This whole schemes sounds just like a way of advert-ridden websites with zero content to pretend to be something they're not.
Are we going to end up with a web full of great looking websites that have actually been created automatically out of nothing the second you went looking for them? At least with parked domains and link farms you know immediately that's what they are.
So if I market an MP3 player that's "technically" a hat I can design it to do whatever I want? After all, who's ever been sued over the functionality of a hat?
Who said anything about you deciding what's reasonable on your own?
So who decides then? Remember, this is a decision after the fact. These people made no effort to reach agreement before selling their mix. What if no agreement can be reached on what's reasonable? Do they just get to keep the money?
You making a knockoff and claiming that it's the real thing is defferent from someone making a derivative work and distributing as a derivative work.
Of course it is. Most comparisons fail at some point, otherwise they wouldn't be comparisons. They'd be the same thing. But in this case the point is they're both making unlicensed use of other's work and reputation.
If your product is blatantly inferior, but people confuse it for the real thing because you tricked them, then it's not good publicity.
The point is that with music "inferior" is a matter of opinion. People have been defending these mixtapes as good publicity. What if you're one of the original artists and you think the mixtape stinks and is inferior. In your opinion the whole thing is a ripoff. Just your opinion, others may think it's great, but as the owner of the work it's your opinion that counts.
So what if these guys did licence everything as you suggest? Again the point is that the creators and owners of the work may not want their work used in this way, and may not want the money. You might disagree. You might think it makes no financial or artistic sense on their part, but it's their decision. No one should have the right to force them into it.
So lets say the original artists are happy for their work to be used this way. Unfortunately these guys have still jumped the gun. You can be happy with the end result and still annoyed they didn't ask first. What if you hadn't been happy?
What they deserve is the opportunity to license the tracks that they've used for a reasonable amount with respect to the money that they've made.
Why do you think he has the right to create his own profit using other people's copyrighted work?
Let's say I decide to produce 81,000 crappy counterfeit Rolex's, sell them, and send Rolex 1 penny for every watch I sell (cos I've decided that's "reasonable"). Is that ok? Sure, I'm basing my whole business on someone else's work and reputation without their permission, but I deserve the opportunity to produce a derivative work and licence them as I see fit! And every Rolex I sell is good publicity for them, so why should they complain?!
You are being horribly naive. What you are suggesting is people paying up front for a product they haven't seen, months in advance. How many people are going to be willing to do this? Sure, it may work for directors/actors who have a solid record of producing popular movies, but what of everyone else?
The current, much derided, system works by investors gambling that a certain movie will make money. That is why they put large sums of money up. Having gambled that money they have a certain expectation that if the movie is popular then they should have the right to make a large profit on it. After all, they could have lost everything. They may well lose everything on their next movie. The profits on the successes is what keeps them going.
But do you see thousands, millions of people willing to put money up front when the end product may be total crap? And if it's an amazing success they get nothing but 2 hours enjoyment? Sorry, not going to work. They'll people who may be willing to gamble the price of a movie ticket on this, but most won't. They are fore-planning a single evening's leisure. They want to spend their money on a movie that they can see now, having read the reviews, seen the trailer.
Here's slashdot's problem. The failure of the admittedly pain-in-in-ass DRM is treated with delight, but no-one has anything to offer that would work to replace it. How are works like movies and music going to be financed if people think it's ok to just take them for free? Too many slashdotters think that it can be done by achieved in a faintly communist kind of way they'd never dare suggest as viable for any other business in free market economy society. And the rest believe it can be done by a licence-free endeavour like open source software. They simply can't fathom that movies and music are not anything like software.
I assume that it costs less to mass produce DVDs and CDs than the late VHS and vinyl records - still prices haven't dropped.
Sigh. Maybe I should give up challenging people on this statement in slashdot. They just keep on repeating it, no matter that it simply isn't true.
I invite you to produce a 20 year comparison of video, record, DVD and CD prices that backs this statement up. In real terms all of these are cheaper than previously.
We are not speaking Arabic, converted to Islam, we have not spilled our liquor, and we are not paying a head tax - so no, I don't think that they've won.
