A ford crown victoria is not very similiar to a chevy corvette or a dodge ram or a honda civic. There are large, substandtial differences.
Those large differences only matter if they were a factor in the purchase decision. If they were not a factor, then yes a crown vic is just a car, which is the whole point of brand marketing - to convince people to buy the brand not the actual product.
Really? And how did Toyota manage to drive up the price of my Ford Crown Victoria through brand marketing?
The correct question would be, "And how did Ford manage to drive up the price of your Ford Crown Vic through brand marketing?"
And the answer is if you purchased the Crown Vic in part or in whole because of the Ford brand or the Crown Vic brand rather than wholey on technical and pricing merits than they did so through marketing.
Targeted ads are nothing close to what we are talking about here: Charging two different prices to two different customers for the exact same product based on individual identity.
More than they would like to admit it, to most people a car is a car is a car, just like a pair of jeans is a pair of jeans regardless of who made it. Your requirement of "exact same product" is tempered by the fact that brand differentiation is almost always about accentuating the superflous differences of essentially identical products.
Given that history of love for proprietary software companies, it is hard to imagine that there would not be sufficient campaign donor resistence to any consideration of free software.
Not a problem. Before I even read the rest of your post it occurred to me that I just form a co-op with about 50 other people of diverse tastes (including their teenaged star-obsessed kids), and we buy music for each other based on who gets the best deal.
The end result of such a co-op will be to equalize price paid across all genres that the co-op purchases. Thus, people who are willing to "pay" all the overhead costs of joining and maintaining said co-op will get to keep pricing at current levels, while the normal people who just want to buy some music once in a while get gouged. So no customers see a benefit, but the copyright cartel succeeds in extracting more money without providing a corresponding increase in value.
Pricing tweaked to the customer has not been accomplished in any other industry, what makes your prof so sure they could pull it off?
Apparently you are unfamiliar with brand-marketing. It isn't necessarily database-driven (although you will be exposed to advertising for different brands depending on what databases you are in) per-person pricing, but it the end results is broadly the same.
But I somehow wonder if power plants in the midwest would really just close up and start buying their power from the west coast.
Of course not.
Instead, they will make a campaign contribution to their local congressthief and get a law passed making interstate transportation of solar-originated power a federal felony.
The law will be written in total ignorance of the fact that petrol-power is solar-originated too, thus having the unintended consquence of shutting down most of the interstate electrictiy market.
you posit this course of action because you know it can't succeed.
On the contrary. I posit this course of action precisely because I believe it CAN suceed. Just as one primary business model incorporating Free software effectively turns "property" into a service, so too can the production of entertainment "property" be turned into a service. The modern day equivalent of an artist and his patron, except the internet allows us to share the load an be "partial patrons" to hundreds or even thousands of artists each.
Microsoft is one of the companies pushing extremely hard for software patents in Europe. So it's more a case of them finally noticing an opportunity, and wanting to join the party...
That is true, Marshall Phelps is the man responsible for "productizing" IBM's patent portfolio to the tune of $2B revenue per year. He now works for Microsoft and heads up their IP division where he is trying to do even more for Billy.
I have no desire to buy a converter unless it's really cheap.
By the time the switchover is enforced, it will be really cheap, I predict less than $25. Right now, today (actually starting about a whole year ago) you can buy a 30" HDTV from wal-mart for $600. That includes two tuners and not only will it tune over the air HDTV it will also tune in digital tv over cable in the clear (not encrypted).
A couple more years and HDTV sets will be at parity with analog and the converter boxes for older TVs will be commonplace and dirt cheap.
It is all a function of volume, the cost difference between digital and analog sets is in the noise when you are building ten million units.
wtf are you talking about. search the text of the US Constitution and you will not find the phrase "fair use".
Amendment X The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
There is no, repeat, NO hope of galvanizing a significant enough fraction of a Congressman's demographic to make a difference in an election when it comes to issues like intellectual property.
The only thing you can do is move out of the country or just continue to civilly disobey.
