I have to agree. I don't think this is any worse than the latest ploys by MCI, AT&T, etc. for getting people to change their phone companies.
They send a check addressed to you. No paperwork included. On the check it has a disclaimer in small writing that says cashing this check amounts to giving AT&T the permission to switch your long-distance phone service.
I think that's more of an illegal scam than this one...
but my question about this scam is, where were all the technology guys that developed this supposed compression technology? Isn't it kind of weird if there weren't any?
think about it, this guy got everything he ever wanted probably:
a respectable job at a startup being the spiritual leader in a high pressure situation hell, he got the WHO to give a reunion concert
and the only thing that was actually lost were sucker VC's money. Well, it serves the VC's wrong for not doing their homework. And I bet his employees were well compensated.
Well, it's not what the internet commerce business was built for, but I think the majority of the people here prospered.
Open Media, Closed Media, what the hell's the difference when someone else is paying the bills?
So CNN is closed media. CNN relies upon advertising revenue to fuel its content and stories. It's supported by "corporatism"
/. is now supposedly "open media"./. is now a publicly traded company owned by VA Linux./. derives its revenue by selling banner ads and affiliate programs. It is also supported by "corporatism".
So what does it matter if one directly functions off of user feedback and commentary, or if the user feedback and commentary is more subtle?
/. directly functions off of the users reading the site, CNN functions off of determining the content that people would like to see and trying to show as much of an unbiased opinion based on the content available in the world and tracking "readership" to determine how much time to alot to a subject and what spot to give to that content.
Open, Closed, it's all the same. Just in different ways.
many of the original developers from the Inferno project are now working for a comany called savaJe tech that is working on a product called jscream, a java kernel and os for information appliances.
As many probably know, M$ has been a noisemaker in trying to get AOL to open the IM protocols so that it can try to take over the IM world with it's Messenger service. if you want more info on the petition that's been going around about this, go to http://www.freeim.org
a few times he makes some interesting comments regarding VCD's... now, from my... um, activities, I know that most VCD's aren't created from a DVD but actually from those people that go into preview movies with a video camera and film the entire thing. You know the guys, the same ones that sell the dummied-up VHS tapes on the corner of Times Square in NYC. Sometimes you'll see someone's head infront of the camera, sometimes the camera operator will cough or sneeze, and most of the times the quality is crap.
So my question is, what the hell does this have to do with DVD's and DeCSS and 2600's posting of the DeCSS code?
Yes, there is pirating going on with movies... but most of it doesn't involve DeCSS or DVD encryption.
I'm going to stop here before I start making too many comparissons to Napster and that stupid battle also.
Btw, I'm proud to say that I was downloading the Matrix VCD, all 1.5 gigs of it, they day before it was released in the theatres, from a Hotline server with no ad banners. It's quality was good, even though it didn't have the soundtrack included (you could hear every bullet casing hit the ground)
but how about a verification # on a content library that will determine whether the current iteration of the data matches the data that currently resides with the user.
upon determining whether the # matches or not, the information that was changed will be marked as changed, and only the fields that were marked will be sent to the client.
more processing, smarter system, but less bandwidth?
"DOn't forget/. is not a public company, we don't pay to use it."
um, WRONG./. IS a public company. It was bought by Andover.net which was public, then was bought by VA Linux which is a publicly owned company. Nice try tho.
"CmdrTaco et al. have all the rights in the world to post whatever bias they want about anything."
This is also incorrect. No they don't.
1. bias could get them sued because their only protection is that they are an unbiased reporting agency that itself does not editorialize. Only its editors editorialize. 2. if I was a majority shareholder, I could put pressure to have all of them fired if they didn't post favorable stories about M$ and then have all the people that talked crap about M$ moderated down. how you like DEM apples? 3. this is no longer a bunch of guys running an underground news service from their garage. This is a public company that has to report its earnings, its page hits, server stats, ad banner revenues, etc. face it,/. is part of corporate america whether they want to admit it or not.
living in manhatten, I initially went with bell atlantic since they offered a good monthly rate and since they "owned" the phone lines. When I called up Concentric, they told me there would be close to a 2 month wait before I got the lines put in due to hassling with Bell Atlantic.
So I used Bell Atlantic for a month. 1 IP address, and the upstream sucked. So I called up Concentric and said get me on the list. 2 months later I got Concentric DSL. But only after Bell Atlantic people had to come in, between 8am and 5pm on a work day, not show up, and say they'll be there the following week. This actually happened a few times. Or once they had come in, Concentric technicians would come in, see what Bell Atlanic had done, and say that they hadn't finished the job. Basically, half-ass work all around. But the Concentric people were very kind, courteous, and answered tech-support quickly and efficiently.
