Are you authority-loving, pro-corporate, free-market types getting this? That's my point. There's virtually nothing about the economic/political system in the US that is a "free market", and I'm not sure I'd like it if it was. I really don't get it. If you meant "not free-market" when you wrote "free-market," did you also mean "not authority-loving" and "not pro-corporate" too?
Are you authority-loving, pro-corporate, free-market types getting this? There is nothing even remotely "free-market" about this situation - copyright is a government granted monopoly and this court ruling is, by virtue of being a court ruling, government interference.
You've left out a 4th group - would pay for it, but not the current asking price.
Collective purchasing - where everyone pays up front what they think the product is worth to them until the creator's asking price is reached neatly captures the available income from that group.
At which point these people say "No thanks, we'll wait and take version 2.0 for free off Pirate Bay, just like we took version 1.0." At which point the developer says, too bad, if I don't get paid for it now, there WON'T BE A 2.0.
It is just saying that because something illegal is suddenly technically easy and difficult to prevent, it should be accepted. Yes. Do you know why? Because every single business model that relies on man's charitable nature has failed in the long run. Even so-called public-tv and public-radio in the USA has resorted to 'selling' physical objects in return for donations, and then there is the whole corporate-sponorship thing. So, if you can't beat it, you might as well join it.
Compare with guns: shooting somebody is technically easy and difficult to prevent, What a piss-poor analogy
Shooting somebody requires a gun - most people don't have them. Shooting somebody requires set of mental circumstances that are at least a 1000x more rare than actual gun ownership. Murder leaves behind evidence, the very least of which is that the dead guy is not around anymore.
Copying software requires a computer - most people have one or easy access to one. Copying software has a mental threshold just slightly higher than what's necessary for listening to the radio. You can 'steal' a million copies of software and there won't be a single shred of evidence left behind and no one will have seen you in the act either.
Just because software/content by contract is hard today does not mean it has to be hard. Before the printing press was created, the entire copyright business model wasn't feasible either.
Unfortunately, that man is looking to make an income off of the software he sells. That man is now devastated and theres nothing he can do about it. You know how regular urban people just dehydrate and die or starve to death if they get lost in the desert? But the people who grew up there are able to survive because they know the 'lore' of the desert - how to take advantage of what appears to be barren surroundings - like what shriveled up plants actually store potable water, how to catch small animals for food, etc.
Your hypothetical software developer is like the urbanite lost in the desert. If he knew how to take advantage of the situation, then he COULD do something about it. All those people who download and actually use the software - not the 99% who download it, play with it and then delete, but the people for whom it is actually useful - those people are potential customers for version 2.0.
They all clearly need the software, they probably all have ideas about how it could be improved. If this hypothetical software developer had some business sense, he would solicit those people to pay for the development of version 2.0. Come up with a list of feature enhancements, set a price to implement for each one, and then make sure that all the regular users of the software know that by paying up front, they can get their most desired features added to the next release.
Of course, if the guy doesn't have a clue about the internet, and is stuck in the old pre-network mindset, yeah, then there really is nothing he can do about the piracy and he might as well just give up. Eventually someone smarter will come along and exploit the opportunities the first guy could not.
I'm always bothered when I read articles like this because I know the Slashdot party line is always "File sharing good, fuck the content creators". If there is a "slashdot party line" it is "fuck the distribution cartel and their obsolete business model" not the content creators. Right now, the creators are caught in the crossfire. But since your brother isn't even signed, he still has the freedom to think outside the box and step outside of the firefight.
Tell your little brother to start thinking of recorded music the same way he thinks of live music - as a performance that he can sell tickets to.
Record each live performance and then set up a paypal collection plate on his website, when the fans have put enough money into the collection plate, the band puts the MP3's up for FREE download. Promote it as concerts for people who couldn't make it to the concert.
Do the same for studio recordings -- one song, a set of songs, even the entire studio session, outtakes and all.