Or, put your money where your mouth is and start a new business based on a model that sells new content but does not rely on obsolete copyright laws. If you are profitable, others will follow -- for example first came redhat (well, not really, but as far as wall street is concerned) and then HP, IBM, Novell and a whole host of smaller companies followed. We need a redhat of music and film.
The DMCA says NOTHING about reverse engineering, forward engineering, hacking, cracking, baking, remote viewing, or doing anything else to systems that have nothing to do with copy prevention. DMCA is not the Don't Mess with Computers Act, it's only about copyright issues, primarily copy prevention.
> Please note that a consumer file does not necessarily exist for you with any one of the three companies.
But it certainly will AFTER you have made a request to see their records, if any, on you.
There is something inherently broken about having to give up your personal information to the very companies who abuse it in order to find out if they are abusing it.
As a minimum, I think the FACT Act should be modified to prevent the companies from recording or otherwise using any of the information you provide when requesting your own records. As a better solution, I think there needs to be an independent third party whose sole purpose is to give consumers their own files from all the tracking agencies and which has very strongly enforced data-privacy policies.
Although you could do that with tripwire, that really isn't what was designed for.
Regardless, it should work just fine to do the same thing as MS's ghostbuster utility:
1) Boot possibly infected system, run tripwire, save hashes. 2) Boot live-linux cd, run tripwire, compare with hashes from #1
Really, it is only the slightest of variations on the way tripwire, et al were envisioned to operate. The kind of thing would be "obvious to one skilled in the art" and ought not to be patentable.
To take it one step further, if you had a second computer on the network you could probably get away without having to reboot the suspect computer and still be fairly confident in any negative detections. Use the network block device driver to give the second machine read-only access to the disk device with the filesystems of interest on the suspect machine.
You'd have to avoid fscking, but since the files of interest (and thus their meta-data, like directory entries and inodes) are suppossed to be read-only, you ought to be able to successfully run tripwire on them (especially if you force a sync on the suspect machine first). The chance of a rootkit on the suspect system knowing how to tweak direct device access rather than filesystem access to hide itself is going to be small (similar to, but not quite as strong of a halting problem as knowing how to manipulate the writing of the hash file).
In a pinch, you could probably get away with the doing the same where the suspect system and the second system are the same, just do a loopback mount on the network block device. It would be less reliable, but the odds of a rootkit knowing how to handle the loopback case are probably only slightly higher than it knowing how to handle direct disk access in the first place.
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
The problem with "technical" or trade schools is the lack of breadth.
The point of college is usually not about learning a trade, it is about exposure to a wide variety of ideas and knowledge with the intent of preparing the student to be a good citizen - with a sense of history and cultural understanding which should provide a solid point of reference for doing citizen-things like voting, donating to charities, sitting on a jury, etc. The kind of things that Harry Truman was talking about when he said, "Those who do not read and understand history are doomed to repeat it."
All that stuff you can learn on your own, and many do, but the vast majority of people won't -- that's why they go to college in the first place.
Why does a a state need a Assistant Director for Digital Information and System Design for their library system?
Maybe because libraries are not about books, they are about information. Any modern library takes digital information very seriously - the stereotype of librarian as an old lady with her gray hair in a bun running around susshing people has nothing to at all to do with a modern library.
Librarians as a group tend to have at least two things in common with slashdotters:
1) Strong privacy rights advocates. They have been at the forefront of fighting the patriot act, going so far as to modify their computerized loan systems to delete all traces of a user's borrowing history once the book/media has been returned.
2) Strong advocates of the "information wants to be free" meme. This doesn't just mean lending books for free, but also making sure that their libraries have purchased online subscriptions to all kinds of non-free content so that patrons of the library can access it for free.
Librarians are on the bleeding edge of some of the coolest developments on the Internet, anyone who thinks otherwise just hasn't been paying attention to the important role that modern librarians play in development of the net.
Right of first sale applies regardless of if you are a person or a library.