What makes you think these are what Al Quaeda want? Because Bush told you?
I always thought what they wanted was the end to western involvement in Middle Eastern politics and society. But maybe that's just because I like to look beyond what people would like me to believe.
The mere mention of terrorism involvement (something that is extremely unlikely in this case) is just symptomatic of current paranoia about it, something that the US Government is quite comfortable with. 50 years ago it would have been Communists. The US Government loves keeping its citizens in a state of fear.
Precisely. The entire article is a number of suppositions, followed by a number of unattributed hearsays. No evidence of who provides these files and no evidence that they are used to track IP (other than the tracking that practically every website does), and no evidence to show what the whole purpose of it all might be.
Just dubious allegation with a large dollup of paranoia.
And the idea that the inhabitants of Sealand could fight them off if it came to that is laughable.
The entire idea is laughable, and it's amazing that so many people are even giving it 5 mins consideration. It's a publicity stunt. End of story. Just how far do you think people are willing to go in order to protect their "right" to rip off other people's copyrighted work?
And if illegal activity was as easy as buying your own artificial island that claims independence, do you not think that far bigger crime outfits than this bunch of bit-torrent monkeys would have tried it already?
Are they ever! I've lost track of the number of Linux software packages I've downloaded that have a "read me" that goes into exhaustive and loving detail about the GPL, and absolutely nothing about the installation or use of the package.
Adding Yet More Dialogs, Prompts and Cautions will not solve the inherent security problem of any system: the user.
This is very true. So what's the solution? What all these steps are designed to try and do is to get the user to actually stop and think about what they are doing. Unfortunately people are generally lazy (and I mean everyone) and would prefer not to, so just hit "OK". So we already know that no matter what security steps you put in, users are always eventually going to become blasé about progressing past them. Doesn't matter how many dialogs you have, doesn't matter how you word them, doesn't matter how they function. Such is the human condition that all software developers have to live and work with.
But more significantly, if the user doesn't know the appropriate password, they cannot progress pass this security. In this Vista is effectively no different from Linux. So yes, if you have admin rights all these prompts are a pain that you're going to get used to just switching your brain off and clicking through. But the only other solutions are to either not have any security steps at all, (and we all know where that leads) or to never give the user the option of over-ruling the operating system's security decisions (at which point you lose ownership of your computer). There is no third way or easy answer.
Don't you know that the god of slashdot is open source. And because that works for the software industry (which is something slashdotters know about) it therefore must work for the music industry (something slashdotters know nothing about, but won't let that stop them...). Anyone who suggests differently doesn't conform with the slashdot group-think and will be modded appropriately. Don't dare suggest that software and music are very different products and cannot be produced using the same business models.
What's interesting is that, as a product of the great, evil, closed-source empire Microsoft, no-one here would ever admit to pirating Windows. Far more likely to use Linux instead. But they are happy to boast about pirating the products of the great, evil, closed-source empire RIAA. Why aren't they shunning its output the same way? Why aren't they listening to "open source" music? Could it be because the two things simply aren't comparable???
I also enter things like "f**k you spammer" into the name fields
Doesn't that negate the whole point of polluting the data with what look like valid bank accounts etc? Far better to have a completely fake name to go with the fake account. Let them waste their time attempting to use it.
I don't visit phishing sites, even though I'd love to mess with them this way. I know I have up-to-date virus and malware protection, but why risk visiting a site that you know is more than likely going to attempt to infect you?
How is this either informative or helpful? This is about as useful as telling someone who has problems with their delivery truck that they ought to get a new motorbike.
Everytime there's a story about spam on slashdot we get the same useless response; "gmail removes all my spam, use gmail." Amazingly, many people work where there is an email system that is not based on a free web provider. Amazingly, many businesses prefer things that way. Touting an external, unsecure, unsupported, advert supported, webmail system as the all-purpose solution to spam is just dumb. Stop doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
If reading OS fanboy arguments online isn't enought for you, now you can experience the towering tedium of them live on TV! Thanks BBC!
