5% is considered a margin of error in polls and studies. But trust me, if, say, the US's GDP decreased by 5%, economists (who took not only first-year, but also fourth-year economics!) would not be shrugging and saying "it's just the margin of error". Rather, people would be predicting recession and gloom. In business, a 5% -- or rather 7% -- drop in sales is something to take notice of.
That's because, statistically, the biggest users of Napster are high-school and university students. There may very well be 78-year-old oil tycoons who use Napster to share public-domain banjo recordings from the 1920s, but a phenomenon like decreasing CD sales would be caused by a large number (i.e. a majority) of users, and that's exactly who the media are talking to.
...to actually read the article. Last year, in Canada, Napster was going full-steam ahead, and CD sales were down dramatically. This year, Napster is seriously hamstrung, but this is mostly offset by the zillion similar services, so CD sales continue to drop, though the rate of decrease stays much the same.
In other words, I have no idea where you got the information you're basic on conclusion on from, but it's completely incorrect, and so is your conclusion.
I think we can agree that what your anonymous Swedish source is saying is quite dumb. But that certainly doesn't mean Napster isn't to blame.
Perhaps Swedish music companies are planning to maybe raise prices. But in Canada, CD prices have not gone up. I see mentions of bygone Circuit City $9.99 specials in posts here -- well, Future Shop, a Canadian electronics chain, will be selling the new Radiohead for $9.99 Canadian, which is somewhere around $6.25 US. Standard CD pricing is generally $17-$18 for recent major-label stuff, and $21-22 for older or less mainstream stuff.
I certainly think Napster, or whatever the music service du jour is, is to blame here. Tons of people here have good, high-speed Internet access. (Personally, I pay about USD$27/month for @Home cable, with no bandwidth caps.) CD-R drives are also extremely popular, though from what I've heard the same is true in the US. And I can't think of any other plausible explanations for the drop in sales: it hasn't been a particularly bad year for music, the economy is not suffering, there have been no major changes in music production or retailing. Obviously, Napster (or Napster clones) are to blame. But what can the record companies do in response?
Even if they somehow miraculously found the computer using some high-power traffic analysis, the data on that computer would be encrypted. Even the owner of the computer would not generally be able to decrypt the information.
No miraculous analysis needed. Get a Freenet client. Download the file. See which IP address your Freenet client is downloading the file from. As to the encryption: really, it doesn't matter if the owner can't decrypt it, cause YOU can, and YOU can provide the evidence.
Is it illegal to distribute numbers when they happen to represent copyrighted/illegal data?
Yes. This particular prime-encoding method is just another method of data encoding. It changes nothing: all digital data is encoded in binary code, essentially a number.
I'm also sure it's possible to find a research project/paper which has used a number which represents copyrighted/illegal data (maybe this number).
First, much less likely than you might think -- you have to understand the sheer scale of numbers. Certainly not this number. Accidentally coming up with this number is no more likely that running a random text generator until it produces the code you're looking for. In theory, this could happen, but in practice it never would. That's the flaw in your reasoning: the problems you bring up exist only on paper and would never actually come up.
So. Moral reasoning: I know of no real-world moral problems that might arise from encoding data in a slightly different way. If you know of an actual case, please bring it to my attention. Legal reasoning: this is simply a new data encoding and changes nothing. The person who published this obviously had distributing DeCSS as an intent, and therefore broke the law.
First, just because something's short enough to memorize doesn't mean copyright doesn't apply. Go the bookstore, pick up a book of modern poetry, and memorize a poem. Not too hard -- many of us have probably done it already. That doesn't mean you can now publish it wherever you please.
Second, have fun getting the number short enough to memorize. Trust me, it ain't the 48562845th number, or anywhere near there.
does Microsoft have legal copyright on some numbers?
No, they don't. They have copyright on some particular piece of source or binary code. This copyright applies regardless of the form in which the code is stored, and applies to obvious derivatives as well.