Perhaps you are confusing educational licenses for 'public display' which allow schools to show the DVD to a group of students in one showing. Or perhaps you are confusing "rental pricing" which applied to VHS tapes where the studio would price the tape at $100+ so that only rental places (many who got some sort of reimbursement from the studios) could afford them.
I was working at Wal-mart when they switched to a strict only exchange for same movie policy.
Did they also tell the employees it was a federal law that they could not refund your money for an opened dvd package? I've heard that exact same line from three different walmarts in two different states. (All cases I was returning a DVD where the package said one thing and the disc did not match what the package said, and I was pretty sure that all of the copies they had would be the same.)
DVD's I haven't watched in over 6 months get donated straight to my local public library. Then LOTS of people can watch them for free.
Two points:
1) You'll find that your library probably sells a lot of your donations instead of putting them into circulation.
2) Assuming your goal is to let lots of people watch them for free, rather than get a tax deduction -- You don't have to give them to the library, just bring them to work and let people borrow them from you.
Ranting about how eeeeevil the RIAA is simply plays right into the hands of the labels behind it all.
I think most of us here understand that, for all intents and purposes, the RIAA is the record labels. At the very least, they are a short-hand way to refer to the labels and most of what is wrong with them.
So you post up all your source code from your client's projects? Or you would assist one of their employees in taking that software code?
My client's source code is their business, including what I created for them as a work for hire. If they wish to "post up" all of their source, it is no skin off my back because I've already been fully compensated for my part in creating it.
You are being silly if you think that by acknowledging that my clients generally, but not always, treat their source code as traditional property does anything to discount my point, because it is oblique to my argument. Restated - if you want to treat your ideas like property, then keep them under lock and key and don't share them with anyone - just like you would with real property. But if you do share your ideas with another you've effectively lost control over those the ideas - just like how you lose control over your car once you've sold it to another person.
My clients who keep their source code under lock and key are doing exactly that, they are treating it just like any real property because they know that if they share the source code with someone outside of their organization, they will lose control over it - just like they would lose control over their office buildings if they sold them off too.
Your sort of broken in your understanding of IP, why it's identical to real P, and my definition of natural monopoly isn't just mine, but that of Allan Greenspan and the rest of the econ department at the University of Chicago.
Referring to your own post, you seem to think that part of being a "natural monopoly" is...having to innovate to keep their market lead. Exactly what definition of natural monopoly does that come from? The actual definition of a natural monopoly is one where maximum efficiency is acheived through monopoly status be it because of economies of scale or other characteristics of the market and not through competition. There is nothing about microsoft's market dominace which fits that description -- especially, if as you say, they have to "innvoate to keep their lead," with a natural monopoly there is no lead because there are no competitors to lead.
Even the movement towards open source in some areas is an acknowledgement of the necessity of the software's creator's control in determining it's use (Ie - anyone can use it if they abide by GPL, etc.)
You just keep refusing to accept that the GPL is a hack of copyright don't you?
You don't see governments or corporations (read: people who make the world go round) making it their policy to run cracked versions of Photoshop.
Well, aren't you the quite the denizen of a fantasy world, "the global piracy rate increased three percentage points, from 37% to 40%, and the total dollar losses due to software piracy decreased from $11.75 billion to $10.97 billion worldwide. BSA estimates that most losses come from businesses and organizations copying software on office computers." -- Meet the BSA:Software Piracy and the Organization that Combats It. Don't even try to argue that 40% does not equal a policy, remember The test of an idea is it's effect.
All that notwithstanding, you've clearly reduced your position to arguing about minutiae while acquiesing to the larger points.
Slashdot Mirror
A ford crown victoria is not very similiar to a chevy corvette or a dodge ram or a honda civic. There are large, substandtial differences.
Those large differences only matter if they were a factor in the purchase decision. If they were not a factor, then yes a crown vic is just a car, which is the whole point of brand marketing - to convince people to buy the brand not the actual product.
Really? And how did Toyota manage to drive up the price of my Ford Crown Victoria through brand marketing?