This whole schemes sounds just like a way of advert-ridden websites with zero content to pretend to be something they're not.
Are we going to end up with a web full of great looking websites that have actually been created automatically out of nothing the second you went looking for them? At least with parked domains and link farms you know immediately that's what they are.
port?
Don't you mean 'install' or 'configure'?
So if I market an MP3 player that's "technically" a hat I can design it to do whatever I want? After all, who's ever been sued over the functionality of a hat?
Unfortunately it then zips the compressed image into a self-extracting exe, so NASA's anti-virus strips it off at the mail server.
So who decides then? Remember, this is a decision after the fact. These people made no effort to reach agreement before selling their mix. What if no agreement can be reached on what's reasonable? Do they just get to keep the money?
You making a knockoff and claiming that it's the real thing is defferent from someone making a derivative work and distributing as a derivative work.
Of course it is. Most comparisons fail at some point, otherwise they wouldn't be comparisons. They'd be the same thing. But in this case the point is they're both making unlicensed use of other's work and reputation.
If your product is blatantly inferior, but people confuse it for the real thing because you tricked them, then it's not good publicity.
The point is that with music "inferior" is a matter of opinion. People have been defending these mixtapes as good publicity. What if you're one of the original artists and you think the mixtape stinks and is inferior. In your opinion the whole thing is a ripoff. Just your opinion, others may think it's great, but as the owner of the work it's your opinion that counts.
So what if these guys did licence everything as you suggest? Again the point is that the creators and owners of the work may not want their work used in this way, and may not want the money. You might disagree. You might think it makes no financial or artistic sense on their part, but it's their decision. No one should have the right to force them into it.
So lets say the original artists are happy for their work to be used this way. Unfortunately these guys have still jumped the gun. You can be happy with the end result and still annoyed they didn't ask first. What if you hadn't been happy?
Why do you think he has the right to create his own profit using other people's copyrighted work?
Let's say I decide to produce 81,000 crappy counterfeit Rolex's, sell them, and send Rolex 1 penny for every watch I sell (cos I've decided that's "reasonable"). Is that ok? Sure, I'm basing my whole business on someone else's work and reputation without their permission, but I deserve the opportunity to produce a derivative work and licence them as I see fit! And every Rolex I sell is good publicity for them, so why should they complain?!
You are being horribly naive. What you are suggesting is people paying up front for a product they haven't seen, months in advance. How many people are going to be willing to do this? Sure, it may work for directors/actors who have a solid record of producing popular movies, but what of everyone else?
The current, much derided, system works by investors gambling that a certain movie will make money. That is why they put large sums of money up. Having gambled that money they have a certain expectation that if the movie is popular then they should have the right to make a large profit on it. After all, they could have lost everything. They may well lose everything on their next movie. The profits on the successes is what keeps them going.
But do you see thousands, millions of people willing to put money up front when the end product may be total crap? And if it's an amazing success they get nothing but 2 hours enjoyment? Sorry, not going to work. They'll people who may be willing to gamble the price of a movie ticket on this, but most won't. They are fore-planning a single evening's leisure. They want to spend their money on a movie that they can see now, having read the reviews, seen the trailer.
Here's slashdot's problem. The failure of the admittedly pain-in-in-ass DRM is treated with delight, but no-one has anything to offer that would work to replace it. How are works like movies and music going to be financed if people think it's ok to just take them for free? Too many slashdotters think that it can be done by achieved in a faintly communist kind of way they'd never dare suggest as viable for any other business in free market economy society. And the rest believe it can be done by a licence-free endeavour like open source software. They simply can't fathom that movies and music are not anything like software.
Sigh. Maybe I should give up challenging people on this statement in slashdot. They just keep on repeating it, no matter that it simply isn't true.
I invite you to produce a 20 year comparison of video, record, DVD and CD prices that backs this statement up. In real terms all of these are cheaper than previously.
it's always feet and inches when buying anything in hardware stores
Neither of the above statements are true, and I suspect you know it. I wonder what you hope to prove by making them?