I envision a future where there are more banner ads than content, more stupid flash movies than written paragraphs, the moment you turn on your computer you're being tracked by companies like doubleclick, and a day when if you actually want to learn something, you'll pick up a book or a newspaper instead of logging on.
They should have taken the whole idea one step further, and just like central air, they should have had a centrally located wireless web router.
Bring something like the airport, already configured with the broadband line (whichever line you support), and have a bunch of relays throughout your home (depending on how big your house is and where structural items will interfere with the signal).
Now THAT would be an Internet-Ready house. It's simply not good enough if you're still restricted to attaching your computer to the wall. The computer wants to be free...
Just imagine, barbecuing outside while surfing the internet, beer in hand, on a beautiful Memorial Day weekend.
Re:It's an economic thing; you wouldn't understand
on
At The Crossroads
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· Score: 2
This is the most flawed logic I have seen in ages.
Royalties are not based on the extraction $ vs. copying $. Royalties are so that a company can allow use of the technology that they spent time and money researching and developing or in the instance of music, time and money spent for a band to produce an album and put their intellectual property (the actual music) into a publishable format. The ability to extract royalties depends on the item being copied being cheaper to develop from scratch to mimick the original rather than it being cheaper to copy in the sense of copying files.
When you copy an mp3 and pass it around, you aren't recreating the music from scratch, you're duplicating the file.
Now go out to K-mart and try to buy yourself some real logic.
Re:the copying vs copyright clause
on
At The Crossroads
·
· Score: 2
it's at this point that you must put faith in the court system.
if you're able to explain why your patent is unique and is your intellectual property, there shouldn't be a problem.
as I've mentioned, how many of these bullshit patents, once challenged, have actually stood up in court or in practice?
"Copying is no longer difficult. As each generation has developed better technologies, the ability of copyright holders to protect their intellectual property has eroded to the point where copyright either has to be re-defined or abandoned. "
I think this is going just a bit too far. As the technology progresses, so does the ability to copy. When you had people carving books in stone, it took just as many hours to copy as it did to create the original... but then again, you could always have just done a rubbing to make a copy. When the printing press was invented, no longer did some monk have to write out the bible word by word in shorthand... you could crank out hundreds of them in a week. The ability to copy has always been hand in hand with the ability to create. Now that it takes 30 seconds to print a cd, it takes just as long to make a copy of it.
This doesn't mean that the IP is worth less. And it doesn't mean the the owner of the IP should just give up protecting their property. And it doesn't mean that the whole system is flawed. It means that if you believe that your property is being taken away from you, you have to fight harder to protect it.
yes, there are bogus patents out there, and protective patents (patenting just to make sure somebody else doesn't and use it against you). But if you've noticed, the bogus patents aren't standing up in court due to the judge's becoming a bit more enlightened when it comes to technology. Thusly, in filing the patent, you need to be prepared to protect your property. If not, sell it to someone that is prepared to do this.
But nothing's really changed in this area, it's just gotten a bit more over-reactive, over-protective, and overly-hyped.
If it's your property, and you feel strongly in that being your property, then you need to protect it. There is nothing really wrong with the system, it has enough checks and balances built in that nobody really gets away with pulling a fast one. I could provide tons of examples of this if required. The system is intact, so stop hyping how bad it needs to be destroyed.
if the computer is given out by the company, is it still considered the company's property?
if it is considered the company's privacy, are they allowed to monitor communications to and from that machine as they are allowed to on the office computer?
hmmmm
while this is great in the US...
on
Universal Access
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· Score: 2
what about all of the other countries, both in the americas and outside this hemisphere? Intel and Ford have employees in other countries, specifically our NAFTA partners. Yet, if you read the releases and such, they don't extend these offers to offices outside of the US.
Sorry to say, but I'd think it's more important to extend this offer outside of the US realm into countries where there is much more of a dividing line between the technological "haves" and the "have nots".
While commending Ford, Intel, and others for their moves, we should also encourage these huge industry leaders to extend their offers outside the US where a large percentage of their employees, and lower-paid employees, work and reside.
but then I feel Metallica does have a legitemate beef with Napster since it's quite obvious that Napster was not making an effort to enforce its T&C by shutting down users trading copyrighted mp3's. In not enforcing its ban on pirated material, Napster was assisting in the crime of pirating. They DO have the necessary information to track down a user and ban them since they collect the personal info when you register.