The correct question would be, "And how did Ford manage to drive up the price of your Ford Crown Vic through brand marketing?"
And the answer is if you purchased the Crown Vic in part or in whole because of the Ford brand or the Crown Vic brand rather than wholey on technical and pricing merits than they did so through marketing.
Targeted ads are nothing close to what we are talking about here: Charging two different prices to two different customers for the exact same product based on individual identity.
More than they would like to admit it, to most people a car is a car is a car, just like a pair of jeans is a pair of jeans regardless of who made it. Your requirement of "exact same product" is tempered by the fact that brand differentiation is almost always about accentuating the superflous differences of essentially identical products.
Wasn't VA the first state to pass the CBITA?
Given that history of love for proprietary software companies, it is hard to imagine that there would not be sufficient campaign donor resistence to any consideration of free software.
Not a problem. Before I even read the rest of your post it occurred to me that I just form a co-op with about 50 other people of diverse tastes (including their teenaged star-obsessed kids), and we buy music for each other based on who gets the best deal.
The end result of such a co-op will be to equalize price paid across all genres that the co-op purchases. Thus, people who are willing to "pay" all the overhead costs of joining and maintaining said co-op will get to keep pricing at current levels, while the normal people who just want to buy some music once in a while get gouged. So no customers see a benefit, but the copyright cartel succeeds in extracting more money without providing a corresponding increase in value.
Pricing tweaked to the customer has not been accomplished in any other industry, what makes your prof so sure they could pull it off?
Apparently you are unfamiliar with brand-marketing. It isn't necessarily database-driven (although you will be exposed to advertising for different brands depending on what databases you are in) per-person pricing, but it the end results is broadly the same.
But I somehow wonder if power plants in the midwest would really just close up and start buying their power from the west coast.
Of course not.
Instead, they will make a campaign contribution to their local congressthief and get a law passed making interstate transportation of solar-originated power a federal felony.
The law will be written in total ignorance of the fact that petrol-power is solar-originated too, thus having the unintended consquence of shutting down most of the interstate electrictiy market.
you posit this course of action because you know it can't succeed.
On the contrary. I posit this course of action precisely because I believe it CAN suceed. Just as one primary business model incorporating Free software effectively turns "property" into a service, so too can the production of entertainment "property" be turned into a service. The modern day equivalent of an artist and his patron, except the internet allows us to share the load an be "partial patrons" to hundreds or even thousands of artists each.
Microsoft is one of the companies pushing extremely hard for software patents in Europe. So it's more a case of them finally noticing an opportunity, and wanting to join the party...
That is true, Marshall Phelps is the man responsible for "productizing" IBM's patent portfolio to the tune of $2B revenue per year. He now works for Microsoft and heads up their IP division where he is trying to do even more for Billy.
Leave your projection TV on the same news channel, with all those mostly-static images, all the time and you'll have the exact same burn-in effects.
I have no desire to buy a converter unless it's really cheap.
By the time the switchover is enforced, it will be really cheap, I predict less than $25. Right now, today (actually starting about a whole year ago) you can buy a 30" HDTV from wal-mart for $600. That includes two tuners and not only will it tune over the air HDTV it will also tune in digital tv over cable in the clear (not encrypted).
A couple more years and HDTV sets will be at parity with analog and the converter boxes for older TVs will be commonplace and dirt cheap.
It is all a function of volume, the cost difference between digital and analog sets is in the noise when you are building ten million units.
wtf are you talking about. search the text of the US Constitution and you will not find the phrase "fair use".
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
There is no, repeat, NO hope of galvanizing a significant enough fraction of a Congressman's demographic to make a difference in an election when it comes to issues like intellectual property.
The only thing you can do is move out of the country or just continue to civilly disobey.