Storing a piece of data as an integer is simply a different way of encoding and storing data, like ASCII or EBCDIC. Saying that performing a simple mathematical operation on an integer negates copyright is as preposterous as saying that, say, my novel is copyright when stored in ASCII but public domain when stored in EBCDIC. As to the number-transform question: if you encoded my novel and transformed it into "2", I would certainly not hold copyright on the number 2. That's because you couldn't logically argue that my novel is stored within the number "2". You could write a program to reverse whatever procedure you used to reduce my novel to 2, and when fed 2 it would spit out my novel. In that case, the combination of the data and your program would be illegal, because it's just another way of storing data.
In other words, as a copyright holder, you hold copyright on all digital data which can reasonably be seen as an encoding of your copyright data. It's quite straightforward, really, and semantic number games never end up meaning anything in the real world.
At worst, it would not be illegal to run a Freenet node, but it would be illegal to share (unwittingly) illegal material.
Right. I agree. Sorry if I didn't make that clear. But considering that Freenet nodes give priority to the most popular content, I have no doubt that 99% of nodes would (do?) contain illegal content.
I doubt any other countries would follow suit.
Here I disagree. I can't think of any industrialized country which doesn't have strong control over distribution of either forbidden or copyright content. The US, from what I know (not American) has fairly lax laws on forbidden content. Many nations forbid, for instance, hate speech. France and Germany have prosecuted foreign Internet sites for selling Nazi items. I think they'd be just as quick to go after users of Freenet as the US. The countries that wouldn't care too much, I think, would be the poorer countries.
I'm just guessing you live in the US, here... Yet we don't hold gun-makers accountable.
Well, I don't live in the US, and I happen to believe that while gunmakers shouldn't be held accountable -- it's not as if they lied about what guns were for, and they were legally allowed to make guns -- they should not be allowed to make guns. But that's irrelevant here; the analogy doesn't hold. The parallel of the gunmaker would be Ian Clarke, the programmer of Freenet, and we're not discussing him. The parallel of Freenet, however, would be a gun that, uncontrollably by the owner, fires random shots. (OK, not a perfect parallel, but analogies are rarely perfect.)
As to the DNS-and-paper argument, it's missing what these arguments tend to miss: common sense. Here's one of the more obvious rebuttals to it. Paper is a medium, it can be used to hold anything. As is Freenet. Again, I happen to think Freenet is a Bad Thing, but I don't believe that it itself is necessarily illegal. But just as using photographic paper to make a print of said eight-year-old is illegal, so is using Freenet to distribute (wittingly or unwittingly) such content. And considering that Freenet works on a popularity model, where nodes give priority to storing the most popular files, I have no doubt that 99% of all nodes will contain some illegal content.
One of the most-repeated things here is that, as Freenet is decentralized, it's impregnable. Now, it's true that because of the decentralization, there'll always be a few people running nodes. But I don't think that the assumption that individuals running nodes will never be gone after is true in this case.
With something like Napster, there was never a question of going after all -- or even some -- users. Millions of people were using it, and the only group who would really WANT to prosecute people, the RIAA, couldn't risk the loss popularity. But Freenet's a different story. Here's what I see happening.
In the public mind, one of the most reprehensible forms of "information" possible is kiddie porn, so I'll use that as an example.
Someone -- police? concerned citizen? -- intentionally downloads a picture of, say, a terrified eight-year-old with bleeding cuts all over her body being violently raped. They get the IP of the node that sent it to them and sue the ISP and, in turn, whoever was running the node.
There is a court case. The prosecution argues, straightforwardly, that both possession and distribution of such material are crimes. The defense argues that, as the operator of the node wasn't aware of what his computer was storing or distributing, he/she couldn't be held responsible. Now, I'm no lawyer, but this seems to me to be an update of the old grade-school trick of closing your eyes, swinging your fists toward someone, and saying I'm just exercising my right to swing my arms, and if you happen to be in the way it's your fault. In other words, though the owner may not have known exactly what their node was distributing, they did know that it was likely that they would be distributing illegal content, and they installed Freenet anyway.
Running Freenet, then, would very likely be illegal. And unlike in cases like Napster, there would be a large army of publically-supported people interested in finding and going after Freenet users. Why? Remember what we're talking about here -- beaten, raped eight-year-olds. Does anyone believe that a majority of any large country would be in favour of distributing pictures of beaten, raped eight-year-olds? So popularity ceases to be an issue. And once a significant percentage of Freenet users have been prosecuted, many remaining users would no doubt be afraid to run it, leaving only a few true believers and residents of small/developing countries.