Based on this, Napster should have complied with the lawyers instead of fighting them tooth and nail. If they had complied, then Napster would have established itself as a genuine article that wasn't JUST created to pirate mp3's, but to trade mp3's that were allowed to be traded.
oh, I'm not disagreeing. I think both groups should pursue legal action against those pirating their wares (not warez). However, I know it's not the general feeling in/. that ANY of the users have done anything wrong.
Metallica, and all those other bands, should be able to collect or fine those that have been illegally trading or repackaging their IP.
so correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this be justifying that Metallica identify the Napster users that are pirating their mp3's and bring them to court?
"See, they go after the poster, the one that commited the crime, slap him with a small fine and embrass the hell out of him so he doesn't do it again, penthouse gets from cash from it and everyone is happy. "
So Metallica should go after all hundred thousand users and slap them with a fine...
Lets face it, Napster was created to trade mp3's. Trading mp3's that you don't own, under the current law, is illegal.
"Metallica could learn a lot about the way penthouse is handling this."
Yes, they should go and sue all hundred thousand users that Metallica found trading their mp3's.
God bless the USA and the lawyers that infest us all.
there is a reasonable use for mp3's. that is to rip songs from cd's that you own, and be able to listen to them on your computer or on your own devices. that's acceptable.
I can understand why people are getting upset on the side of the people selling cd's, the artists, etc. because by users pirating (and that's exactly what is happening with programs such as napster) they are losing revenue.
now, everyone in/. is saying that every user should have the right to trade these files on the open, but while this is great for the user, nobody has given an agenda that would appease the opposition to this plan. So instead of yelling about how wrong it is for artists and recording companies to ban napster, propose some brilliant solution so that everyone can be happy.
the music on a cd is still the intellectual property or copyrighted material of the artist and the recording company. it is illegal, in all senses of the word, to reproduce this material in a way and method intended for users who did not pay for the material.
yes, we should all stand up and say that the actions everyone is taking right now is wrong, but instead of flaming your local congressman, why not propose a solution?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess "corporatism" and "nationalism" could share similar traits in the stripping away of humanity in the sciences.
I have to agree. I don't think this is any worse than the latest ploys by MCI, AT&T, etc. for getting people to change their phone companies.
They send a check addressed to you. No paperwork included. On the check it has a disclaimer in small writing that says cashing this check amounts to giving AT&T the permission to switch your long-distance phone service.
I think that's more of an illegal scam than this one...
but my question about this scam is, where were all the technology guys that developed this supposed compression technology? Isn't it kind of weird if there weren't any?
think about it, this guy got everything he ever wanted probably:
a respectable job at a startup
being the spiritual leader in a high pressure situation
hell, he got the WHO to give a reunion concert
and the only thing that was actually lost were sucker VC's money. Well, it serves the VC's wrong for not doing their homework. And I bet his employees were well compensated.
Well, it's not what the internet commerce business was built for, but I think the majority of the people here prospered.
but the government isn't the one waging the war on copyright infringement...
it's the corporations waging the war, and it's in their best interest both to continue with copyrights but also to continue trying to enforce them.
no, copyright law will not disappear. give up.
Open Media, Closed Media, what the hell's the difference when someone else is paying the bills?
/. is now a publicly traded company owned by VA Linux. /. derives its revenue by selling banner ads and affiliate programs. It is also supported by "corporatism".
So CNN is closed media. CNN relies upon advertising revenue to fuel its content and stories. It's supported by "corporatism"
/. is now supposedly "open media".
So what does it matter if one directly functions off of user feedback and commentary, or if the user feedback and commentary is more subtle?
/. directly functions off of the users reading the site, CNN functions off of determining the content that people would like to see and trying to show as much of an unbiased opinion based on the content available in the world and tracking "readership" to determine how much time to alot to a subject and what spot to give to that content.
Open, Closed, it's all the same. Just in different ways.
sorry, forgot to turn on html... savaJe
many of the original developers from the Inferno project are now working for a comany called savaJe tech that is working on a product called jscream, a java kernel and os for information appliances.
As many probably know, M$ has been a noisemaker in trying to get AOL to open the IM protocols so that it can try to take over the IM world with it's Messenger service. if you want more info on the petition that's been going around about this, go to http://www.freeim.org
a few times he makes some interesting comments regarding VCD's... now, from my... um, activities, I know that most VCD's aren't created from a DVD but actually from those people that go into preview movies with a video camera and film the entire thing. You know the guys, the same ones that sell the dummied-up VHS tapes on the corner of Times Square in NYC. Sometimes you'll see someone's head infront of the camera, sometimes the camera operator will cough or sneeze, and most of the times the quality is crap.
