I must surely be one of the lone dissenting voices with this idea, but - as a long-time iPad owner - I often found myself wishing Apple (or anyone else) also offered a hand-held touch-screen model that was twice as large, where reading books and magazines didn't feel so constricted and one could actually enjoy this wonderful portable medium for the experience it should be able to deliver around the household or elsewhere.
Probably won't happen until we have paper-thin computing devices.... but I can't fail to observe that this whole digital revolution keeps manufacturers bringing a lot of their smaller/cheaper/lighter 'innovations' at the expense of a certain comfort and quality standards we all sort of were taking for granted, and which had to do with basic ergonomics and functionality rather than cramming features into something that sacrificed the very essence of the user's experience with the device in question.
Funny you came up with the same exact figure that most of these shady Russian sites sold music for.... (AllOfMP3.com, and so many more like Nuloop and such)
I'd say that $0.20 per track is a pretty reasonable price for digital goods, problem is you're starting to run into a conflict with the amount of revenue the law allocates to the composition's publishers and the songwriters they represent, which in the US is a statutory mechanical royalty rate of around $0.09 which did not seem outrageous when songs were selling for $1 or more, but at $0.20 for the whole thing, this has the potential to become a huge problem.
Anyway, my main argument is that the Russian sites must have researched the tipping point that would make people 'click and buy', which for music seems to me remarkably accurate at around $0.15 to $0.25 per song. Of course I wouldn't expect any record label to agree to this, this is a fight that will go on until those on the side of copyright owners who must change their expectations are given no other choice but to grudgingly take it.
Speaking of mechanical royalties, the white elephant in the room that almost everyone is continuing to ignore is that US terrestrial radio is -unlike any other radio networks in the entire world- still exempt from paying royalties to copyright owners for the use of the sound recording due to a long-standing exemption granted to them by Congress in 1933 to build out their FM networks. (they're still building them as we speak) Only publishers get paid, but nothing goes to those who funded and own the sound recording. [yes, publishing and ownership of master recordings are two separate, distinct areas that most people who aren't familiar with the setup tend to bundle as one thing]
To add insult to injury, and because of reciprocity agreements with other countries, this means that the owners of US copyright cannot collect income from radio play from stations in other countries since those foreign artists are not getting paid this income by US radio. That money goes to 'black box', famously shared and redistributed among society members in whatever country this happened
This exemption is therefore costing the owners of sound recordings an double whammy in lost income. This obviously made sense when one hand was washing the other, and radio play helped certain acts sell into the millions. So it was overlooked as a mere promotional expense. But now that records are not selling, the fact that radio is using all of this music for free -by only paying the publishers- is sticking out like a sore thumb.
I'd say for anybody who's mad, that'd be a much more logical place to start looking for some easy and very large additional income streams, rather than blabber on uselessly flapping their wings about online piracy. But it means butting heads with the NAB's tough lobbyists and ruffling a lot of feathers in places we usually don't have much access to, starting with addresses on K Street, District of Columbia.
Also have one of those Dell E6520 Windows 7 Pro 64-bit / Ubuntu dual boot - absolutely awesome machine with a full keypad, customizable media tray where you can put a second hard drive, a very sharp display and tons of expansion ports.
When those Dell boxes work, they're pretty sweet and very reasonably priced. Fingers crossed, mine never had any troubles...
Except that the article refers to 24-bit linear PCM audio files that are encoded at a sampling rate of 192 kHz (equivalent to 9216 kB/sec compared to the MP3's 192 kB/sec)
Hertz versus kB/sec... totally different units.
For what it's worth, most audiophile sites like HDTracks sell high-resolution files that are 24-bit / 96 kHz. (4608 kB/sec)
Very few people (if any) besides fanatical audio buffs would deal with anything above that. DSD (SACD) is different enough that it's hard to compare to this.
TBH, I was likewise a bit shocked by this as well, and it saddened me because I felt that this could have been a real manifesto for these new times we live in, a dignified piece by one of our respected elders and that unbeatably articulated his position in a cogent and measured manner.