I may not be a prophet, but if a system as destructive to accepted notions of what's decent and where freedom and anarchy separate ever becomes popular, there's gonna be trouble. And plenty of it.
Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?
Well, dear, I can't remember. Last I remember was 2001, when the Internet had freedom of the press -- major democractic governments didn't stop legitimate political or journalistic speech, and totalitarian governments continued exactly as they always had (if the Internet threatened, they could just throw you in jail for using a particular piece of software, e.g. Freenet). After that, things are kind of a blur. You see, Freenet was released, and I devoted my life to the cause -- that is, I spent my days with warez 'n' kiddie porn. (They actually believed that freedom crap!)
Let's keep this in perspective here. If we're talking about a totalitarian world government that restricts political speech and forbids all individual thought, then I agree. If we're talking about an anonymous, encrypted network of MP3s and kiddie porn... um, no.
I have never used AOL. Should I suddenly feel the desire to do so, I would have no problem encrypting e-mail. But I never have. Why? First, because the person on the other end might have problems reading it -- far from all clients support encryption, and some support different kinds. Second... ooh, someone's gonna read my e-mail, I'm scared. Just send me your address, I'll forward my gossip to you, too! The assumption that everyone must be a privacy freak is quite annoying.
Re:Rampant homophobia? Not necessarily.
on
eFront From Inside
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· Score: 1
Not quite. "Lame" has, for a long time, meant something that's ineffectual or weak, and this meaning comes directly from its other meaning; that is, a lame animal (one that's injured and can't walk) is weak and ineffectual. "Retarded" has always meant slow and backward, and "mentally retarded" came from the original meaning; that is, a mentally retarded person develops slower than most people in some areas.
The derogatory meaning of both of these terms either comes from or is the source of the other meaning. That's not the case with "gay". Obviously, the derogatory usage of "gay" comes from the homosexual meaning of the word as opposed to the joie-de-vivre one, and unlike "lame" and "retarded", that meaning of "gay" is NOT one that should have any negative connotations at all. Using "gay" in that way treats homosexuality as in insult.
The derogatory use of "lame", for instance, has long been divorced from its other meaning. But that isn't the case with "gay". Look at the page linked to in the post, actually. The person is called gay by insinuating that he has sex with men. That's hardly an innocent usage. I don't think it would all that hard to argue that that "degardes the gay community". And as long as usages like that remain widespread -- which they unquestionably are at the moment -- then ANY usage of "gay" will be associated with that.
Put it this way: if "African-American" had two meanings, namely:
- the current one (race)
- a person who kidnaps, rapes, and murders children
then would you be claiming that to protest against the second usage is "paranoid"? If not, then that's an unconscious bias against gay people, because the two examples are essentially the same.
That's because if you buy one 7-11 donut, you can't let your 500 closest friends eat the same donut (in full). That's because if you buy one TV, that TV can only be in one room at a time.
I happen to agree that Microsoft is going a bit overboard here, but the analogy doesn't hold -- physical property and intellectual property are two very different things.
Let's see. This is a new system being used for most Microsoft products. Mathematica is not made by Microsoft. How could you possibly think that it'll be the same system?
if windows is using hardware as a basis, youll need a new code if you reformat and reinstall
Why? Hardware means the physical components of a computer. Formatting a hard drive does not modify hardware in any way.
His point was that British Columbia has standard provincial exams. The course content is laid out by the Ministry of Education and all students write the same centrally-marked exam.
Let's see: Canada, $0.32, the UK, $0.28 ($0.38 for next-business day). Bulk mailers get volume discounts and pay much less than consumers do; they do not subsidise standard mail.
Oh, right. And nobody would notice. Nobody would do anything about it. Loopholes always stay open forever, even when people take advantage of them en masse.
And if you believe them, I've got a tape to sell you. No, no, it's not blank -- I pre-recorded it with static hiss.