Sell vanity performances where, for some suitably expensive fee, a guy can have the band record a version of the song that substitutes his girlfriend/wife/kid/enemy's name in the lyrics. For even more money, perform and record THAT version live at a concert
The reason your brother is being hurt by piracy is because he's been brainwashed by the content cartel to ignore the profitable opportunities that the internet makes possible.
Re:Aa DRM technology which hasn't been cracked
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
It really doesn't matter if you can recreate what is on the disk or not - it's what goes into the dacs that counts. Not if you have a PDM-capable DAC you want to play the copied bits on. If you can't recreate the original bits, then its just a variation on the analog hole.
Microsoft makes their promise to make this free. The exact wording from the article is, "offer a royalty-free grant for its patents that are required to implement" --I'm sure there are more details to the offer, but just because it is royalty-free doesn't necessarily mean that there won't be other terms that are deal breakers.
Re:Aa DRM technology which hasn't been cracked
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
It sounds like they are just taking the analog hole one step further and sampling the bits being fed into the dacs. For DVD-Audio that should be a bit-perfect duplication because DVD-Audio uses PCM, but for SACD it isn't so simple because the native format is PDM aka Sony's trademark Direct Stream Digital so what you get out of the sp-difs is not the same as what's on the disc and you probably can't perfectly recreate what is on the disc either even if tried to convert it back to PDM.
Re:DRM technology which hasn't been cracked (also)
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
What about taking a bitstream copy of the dongle with some kind of low-level drive-imaging software? The dongle is not a disk. It is designed explicitly not to divulge its contents. The important data will be stored in a tamper-resistant chip - unless you've got a scanning electron microscope and a lot of time on your hands, you aren't going to be able to figure out the contents of the chip.
Re:DRM technology which hasn't been cracked (also)
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
In theory, donglization can be "uncrackable." Essentially you put part of the program in the dongle and make the dongle smart enough to run that code too, so it never leaves the dongle - just takes input from the host and returns the computational output. As long as no one can extract the code from the dongle and run it on the host, then the software is effectively tied to the dongle because it *is* the dongle.
But, at that point you start to leave the realm of wide-scale feasibility because you are effectively distributing a computer along with your software.
Re:Bad arguments and bad reasoning
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
At the risk of being taken for a literalist, DRM is the enforcement, not the law itself (copyright law and contract law).
It just has to be effective enough to keep Joe Average from copying the file. No, that's only marginally useful. All it takes is for one person to remove the DRM and then all the Joe Averages can copy THAT file.
What the MAFIAA 'needs' is playback restriction, not copy restriction. They 'need' a way to restrict playback on each device to files that were specifically purchased for use on that playback device. Then even if a bunch of nerds crack their own playback devices to play any files, it won't make any difference because Joe Average will still be stuck with an uncracked piece of hardware and no matter how many DRM-free file copies anyone gives him, he won't be able to do a thing with them.
Note to the REAL literalists out there, I'm not advocating that, I'm just saying that the argument that DRM just has to be "good enough" to stop Joe Average is a fallacy. DRM has to withstand the strongest attacks to be effective. While restrictions in the playback devices are an example of a system that would only have withstand weak attacks to be effective in the way that timholman meant.
No, it's definitely DVD+R I am thinking of. Part of the reasoning back then was that the DVD+R standard took longer to complete, and thus came to market later than the DVD-R standard in part because of the requirements for more sophisticated recording functionality like efficient pausing.
Aa DRM technology which hasn't been cracked
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
Can anyone think of a DRM technology which hasn't been cracked?
SACDs - Super Audio CD's - the BLU-RAY to DVD-Audio's HD-DVD. DVIX - the original dvd-lite, not the codec.
Analog Hole doesn't count as a "crack" since it is not bit perfect, unlike the cracks of CCS, AACS, CPPM, 5C, Fairplay, WM-DRM, etc.
Baloney. You are referring to the NSAKEY and it is not about executable signing, because until Vista+TPM there was no mechanism for executable signing and authentication in MS Windows.