The same exact sentiment could have been expressed, but without the 'strong qualifiers' that somehow made their way onto this, as they will invariably become the focal point of many dismissing it as 'extremism'; and it arguably would have made a much stronger impact without calling anyone any names.
Editing is still an option, just send out a press release saying that the wrong version was uploaded to GitHub, or whatever else ranting writers use for version control nowadays.
In the spirit of open-source, a professional writer should take a stab at re-writing this and make it palatable for mass consumption. The ideas are all there. They just need to be expressed in a manner less likely to alienate those who will read it, so that the deeper meaning sinks in, rather than stopping most at the sensationalism of calling the entire media industry "thieves and liars" which will lead them to ignore it outright.
There definitely has to be a way to convey the same exact thoughts, but with this being implied rather than stated. Let the readers illustrate the meaning on their own.
Required viewing before enacting such punishment-based copyright legislation should be the movie 'Caddyshack'... so that they can get a stark reminder that the game of 'whack-a-mole' usually has no winners.
Somehow watching Bill Murray's epic fail in his attempts at getting those groundhogs should be enough for them to understand that this is a pointless battle that will never, ever be won.
Well, it probably won't happen not the least because the copyright holder would demand payment for letting them watch it!
The next video would be one of Gabe Newell discussing the success Steam has had in making users pay for reasonably-priced content with a convenient platform and easy-to-use interface.
I generally agree with the view that we are going down a slippery slope when it comes to individual liberties being subverted to fit the model of special interest groups like the copyright cartel. A couple of things I thought about.
-1) It's worth remembering that Hollywood became what it was when the young movie industry felt stifled and encumbered by Thomas Edison's legal challenges asking everyone to pay license fees to use his inventions on the East Coast, so they decided to move West. (sounds familiar?...) People and companies will move again if there is no breathing room left in the US.
-2) Between China and India there are over 2.5 billion people on the planet to whom this makes no difference whatsoever, as for all intents and purposes, copyright enforcement is non-existent. The market they create is too big to ignore, and general-purpose computing boxes that are fully open and customizable will always be around because of them.
It's very simple. Just calmly tell them you want to opt out. By now they are used to the idea that a small percentage of us will refuse, and they'll just go through with their manual search without much of a fuss. While you are being searched, it's usually pretty easy to mention in passing to that TSA agent that beyond the unknown potential cumulative damage to frequent flyers like myself who would be made to pass through this devices fifty to sixty times a year, they themselves are all possibly working in an unsafe environment, around devices which have been rushed to market without proper long-term testing and whose effects are in truth at best poorly understood; therefore those who remain close to them for long periods of time may be candidates to develop some future problems from this, themselves being - of course - very much included. Let that sink in...
I would expect these units to be removed from all but the most sensitive locations in the not-too-distant future, and become reserved for people who already are a likely security risk, rather than for them to remain in use with the general public. All it'll take is one workplace hazard lawsuit by a TSA screening staff's lawyer looking for the glory of a precedent-setting decision with their names attached to it.
I just don't know how that's going to work out. For example I am getting a lot of free subscriptions to industry-specific magazines that used to be print, now digital-only. While I occasionally read an issue here and there, it certainly is far less than it used to be with the dead-tree edition.
While I understand that they have to go with the times, it seems to me that going digital-only has its own set of challenges, and that very few publishers have really bridged the gap that will make their digital publication attractive, with features that make it easy to search, cross-reference and with the types of niceties that would make someone want to pay for it, like a bonus yearly archive or something of that sort.
Honestly I am not sure that I will be renewing under those circumstances, just because I find that - for better or for worse - I tend to read less of those digital editions that I would if the same magazine was still in physical form.
There are many areas of our lives that this digital revolution has been totally restructuring, but while the cost-cutting and efficiency measures do make a great deal of sense when looking at it from the standpoint of a publication's survival, the way the customers relate to this new product is sometimes profoundly less of a pleasurable experience.