Everybody's started taking the idea that the media-company business model is stupid as a given. But, also, nobody has yet (to my knowledge) suggested an alternative. To concentrate on music, there have generally been two suggestions: give away music, concentrate on live tickets (bullshit: works decently for certain people, generally arena-rock groups, but doesn't even come close to working for, say, musicians with families or hip-hop/electronic/other non-live genre musicians) or that users should give artists voluntary "tips" (uh huh. like that's gonna happen.).
So, if you're able to call the current media business model painfully stupid, what do you in your non-painful and non-stupid ways suggest?
Slashdot Mirror
(pricing there -- mod parent up, please)
5% is considered a margin of error in polls and studies. But trust me, if, say, the US's GDP decreased by 5%, economists (who took not only first-year, but also fourth-year economics!) would not be shrugging and saying "it's just the margin of error". Rather, people would be predicting recession and gloom. In business, a 5% -- or rather 7% -- drop in sales is something to take notice of.
That's because, statistically, the biggest users of Napster are high-school and university students. There may very well be 78-year-old oil tycoons who use Napster to share public-domain banjo recordings from the 1920s, but a phenomenon like decreasing CD sales would be caused by a large number (i.e. a majority) of users, and that's exactly who the media are talking to.
In other words, I have no idea where you got the information you're basic on conclusion on from, but it's completely incorrect, and so is your conclusion.
Perhaps Swedish music companies are planning to maybe raise prices. But in Canada, CD prices have not gone up. I see mentions of bygone Circuit City $9.99 specials in posts here -- well, Future Shop, a Canadian electronics chain, will be selling the new Radiohead for $9.99 Canadian, which is somewhere around $6.25 US. Standard CD pricing is generally $17-$18 for recent major-label stuff, and $21-22 for older or less mainstream stuff.
I certainly think Napster, or whatever the music service du jour is, is to blame here. Tons of people here have good, high-speed Internet access. (Personally, I pay about USD$27/month for @Home cable, with no bandwidth caps.) CD-R drives are also extremely popular, though from what I've heard the same is true in the US. And I can't think of any other plausible explanations for the drop in sales: it hasn't been a particularly bad year for music, the economy is not suffering, there have been no major changes in music production or retailing. Obviously, Napster (or Napster clones) are to blame. But what can the record companies do in response?
No miraculous analysis needed. Get a Freenet client. Download the file. See which IP address your Freenet client is downloading the file from. As to the encryption: really, it doesn't matter if the owner can't decrypt it, cause YOU can, and YOU can provide the evidence.
Suppose that for a certain n,
n = win2k
n = DeCSS
n = Complete Works of William Shakespeare
n = New York Times, March 28th, 2072
In other words, what you describe ain't gonna happen.
Yes. This particular prime-encoding method is just another method of data encoding. It changes nothing: all digital data is encoded in binary code, essentially a number.
I'm also sure it's possible to find a research project/paper which has used a number which represents copyrighted/illegal data (maybe this number).
First, much less likely than you might think -- you have to understand the sheer scale of numbers. Certainly not this number. Accidentally coming up with this number is no more likely that running a random text generator until it produces the code you're looking for. In theory, this could happen, but in practice it never would. That's the flaw in your reasoning: the problems you bring up exist only on paper and would never actually come up.
So. Moral reasoning: I know of no real-world moral problems that might arise from encoding data in a slightly different way. If you know of an actual case, please bring it to my attention. Legal reasoning: this is simply a new data encoding and changes nothing. The person who published this obviously had distributing DeCSS as an intent, and therefore broke the law.
First, just because something's short enough to memorize doesn't mean copyright doesn't apply. Go the bookstore, pick up a book of modern poetry, and memorize a poem. Not too hard -- many of us have probably done it already. That doesn't mean you can now publish it wherever you please.
Second, have fun getting the number short enough to memorize. Trust me, it ain't the 48562845th number, or anywhere near there.
No, they don't. They have copyright on some particular piece of source or binary code. This copyright applies regardless of the form in which the code is stored, and applies to obvious derivatives as well.