So my question is, what the hell does this have to do with DVD's and DeCSS and 2600's posting of the DeCSS code?
Yes, there is pirating going on with movies... but most of it doesn't involve DeCSS or DVD encryption.
I'm going to stop here before I start making too many comparissons to Napster and that stupid battle also.
Btw, I'm proud to say that I was downloading the Matrix VCD, all 1.5 gigs of it, they day before it was released in the theatres, from a Hotline server with no ad banners. It's quality was good, even though it didn't have the soundtrack included (you could hear every bullet casing hit the ground)
but how about a verification # on a content library that will determine whether the current iteration of the data matches the data that currently resides with the user.
upon determining whether the # matches or not, the information that was changed will be marked as changed, and only the fields that were marked will be sent to the client.
more processing, smarter system, but less bandwidth?
"DOn't forget /. is not a public company, we don't pay to use it."
/. IS a public company. It was bought by Andover.net which was public, then was bought by VA Linux which is a publicly owned company. Nice try tho.
/. is part of corporate america whether they want to admit it or not.
um, WRONG.
"CmdrTaco et al. have all the rights in the world to post whatever bias they want about anything."
This is also incorrect. No they don't.
1. bias could get them sued because their only protection is that they are an unbiased reporting agency that itself does not editorialize. Only its editors editorialize.
2. if I was a majority shareholder, I could put pressure to have all of them fired if they didn't post favorable stories about M$ and then have all the people that talked crap about M$ moderated down. how you like DEM apples?
3. this is no longer a bunch of guys running an underground news service from their garage. This is a public company that has to report its earnings, its page hits, server stats, ad banner revenues, etc. face it,
living in manhatten, I initially went with bell atlantic since they offered a good monthly rate and since they "owned" the phone lines. When I called up Concentric, they told me there would be close to a 2 month wait before I got the lines put in due to hassling with Bell Atlantic.
So I used Bell Atlantic for a month. 1 IP address, and the upstream sucked. So I called up Concentric and said get me on the list. 2 months later I got Concentric DSL. But only after Bell Atlantic people had to come in, between 8am and 5pm on a work day, not show up, and say they'll be there the following week. This actually happened a few times. Or once they had come in, Concentric technicians would come in, see what Bell Atlanic had done, and say that they hadn't finished the job. Basically, half-ass work all around. But the Concentric people were very kind, courteous, and answered tech-support quickly and efficiently.
I couldn't say that with Bell Atlantic.
I envision a future where there are more banner ads than content, more stupid flash movies than written paragraphs, the moment you turn on your computer you're being tracked by companies like doubleclick, and a day when if you actually want to learn something, you'll pick up a book or a newspaper instead of logging on.
scary? I think we're just about there...
They should have taken the whole idea one step further, and just like central air, they should have had a centrally located wireless web router.
Bring something like the airport, already configured with the broadband line (whichever line you support), and have a bunch of relays throughout your home (depending on how big your house is and where structural items will interfere with the signal).
Now THAT would be an Internet-Ready house. It's simply not good enough if you're still restricted to attaching your computer to the wall. The computer wants to be free...
Just imagine, barbecuing outside while surfing the internet, beer in hand, on a beautiful Memorial Day weekend.
This is the most flawed logic I have seen in ages.
Royalties are not based on the extraction $ vs. copying $. Royalties are so that a company can allow use of the technology that they spent time and money researching and developing or in the instance of music, time and money spent for a band to produce an album and put their intellectual property (the actual music) into a publishable format. The ability to extract royalties depends on the item being copied being cheaper to develop from scratch to mimick the original rather than it being cheaper to copy in the sense of copying files.
When you copy an mp3 and pass it around, you aren't recreating the music from scratch, you're duplicating the file.
Now go out to K-mart and try to buy yourself some real logic.
it's at this point that you must put faith in the court system.
if you're able to explain why your patent is unique and is your intellectual property, there shouldn't be a problem.
as I've mentioned, how many of these bullshit patents, once challenged, have actually stood up in court or in practice?