Or, put your money where your mouth is and start a new business based on a model that sells new content but does not rely on obsolete copyright laws. If you are profitable, others will follow -- for example first came redhat (well, not really, but as far as wall street is concerned) and then HP, IBM, Novell and a whole host of smaller companies followed. We need a redhat of music and film.
the DMCA is all about copyright, and it was Lexmark's (necessary) argument that their copyright was infringed upon by SCC when they reverse engineered the chip. The court, however, sided with the view that access controls are not typically eligible for copyright protection.
Doh!
The DMCA says NOTHING about reverse engineering, forward engineering, hacking, cracking, baking, remote viewing, or doing anything else to systems that have nothing to do with copy prevention. DMCA is not the Don't Mess with Computers Act, it's only about copyright issues, primarily copy prevention.
For all of you about to say: "Well, that's against the DMCA...", true,
Uh, FALSE. The DMCA is bad stuff, but there is no copy prevention system involved here much less circumvented. Thus, the DMCA does not apply at all.
> Please note that a consumer file does not necessarily exist for you with any one of the three companies.
But it certainly will AFTER you have made a request to see their records, if any, on you.
There is something inherently broken about having to give up your personal information to the very companies who abuse it in order to find out if they are abusing it.
As a minimum, I think the FACT Act should be modified to prevent the companies from recording or otherwise using any of the information you provide when requesting your own records. As a better solution, I think there needs to be an independent third party whose sole purpose is to give consumers their own files from all the tracking agencies and which has very strongly enforced data-privacy policies.
Although you could do that with tripwire, that really isn't what was designed for.
Regardless, it should work just fine to do the same thing as MS's ghostbuster utility:
1) Boot possibly infected system, run tripwire, save hashes.
2) Boot live-linux cd, run tripwire, compare with hashes from #1
Really, it is only the slightest of variations on the way tripwire, et al were envisioned to operate. The kind of thing would be "obvious to one skilled in the art" and ought not to be patentable.
To take it one step further, if you had a second computer on the network you could probably get away without having to reboot the suspect computer and still be fairly confident in any negative detections. Use the network block device driver to give the second machine read-only access to the disk device with the filesystems of interest on the suspect machine.
You'd have to avoid fscking, but since the files of interest (and thus their meta-data, like directory entries and inodes) are suppossed to be read-only, you ought to be able to successfully run tripwire on them (especially if you force a sync on the suspect machine first). The chance of a rootkit on the suspect system knowing how to tweak direct device access rather than filesystem access to hide itself is going to be small (similar to, but not quite as strong of a halting problem as knowing how to manipulate the writing of the hash file).
In a pinch, you could probably get away with the doing the same where the suspect system and the second system are the same, just do a loopback mount on the network block device. It would be less reliable, but the odds of a rootkit knowing how to handle the loopback case are probably only slightly higher than it knowing how to handle direct disk access in the first place.
That's funny, the word "personal" is never once referenced by the Fair Use Clause:
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.Apart from that, you call him a liar and yet provide no evidence.
If it's good enough for Rush, then it's more than good enough for you!
The problem with "technical" or trade schools is the lack of breadth.
The point of college is usually not about learning a trade, it is about exposure to a wide variety of ideas and knowledge with the intent of preparing the student to be a good citizen - with a sense of history and cultural understanding which should provide a solid point of reference for doing citizen-things like voting, donating to charities, sitting on a jury, etc. The kind of things that Harry Truman was talking about when he said, "Those who do not read and understand history are doomed to repeat it."
All that stuff you can learn on your own, and many do, but the vast majority of people won't -- that's why they go to college in the first place.
Why does a a state need a Assistant Director for Digital Information and System Design for their library system?
Maybe because libraries are not about books, they are about information. Any modern library takes digital information very seriously - the stereotype of librarian as an old lady with her gray hair in a bun running around susshing people has nothing to at all to do with a modern library.
Librarians as a group tend to have at least two things in common with slashdotters:
1) Strong privacy rights advocates. They have been at the forefront of fighting the patriot act, going so far as to modify their computerized loan systems to delete all traces of a user's borrowing history once the book/media has been returned.