Storing a piece of data as an integer is simply a different way of encoding and storing data, like ASCII or EBCDIC. Saying that performing a simple mathematical operation on an integer negates copyright is as preposterous as saying that, say, my novel is copyright when stored in ASCII but public domain when stored in EBCDIC. As to the number-transform question: if you encoded my novel and transformed it into "2", I would certainly not hold copyright on the number 2. That's because you couldn't logically argue that my novel is stored within the number "2". You could write a program to reverse whatever procedure you used to reduce my novel to 2, and when fed 2 it would spit out my novel. In that case, the combination of the data and your program would be illegal, because it's just another way of storing data.
In other words, as a copyright holder, you hold copyright on all digital data which can reasonably be seen as an encoding of your copyright data. It's quite straightforward, really, and semantic number games never end up meaning anything in the real world.
Right. I agree. Sorry if I didn't make that clear. But considering that Freenet nodes give priority to the most popular content, I have no doubt that 99% of nodes would (do?) contain illegal content.
I doubt any other countries would follow suit.
Here I disagree. I can't think of any industrialized country which doesn't have strong control over distribution of either forbidden or copyright content. The US, from what I know (not American) has fairly lax laws on forbidden content. Many nations forbid, for instance, hate speech. France and Germany have prosecuted foreign Internet sites for selling Nazi items. I think they'd be just as quick to go after users of Freenet as the US. The countries that wouldn't care too much, I think, would be the poorer countries.
Well, I don't live in the US, and I happen to believe that while gunmakers shouldn't be held accountable -- it's not as if they lied about what guns were for, and they were legally allowed to make guns -- they should not be allowed to make guns. But that's irrelevant here; the analogy doesn't hold. The parallel of the gunmaker would be Ian Clarke, the programmer of Freenet, and we're not discussing him. The parallel of Freenet, however, would be a gun that, uncontrollably by the owner, fires random shots. (OK, not a perfect parallel, but analogies are rarely perfect.)
As to the DNS-and-paper argument, it's missing what these arguments tend to miss: common sense. Here's one of the more obvious rebuttals to it. Paper is a medium, it can be used to hold anything. As is Freenet. Again, I happen to think Freenet is a Bad Thing, but I don't believe that it itself is necessarily illegal. But just as using photographic paper to make a print of said eight-year-old is illegal, so is using Freenet to distribute (wittingly or unwittingly) such content. And considering that Freenet works on a popularity model, where nodes give priority to storing the most popular files, I have no doubt that 99% of all nodes will contain some illegal content.
One of the most-repeated things here is that, as Freenet is decentralized, it's impregnable. Now, it's true that because of the decentralization, there'll always be a few people running nodes. But I don't think that the assumption that individuals running nodes will never be gone after is true in this case.
With something like Napster, there was never a question of going after all -- or even some -- users. Millions of people were using it, and the only group who would really WANT to prosecute people, the RIAA, couldn't risk the loss popularity. But Freenet's a different story. Here's what I see happening.
In the public mind, one of the most reprehensible forms of "information" possible is kiddie porn, so I'll use that as an example.
Someone -- police? concerned citizen? -- intentionally downloads a picture of, say, a terrified eight-year-old with bleeding cuts all over her body being violently raped. They get the IP of the node that sent it to them and sue the ISP and, in turn, whoever was running the node.
There is a court case. The prosecution argues, straightforwardly, that both possession and distribution of such material are crimes. The defense argues that, as the operator of the node wasn't aware of what his computer was storing or distributing, he/she couldn't be held responsible. Now, I'm no lawyer, but this seems to me to be an update of the old grade-school trick of closing your eyes, swinging your fists toward someone, and saying I'm just exercising my right to swing my arms, and if you happen to be in the way it's your fault. In other words, though the owner may not have known exactly what their node was distributing, they did know that it was likely that they would be distributing illegal content, and they installed Freenet anyway.
Running Freenet, then, would very likely be illegal. And unlike in cases like Napster, there would be a large army of publically-supported people interested in finding and going after Freenet users. Why? Remember what we're talking about here -- beaten, raped eight-year-olds. Does anyone believe that a majority of any large country would be in favour of distributing pictures of beaten, raped eight-year-olds? So popularity ceases to be an issue. And once a significant percentage of Freenet users have been prosecuted, many remaining users would no doubt be afraid to run it, leaving only a few true believers and residents of small/developing countries.