I only ever use imperial measurement for the following;
- body weight
- body height
- road distance
- vehicle speed
And that's only because if I used metric no-one else would follow me.
Everything else is metric, and everything is sold in metric.
What makes you think these are what Al Quaeda want? Because Bush told you?
I always thought what they wanted was the end to western involvement in Middle Eastern politics and society. But maybe that's just because I like to look beyond what people would like me to believe. The mere mention of terrorism involvement (something that is extremely unlikely in this case) is just symptomatic of current paranoia about it, something that the US Government is quite comfortable with. 50 years ago it would have been Communists. The US Government loves keeping its citizens in a state of fear.
Oh, and the mis-spelling of "Heatshield" on the picture doesn't exactly look too professional either.
You're not alone. I can't make out anything that doesn't look like Martian rock. Is everyone looking at a different picture or something? Am I blind??
Just dubious allegation with a large dollup of paranoia.
The entire idea is laughable, and it's amazing that so many people are even giving it 5 mins consideration. It's a publicity stunt. End of story. Just how far do you think people are willing to go in order to protect their "right" to rip off other people's copyrighted work?
And if illegal activity was as easy as buying your own artificial island that claims independence, do you not think that far bigger crime outfits than this bunch of bit-torrent monkeys would have tried it already?
As long as you have money, your diet is no-one's fault but your own.
Absolutely everyone hates craplets and Microsoft's concern is valid. Not that they can do anything about it.
So... as this is the case for musicians, the world must be starved of music?
Hmmm, doesn't appear to be the case. So your comparison is totally flawed. I guess music and art isn't anything like potatoes.
Are they ever! I've lost track of the number of Linux software packages I've downloaded that have a "read me" that goes into exhaustive and loving detail about the GPL, and absolutely nothing about the installation or use of the package.
This is very true. So what's the solution? What all these steps are designed to try and do is to get the user to actually stop and think about what they are doing. Unfortunately people are generally lazy (and I mean everyone) and would prefer not to, so just hit "OK". So we already know that no matter what security steps you put in, users are always eventually going to become blasé about progressing past them. Doesn't matter how many dialogs you have, doesn't matter how you word them, doesn't matter how they function. Such is the human condition that all software developers have to live and work with.
But more significantly, if the user doesn't know the appropriate password, they cannot progress pass this security. In this Vista is effectively no different from Linux. So yes, if you have admin rights all these prompts are a pain that you're going to get used to just switching your brain off and clicking through. But the only other solutions are to either not have any security steps at all, (and we all know where that leads) or to never give the user the option of over-ruling the operating system's security decisions (at which point you lose ownership of your computer). There is no third way or easy answer.
I'm going with gogole, but the possibilities are endless. (Though I'm sure someone will work out the exact figure...)
What's interesting is that, as a product of the great, evil, closed-source empire Microsoft, no-one here would ever admit to pirating Windows. Far more likely to use Linux instead. But they are happy to boast about pirating the products of the great, evil, closed-source empire RIAA. Why aren't they shunning its output the same way? Why aren't they listening to "open source" music? Could it be because the two things simply aren't comparable???
Doesn't that negate the whole point of polluting the data with what look like valid bank accounts etc? Far better to have a completely fake name to go with the fake account. Let them waste their time attempting to use it.
I don't visit phishing sites, even though I'd love to mess with them this way. I know I have up-to-date virus and malware protection, but why risk visiting a site that you know is more than likely going to attempt to infect you?
How is this either informative or helpful? This is about as useful as telling someone who has problems with their delivery truck that they ought to get a new motorbike.
Everytime there's a story about spam on slashdot we get the same useless response; "gmail removes all my spam, use gmail." Amazingly, many people work where there is an email system that is not based on a free web provider. Amazingly, many businesses prefer things that way. Touting an external, unsecure, unsupported, advert supported, webmail system as the all-purpose solution to spam is just dumb. Stop doing it.
Selling people an operating system that the majority want and use? Stealing?
Still, very brave of you to put forward the notion that Microsoft has the world's riches. Is that XP or Vista you're talking about?