2) Strong advocates of the "information wants to be free" meme. This doesn't just mean lending books for free, but also making sure that their libraries have purchased online subscriptions to all kinds of non-free content so that patrons of the library can access it for free.
Librarians are on the bleeding edge of some of the coolest developments on the Internet, anyone who thinks otherwise just hasn't been paying attention to the important role that modern librarians play in development of the net.
You are 100% wrong.
Right of first sale applies regardless of if you are a person or a library.
Perhaps you are confusing educational licenses for 'public display' which allow schools to show the DVD to a group of students in one showing. Or perhaps you are confusing "rental pricing" which applied to VHS tapes where the studio would price the tape at $100+ so that only rental places (many who got some sort of reimbursement from the studios) could afford them.
I was working at Wal-mart when they switched to a strict only exchange for same movie policy.
Did they also tell the employees it was a federal law that they could not refund your money for an opened dvd package? I've heard that exact same line from three different walmarts in two different states. (All cases I was returning a DVD where the package said one thing and the disc did not match what the package said, and I was pretty sure that all of the copies they had would be the same.)
DVD's I haven't watched in over 6 months get donated straight to my local public library. Then LOTS of people can watch them for free.
Two points:
1) You'll find that your library probably sells a lot of your donations instead of putting them into circulation.
2) Assuming your goal is to let lots of people watch them for free, rather than get a tax deduction -- You don't have to give them to the library, just bring them to work and let people borrow them from you.
Ranting about how eeeeevil the RIAA is simply plays right into the hands of the labels behind it all.
I think most of us here understand that, for all intents and purposes, the RIAA is the record labels. At the very least, they are a short-hand way to refer to the labels and most of what is wrong with them.
So you post up all your source code from your client's projects? Or you would assist one of their employees in taking that software code?
...having to innovate to keep their market lead. Exactly what definition of natural monopoly does that come from? The actual definition of a natural monopoly is one where maximum efficiency is acheived through monopoly status be it because of economies of scale or other characteristics of the market and not through competition. There is nothing about microsoft's market dominace which fits that description -- especially, if as you say, they have to "innvoate to keep their lead," with a natural monopoly there is no lead because there are no competitors to lead.
My client's source code is their business, including what I created for them as a work for hire. If they wish to "post up" all of their source, it is no skin off my back because I've already been fully compensated for my part in creating it.
You are being silly if you think that by acknowledging that my clients generally, but not always, treat their source code as traditional property does anything to discount my point, because it is oblique to my argument. Restated - if you want to treat your ideas like property, then keep them under lock and key and don't share them with anyone - just like you would with real property. But if you do share your ideas with another you've effectively lost control over those the ideas - just like how you lose control over your car once you've sold it to another person.
My clients who keep their source code under lock and key are doing exactly that, they are treating it just like any real property because they know that if they share the source code with someone outside of their organization, they will lose control over it - just like they would lose control over their office buildings if they sold them off too.
Your sort of broken in your understanding of IP, why it's identical to real P, and my definition of natural monopoly isn't just mine, but that of Allan Greenspan and the rest of the econ department at the University of Chicago.
Referring to your own post, you seem to think that part of being a "natural monopoly" is
Even the movement towards open source in some areas is an acknowledgement of the necessity of the software's creator's control in determining it's use (Ie - anyone can use it if they abide by GPL, etc.)
You just keep refusing to accept that the GPL is a hack of copyright don't you?
You don't see governments or corporations (read: people who make the world go round) making it their policy to run cracked versions of Photoshop.
Well, aren't you the quite the denizen of a fantasy world, "the global piracy rate increased three percentage points, from 37% to 40%, and the total dollar losses due to software piracy decreased from $11.75 billion to $10.97 billion worldwide. BSA estimates that most losses come from businesses and organizations copying software on office computers." -- Meet the BSA:Software Piracy and the Organization that Combats It. Don't even try to argue that 40% does not equal a policy, remember The test of an idea is it's effect.
All that notwithstanding, you've clearly reduced your position to arguing about minutiae while acquiesing to the larger points.