the terms are so long somehow breeds this sort of amorphous, diffuse resentment that causes them to copy movies for free when they know they'd rather pay for them. Yeah that's what it is, it's really an elaborate social protest movement.
Either that, or they just do it because they can. One of those.
Why is the technological infrastructure, or rather, a particular group of people's vision for how the infrastructure should work, more important than people getting paid for their work? The important point is that you have a right to stop people making a copy of your work, at least the law the way it is now, but you don't have a right to expect the Internet to work a particular way. Your assertion basically is that an enumerated, Article 1 power of the United States Congress should be enforceable as long as it doesn't conflict with RFC 1034. Where does that rule come from exactly?
Are you sure this isn't just a matter of taste? It gives it scripting-language agility and introspection with compiled language speeds, and still most of the type checking features are available when you want them, it just doesn't compel them.
The people who hate really Objective-C the most seem to be the people who are paid to write IEnumeratesEveryOddThursday interfaces and AbstractClassFactoryIntegerSerializationDataFactory classes for a living. Also, people who expect garbage collection on every platform, they aren't crazy about it either :)