"Copying is no longer difficult. As each generation has developed better technologies, the ability of copyright holders to protect their intellectual property has eroded to the point where copyright either has to be re-defined or abandoned. "
I think this is going just a bit too far. As the technology progresses, so does the ability to copy. When you had people carving books in stone, it took just as many hours to copy as it did to create the original... but then again, you could always have just done a rubbing to make a copy. When the printing press was invented, no longer did some monk have to write out the bible word by word in shorthand... you could crank out hundreds of them in a week. The ability to copy has always been hand in hand with the ability to create. Now that it takes 30 seconds to print a cd, it takes just as long to make a copy of it.
This doesn't mean that the IP is worth less. And it doesn't mean the the owner of the IP should just give up protecting their property. And it doesn't mean that the whole system is flawed. It means that if you believe that your property is being taken away from you, you have to fight harder to protect it.
yes, there are bogus patents out there, and protective patents (patenting just to make sure somebody else doesn't and use it against you). But if you've noticed, the bogus patents aren't standing up in court due to the judge's becoming a bit more enlightened when it comes to technology. Thusly, in filing the patent, you need to be prepared to protect your property. If not, sell it to someone that is prepared to do this.
But nothing's really changed in this area, it's just gotten a bit more over-reactive, over-protective, and overly-hyped.
If it's your property, and you feel strongly in that being your property, then you need to protect it. There is nothing really wrong with the system, it has enough checks and balances built in that nobody really gets away with pulling a fast one. I could provide tons of examples of this if required. The system is intact, so stop hyping how bad it needs to be destroyed.
if the computer is given out by the company, is it still considered the company's property?
if it is considered the company's privacy, are they allowed to monitor communications to and from that machine as they are allowed to on the office computer?
hmmmm
what about all of the other countries, both in the americas and outside this hemisphere? Intel and Ford have employees in other countries, specifically our NAFTA partners. Yet, if you read the releases and such, they don't extend these offers to offices outside of the US.
Sorry to say, but I'd think it's more important to extend this offer outside of the US realm into countries where there is much more of a dividing line between the technological "haves" and the "have nots".
While commending Ford, Intel, and others for their moves, we should also encourage these huge industry leaders to extend their offers outside the US where a large percentage of their employees, and lower-paid employees, work and reside.
hey, don't forget that the g4's will also be going multi-processor soon...
so a 2 Ghz G4... yummy
alright then, we're agreeing.
but then I feel Metallica does have a legitemate beef with Napster since it's quite obvious that Napster was not making an effort to enforce its T&C by shutting down users trading copyrighted mp3's. In not enforcing its ban on pirated material, Napster was assisting in the crime of pirating. They DO have the necessary information to track down a user and ban them since they collect the personal info when you register.
Based on this, Napster should have complied with the lawyers instead of fighting them tooth and nail. If they had complied, then Napster would have established itself as a genuine article that wasn't JUST created to pirate mp3's, but to trade mp3's that were allowed to be traded.
oh, I'm not disagreeing. I think both groups should pursue legal action against those pirating their wares (not warez). However, I know it's not the general feeling in /. that ANY of the users have done anything wrong.
Metallica, and all those other bands, should be able to collect or fine those that have been illegally trading or repackaging their IP.
so correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this be justifying that Metallica identify the Napster users that are pirating their mp3's and bring them to court?
"See, they go after the poster, the one that commited the crime, slap him with a small fine and embrass the hell out of him so he doesn't do it again, penthouse gets from cash from it and everyone is happy. "
So Metallica should go after all hundred thousand users and slap them with a fine...
Lets face it, Napster was created to trade mp3's. Trading mp3's that you don't own, under the current law, is illegal.
"Metallica could learn a lot about the way penthouse is handling this."
Yes, they should go and sue all hundred thousand users that Metallica found trading their mp3's.
God bless the USA and the lawyers that infest us all.
there is a reasonable use for mp3's. that is to rip songs from cd's that you own, and be able to listen to them on your computer or on your own devices. that's acceptable.
/. is saying that every user should have the right to trade these files on the open, but while this is great for the user, nobody has given an agenda that would appease the opposition to this plan. So instead of yelling about how wrong it is for artists and recording companies to ban napster, propose some brilliant solution so that everyone can be happy.
I can understand why people are getting upset on the side of the people selling cd's, the artists, etc. because by users pirating (and that's exactly what is happening with programs such as napster) they are losing revenue.
now, everyone in
the music on a cd is still the intellectual property or copyrighted material of the artist and the recording company. it is illegal, in all senses of the word, to reproduce this material in a way and method intended for users who did not pay for the material.
yes, we should all stand up and say that the actions everyone is taking right now is wrong, but instead of flaming your local congressman, why not propose a solution?
hehe, OOPS.
(my apologies to all of the WASP's I just insulted)