I may not be a prophet, but if a system as destructive to accepted notions of what's decent and where freedom and anarchy separate ever becomes popular, there's gonna be trouble. And plenty of it.
Well, dear, I can't remember. Last I remember was 2001, when the Internet had freedom of the press -- major democractic governments didn't stop legitimate political or journalistic speech, and totalitarian governments continued exactly as they always had (if the Internet threatened, they could just throw you in jail for using a particular piece of software, e.g. Freenet). After that, things are kind of a blur. You see, Freenet was released, and I devoted my life to the cause -- that is, I spent my days with warez 'n' kiddie porn. (They actually believed that freedom crap!)
Let's keep this in perspective here. If we're talking about a totalitarian world government that restricts political speech and forbids all individual thought, then I agree. If we're talking about an anonymous, encrypted network of MP3s and kiddie porn... um, no.
I have never used AOL. Should I suddenly feel the desire to do so, I would have no problem encrypting e-mail. But I never have. Why? First, because the person on the other end might have problems reading it -- far from all clients support encryption, and some support different kinds. Second... ooh, someone's gonna read my e-mail, I'm scared. Just send me your address, I'll forward my gossip to you, too! The assumption that everyone must be a privacy freak is quite annoying.
Not quite. "Lame" has, for a long time, meant something that's ineffectual or weak, and this meaning comes directly from its other meaning; that is, a lame animal (one that's injured and can't walk) is weak and ineffectual. "Retarded" has always meant slow and backward, and "mentally retarded" came from the original meaning; that is, a mentally retarded person develops slower than most people in some areas.
The derogatory meaning of both of these terms either comes from or is the source of the other meaning. That's not the case with "gay". Obviously, the derogatory usage of "gay" comes from the homosexual meaning of the word as opposed to the joie-de-vivre one, and unlike "lame" and "retarded", that meaning of "gay" is NOT one that should have any negative connotations at all. Using "gay" in that way treats homosexuality as in insult.
The derogatory use of "lame", for instance, has long been divorced from its other meaning. But that isn't the case with "gay". Look at the page linked to in the post, actually. The person is called gay by insinuating that he has sex with men. That's hardly an innocent usage. I don't think it would all that hard to argue that that "degardes the gay community". And as long as usages like that remain widespread -- which they unquestionably are at the moment -- then ANY usage of "gay" will be associated with that.
Put it this way: if "African-American" had two meanings, namely:
- the current one (race)
- a person who kidnaps, rapes, and murders children
then would you be claiming that to protest against the second usage is "paranoid"? If not, then that's an unconscious bias against gay people, because the two examples are essentially the same.
I'm 100% sure that it hasn't.
What's to stop a code-generator? a) Microsoft programmers are not idiots. b) Public-key cryptography is rather difficult to crack.
That's because if you buy one 7-11 donut, you can't let your 500 closest friends eat the same donut (in full). That's because if you buy one TV, that TV can only be in one room at a time.
I happen to agree that Microsoft is going a bit overboard here, but the analogy doesn't hold -- physical property and intellectual property are two very different things.
Let's see. This is a new system being used for most Microsoft products. Mathematica is not made by Microsoft. How could you possibly think that it'll be the same system?
if windows is using hardware as a basis, youll need a new code if you reformat and reinstall
Why? Hardware means the physical components of a computer. Formatting a hard drive does not modify hardware in any way.
And under Windows you can display file extensions if you decide that suits your fancy.
His point was that British Columbia has standard provincial exams. The course content is laid out by the Ministry of Education and all students write the same centrally-marked exam.
Let's see: Canada, $0.32, the UK, $0.28 ($0.38 for next-business day). Bulk mailers get volume discounts and pay much less than consumers do; they do not subsidise standard mail.
Oh, right. And nobody would notice. Nobody would do anything about it. Loopholes always stay open forever, even when people take advantage of them en masse.
And if you believe them, I've got a tape to sell you. No, no, it's not blank -- I pre-recorded it with static hiss.
So, if you're able to call the current media business model painfully stupid, what do you in your non-painful and non-stupid ways suggest?