They are not very good at tasks which involve writing a lot in small increments like a log. The sector size is quite big so if you guarantee that each log entry has finished physically on disc without caching till the sector is full the disc will be eaten in no time. I seem to recall that DVD+R was designed to work around that problem. The thinking at the time was that people would used DVD+R media like they used VHS tapes, to record tv with the ability to pause and or stop/restart recording frequently. They wanted to avoid the inefficiency of CD-R and DVD-R which are very wasteful on start/stop record operations as you indicated.
I really can't dig up the link, it was years ago that I read this and google ain't cooperating right now, but I recall that whereas a recording pause could waste up to an entire track (once around the disc) with DVD-R, a DVD+R recorder would waste at most one sector (one the order of a few Kbytes).
And I'm perfectly confident that the invisible hand of the market will keep the planes from colliding with each other mid-air. Please name the two official missions of the FAA. You'll learn a lot.
I'm sure that Hawaii has benefited from federal money at some point. If you tried to make the case that no money should be spend unless every single citizen can be shown to have a tangible benefit, you'd never get anything done. That's an extreme position. There are certainly some types of local-to-hawaii projects for which the majority of federal taxpayers would benefit. For example, all of the military related spending there.
But a bridge that goes to an as yet undeveloped area really isn't going to benefit anyone in a different state and ought to be the provenance of state and or city tax dollars, not federal.
But the point is that making taxpayers pay for it isn't as ludicrous as you're making it out to be; taxpayers are the eventual beneficiaries and they end up paying for it in the end anyway. The logistics of how you make them pay for it is just a matter of shifting responsibility for obtaining the funding. One thing that can be said though is that the taxpayers of Hawaii who partially footed the bill through their federal taxes did not benefit much at all.
Following orders is one thing. Lying to congress is a considerable felony. Why does no one seem to get this these days, lying to congress is not some American right, no matter how much they lie to you? Not an american right, but a corporate right. Championed in recent decades by the tobacco industry. Ah what amazing corporate rights pioneers where they. We should declare a national holiday in their honor - RJR-Nabisco-Marlboro-Vagina-Slimes day!
Slashdot Mirror
What's your problem?
Did someone tell you to expect a check but didn't warn you that you had to deposit it with a bank in order to use it?
Besides, you are a fine one to be bitching that the meaning of a word has changed due to popular usage.
So they took advantage of her naivete to pillory her in front of an audience. Seems like turnabout to me.
Yep, I agree. And I think that the people at DefCon have every right to hunt for and catch moles too. Let the games begin!
You've left out a 4th group - would pay for it, but not the current asking price.
Collective purchasing - where everyone pays up front what they think the product is worth to them until the creator's asking price is reached neatly captures the available income from that group.
Shooting somebody requires a gun - most people don't have them. Shooting somebody requires set of mental circumstances that are at least a 1000x more rare than actual gun ownership. Murder leaves behind evidence, the very least of which is that the dead guy is not around anymore.
Copying software requires a computer - most people have one or easy access to one. Copying software has a mental threshold just slightly higher than what's necessary for listening to the radio. You can 'steal' a million copies of software and there won't be a single shred of evidence left behind and no one will have seen you in the act either.
Just because software/content by contract is hard today does not mean it has to be hard. Before the printing press was created, the entire copyright business model wasn't feasible either.
Your hypothetical software developer is like the urbanite lost in the desert. If he knew how to take advantage of the situation, then he COULD do something about it. All those people who download and actually use the software - not the 99% who download it, play with it and then delete, but the people for whom it is actually useful - those people are potential customers for version 2.0.
They all clearly need the software, they probably all have ideas about how it could be improved. If this hypothetical software developer had some business sense, he would solicit those people to pay for the development of version 2.0. Come up with a list of feature enhancements, set a price to implement for each one, and then make sure that all the regular users of the software know that by paying up front, they can get their most desired features added to the next release.