Another prime example of that is the tactile difference between holding a full LP sleeve in your hand, and looking at the.jpg image of it in iTunes. Yes, the information is there, but arguably it is much less of the immersive experience that it may have previously been; not that I am against digital, just pointing out that in the cost-cutting frenzy most haven't figured out how to replace the very experience provided by what they had with something that has the same impact (beyond the mere information contained in the article or just the song in the case of an LP). So for example in LJ's case, if they are in fact thinking that this is a good move, they should come up with innovative indexing features that allow the reader to have access to the information and browse articles a bit better than clunky.pdf files.
All of this cost-saving is great, but I sort of deplore that what replaces it doesn't nearly have the same level of convenience and friendliness yet. The challenge is therefore for digital publishers to come up with new killer features and ways to organize the information they are presenting in a way that leverages the platform they are on rather than using it as a crutch, and which will ultimately motivate their readership to subscribe. Make it a compelling upgrade, not a letdown!
Using apps like Little Snitch, it's trivial to block the server requests (which happen about once a day) that the OS is making when it tries to 'phone home'.
They actually come in groups of three, including iphone-wu.apple.com, location.apple.com or something of that ilk.
This is obviously much more of an issue on any iOS device, where the user has little to no control of what's taking place behind the fancy window dressing, and for which no such firewall is made available for purchase through Apple's app store that I know of.
Anyway, for a computer that's staying in one place, a case could be made for the lack of need to know it is staying there all the time. Butt off my activities unless you give me the opt-in choice to be the one that decides whether to provide your company with this information or not. In fact, it could be argued that for home computers the only use for this sort of stuff is targeted advertising somewhere down the road, once users have accepted the idea that being tracked is normal.
Another potential crime which is not often spoken about was that in doing so, he also inadvertently managed to prove that the then-governor of Alaska was using her private email account for conducting state business, something against which there are very strict compliance rules, and that according to many was a clear breach of protocol on her part. These emails are supposed to be archived and later visible to anyone who wishes to see how state business is conducted, but cannot if she used a private account. In a similar vein, the Republicans in power during the Bush years suffered an unfortunate and accidental 'total erasure' all their emails from the White House servers including any backups there may have been for a period of well over a year, which only the more cynical among us would link to the possibility that this may just have been done so that no incriminating evidence could ever be found with regards to what was really discussed when the war in Iraq was started under false pretenses, and other trivial, inconsequential matters. "Real Americans" would far more readily accept the idea that the government losing all of this data and never keeping a single backup of it was a totally unexpected thing, and that's that.
Yes, I think that what this young man did is reprehensible, but so are the other points above, none of which ever got pursued (to my knowledge). That stinks of a real and pretty obvious double-standard of accountability. Sweeping them under the carpet by employing some other distraction was the only magic trick required...
No wonder they hate ***leaks so much. The sort of action which might just begrudgingly force them to come clean about their own practices and start having to play by the rules themselves. For that reason, expect stiffer sentences for similar crimes in the future, to prevent anyone from ever seeing all of this dirty laundry being aired.
Inbefore the obligatory quote from Terry Gilliam's prophetic movie masterpiece Brazil with the mistake between 'Buttle' and 'Tuttle', and the ensuing pandemonium.
Might this be a rare case of cooler heads having prevailed? One would certainly hope so, but that's probably not the real reason.
Regardless of what caused this backtracking, with the economy in the toilet, deterioration conditions in Afghanistan and a few other really urgent considerations like the upcoming mid-term elections, could the Obama administration have decided to pick battles to fight that will actually matter?
It would be interesting to revisit this thread and all of its comments in 10 years' time to compare notes on what really happened.
By then it may feel so anachronistic and quaintly out of place that the reader might well wonder why no lawmaking body could foresee the consequences of infinite copying, the end of artificial scarcity coming, and all of the consequences thereof.
No matter what SCOTUS ends up with as an opinion, the realities on the ground will be so different by then that one can wonder how much this really matters at all. (sorry for the cheerleader)
Maybe the real deal will be something along the lines of what Charles Stross wrote in his most excellent book Accelerando ?
The carcasses of the record business purchased by Russian organized crime and turned into a for-profit extortion racket, exacting demands for payment on things that were created by people who died fifty years ago...
I've resisted from posting and getting dragged into this poorly worded question (how can you prove what isn't?)
Not speaking about the four major music labels, but there appear to be some misconceptions about the role of record labels among many/. readers, who may have had little or no direct interaction and dealings with indie labels, which needless to say have historically been responsible for breaking out a lot of very innovative talent. Besides the old distribution and manufacturing duties, the primary functions of such a label are to help with the artist's image, promotion, publicity, airplay, guide their career with a choice of songs, producer, and many other things that most professional musicians do not have time, resources or the inclination to be doing when they are busy making music and performing it. Cue in the obligatory contrarian "I did it all myself" to negate this statement, but most successful creative people would prefer focusing on what they are good at instead of dealing with merchandising, filling out aggregator licensing agreements or dealing with graphic artists. That there are a few who are an exception to this doesn't make it any different for the majority of music professionals out there, whether artists, composers, etc... who really WANT someone by their side to partner with them in making their release a successful one, rather than merely just adding yet another entry into the dustbins of recorded music.
But on the artistic side of things, there is no question that today, many artists are not able to spend the time necessary for crafting songs with the same kind of quality and loving care they once did. Again, those who think that having a copy of Garage Band or Cubase along with two microphones and a cheap Mackie board at home is enough to make fantastic music are in my opinion mostly deluded on thinking that they can come close or even beat teams of well-honed and dedicated professionals at the top of their craft, whether those be recording engineers, assistants, drum techs, roadies, as well as arrangers (who even remembers those?), or the dedicated studios and the maintenance technicians that provided the environment needed to comfortably record one-of-a-kind performance without any technical glitches, and so on.
What has happened is that the entire ecology that supported record-making has imploded, and while a few of those at the top of their trade still find work elsewhere or for wealthy artists, most of the people that were associated with recording studios and making music professionally have moved on to other related activities like audio for broadcasting, gaming, advertising or movies. The budgets just aren't there for the most part anymore, to put together full-fledged recording sessions with great professional players.
Yes, as many like to immediately point out it is possible to do most of this stuff very inexpensively on one's laptop... yet having access to the gear does not ensure that those who operate it have a modicum of taste, experience and knowledge to turn these simple tools into something that will make tantalizing, mind-blowing recordings, and that they will have the expertise to coax that special magically inspired performance out of an artist, and so on. Of course, it is possible to do everything by yourself, but the chances of the results of this being on the same level as Stevie Wonder and Prince are so infinitesimally small that one could easily wonder why it should even be mentioned at all, except as a straw man argument.
To deny the combined expertise, know-how and vast irreplaceable contributions to record-making that all of these side helpers have traditionally brought to the table has recently been a popular point of view harbored by those who feel they know better, which they are welcome to in a sense, because the sheer mediocrity, overall uninspired and depressingly bland results of such one-man-band recording sessions are right now cluttering more people's in-boxes that one co
This is more of a question than anything, as I find this to be a fascinating topic, but have little experience in managing corporate networks.
At what point does it make sense to have your users having to run all that they do on a virtual machine, which if anything gets compromised can just be rolled back without too much fuss?
Also, does it make sense to move a lot of what people do to some sort of hosted app infrastructure (private cloud for example) where the lockdown can occur in an easier and more granular manner as all of the apps are managed by IT only, or is this just a pipe dream that's at least another 10 years away?
Still, in the end it all has to do with your users not practicing safe browsing, double-clicking on attachments that they did not expect, and the likes.
I do like fuzzyfuzzyfungus, magamiako1 and Z34107's suggestions very much, seems fairly practical yet transparent to the users. (wish I had mod points for you guys, but not today!)
But regardless, I guess in some sense any of these solutions seem like they are going to be quite costly and labor-intensive, from a business owner's perspective should those long-term costs not be taken into account when comparing them to deploying a network of machines running Linux or OS-X (and Windows apps inside a VM on those)? Does this all have to do with many corporate apps only working in a Windows network, and with legacy code not being able to be migrated away from a Microsoft-centric platform?
Sorry for sounding naive, but this is not my area of expertise...