Of course, if the guy doesn't have a clue about the internet, and is stuck in the old pre-network mindset, yeah, then there really is nothing he can do about the piracy and he might as well just give up. Eventually someone smarter will come along and exploit the opportunities the first guy could not.
Tell your little brother to start thinking of recorded music the same way he thinks of live music - as a performance that he can sell tickets to.
Record each live performance and then set up a paypal collection plate on his website, when the fans have put enough money into the collection plate, the band puts the MP3's up for FREE download. Promote it as concerts for people who couldn't make it to the concert.
Do the same for studio recordings -- one song, a set of songs, even the entire studio session, outtakes and all.
Sell vanity performances where, for some suitably expensive fee, a guy can have the band record a version of the song that substitutes his girlfriend/wife/kid/enemy's name in the lyrics. For even more money, perform and record THAT version live at a concert
The reason your brother is being hurt by piracy is because he's been brainwashed by the content cartel to ignore the profitable opportunities that the internet makes possible.
If you can't recreate the original bits, then its just a variation on the analog hole.
http://colorfilter.wickline.org/
That site lets a normal person see how a web-page looks to people with different kinds of color blindness.
http://www.dvdupgrades.ch/product/Modification/SPD IF/Output/Six_channel_S_P_DIF_output_board/24308.h tml
It sounds like they are just taking the analog hole one step further and sampling the bits being fed into the dacs. For DVD-Audio that should be a bit-perfect duplication because DVD-Audio uses PCM, but for SACD it isn't so simple because the native format is PDM aka Sony's trademark Direct Stream Digital so what you get out of the sp-difs is not the same as what's on the disc and you probably can't perfectly recreate what is on the disc either even if tried to convert it back to PDM.
In theory, donglization can be "uncrackable." Essentially you put part of the program in the dongle and make the dongle smart enough to run that code too, so it never leaves the dongle - just takes input from the host and returns the computational output. As long as no one can extract the code from the dongle and run it on the host, then the software is effectively tied to the dongle because it *is* the dongle.
But, at that point you start to leave the realm of wide-scale feasibility because you are effectively distributing a computer along with your software.
What the MAFIAA 'needs' is playback restriction, not copy restriction. They 'need' a way to restrict playback on each device to files that were specifically purchased for use on that playback device. Then even if a bunch of nerds crack their own playback devices to play any files, it won't make any difference because Joe Average will still be stuck with an uncracked piece of hardware and no matter how many DRM-free file copies anyone gives him, he won't be able to do a thing with them.
Note to the REAL literalists out there, I'm not advocating that, I'm just saying that the argument that DRM just has to be "good enough" to stop Joe Average is a fallacy. DRM has to withstand the strongest attacks to be effective. While restrictions in the playback devices are an example of a system that would only have withstand weak attacks to be effective in the way that timholman meant.
No, it's definitely DVD+R I am thinking of. Part of the reasoning back then was that the DVD+R standard took longer to complete, and thus came to market later than the DVD-R standard in part because of the requirements for more sophisticated recording functionality like efficient pausing.
Can anyone think of a DRM technology which hasn't been cracked?
SACDs - Super Audio CD's - the BLU-RAY to DVD-Audio's HD-DVD.
DVIX - the original dvd-lite, not the codec.
Analog Hole doesn't count as a "crack" since it is not bit perfect, unlike the cracks of CCS, AACS, CPPM, 5C, Fairplay, WM-DRM, etc.
Baloney. You are referring to the NSAKEY and it is not about executable signing, because until Vista+TPM there was no mechanism for executable signing and authentication in MS Windows.
I really can't dig up the link, it was years ago that I read this and google ain't cooperating right now, but I recall that whereas a recording pause could waste up to an entire track (once around the disc) with DVD-R, a DVD+R recorder would waste at most one sector (one the order of a few Kbytes).
But a bridge that goes to an as yet undeveloped area really isn't going to benefit anyone in a different state and ought to be the provenance of state and or city tax dollars, not federal.