Found something on Boing-Boing's comments which might make us take this with a grain of salt:
Here (with his permission) is a comment from Stan Taffel, who is a media preservationist and posted this to the Association of Moving Image Archivists listserv (AMIA-L). According to Stan, this controversy has been orchestrated by a fan club person who sells copies of the shows. Stan also tells me he's just been speaking with a company who is trying to secure a license to release the shows. Again, I'm just reporting what others have said, and have no personal stake or opinion other than that these shows should be made available to those who fervently want to see them.
Stan's comment:
"I have spoken to my source at CBS and am happy to report that the "hype" is just what it is; all hype.
CBS is ready and willing to sub license any property (as they did with Studio One etc.) for a fee.
Laura Leff, the "President" of the Jack Benny Fan Club she began a few years ago, is very good at
generating P R and has done a very good job at starting a Facebook petition against CBS and getting
articles and giving interviews pleading for the release of 25 Benny shows. She says that CBS has "locked"
these films away and will not be preserved. This is not the case.
The 25 Benny shows as well as the full run of the series is stored in state of the art facilities. The film elements
are safe and in good shape. CBS is also aware of the fact that Ms. Leff has a library of many existing shows
and charges for making copies; dupes of both copywritten and PD shows are offered from her website.
While I applaud her tenacity and love for Jack Benny (she organized a fine website and a convention a few
years ago), it seems that the truth has been diluted and the actual state of the predicament has been reported
in error. She is great at "self promoting". What it boils down to is this: She is a huge fan who just wants to
have copies of the shows and has gone this route to try and obtain them. CBS doesn't know how she was
"supervising" a transfer of one of the color shows as that is not her job. True, it was an NBC special and
maybe she was invited to see a conversion but "supervising"? She is friends with Joan Benny (Jack's
daughter) so perhaps that's how she was invited to see the inner workings. She has gained attention to her
fan club and her plight, however misrepresented it is.
CBS is not the enemy here; they will sub contract The Jack Benny out. As these are supposedly P D shows
(and that's not definite) there are other sources to locate them and once they're out, anyone can dupe them
and sell them for no fee. CBS isn't the only source for 16mm kinescopes. They even told her to try to find
them through other avenues, fully aware she wants to add them to her "collection".
Should these films be available - of course. However, business is business and CBS pays for the storage
of these and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of elements and that's not cheap. To give copies to her
for her archive is not so simple even if she pays for her copies. Maybe some company will come forward
and these shows will be seen. Time will tell."
Without wanting to add too much to the anti-copyright vituperations, has anyone considered how difficult it must truly be for a lawyer sensing a great case such as this one, with hundreds of billable hours (regardless of the outcome) to refrain themselves from telling their clients that serving papers to one of the planet's largest corporate behemoths is the only option, when in reality they pretty much know that they are guaranteed to lose the case but will still manage to milk the estate for plenty of money by going that route, and that this will be the closest they'll ever come to being 'cool with the in crowd' ?
How Darwinian! In that sense,they are taking the role of parasite, which as we all know is necessary for the ecosystem to function properly.
Looks like Robert Heinlein wrote this, and it does feel fairly applicable to this situation:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped or turned back, for their private benefit."
Hope no one else posted this.... apologies if this is a duplicate post.
Obviously, what he failed to foresee is that corporations could in fact have the government change common law, by employing the services of enough lobbyists.
While I would tend to agree with the opinions already expressed that:
by now people have become so used to MP3 'sizzle' artifacts that they think it is part of the music, and have started preferring it to the cleaner original sounds.
it takes someone working in the studio or with an extremely keen ear listening on reference-grade monitoring to detect the artifacts in the compressed versions
I find it really disturbing that no one ever brings up the fact that these results will vary widely depending on the size of the listening space.
While my own experience is that at home (Genelec 1031A, Shure EC530 in-ear monitors, etc..) or in a small studio it is somewhat difficult to pick those
differences out, as soon as the same test is conducted in a larger acoustic space, they jump out to the point that it is obscene and hard to ignore.
As I have already said many times in previous posts here, we can sit here and argue all day long about which looks better on our laptop's LCD monitor, a 65 Kbytes.jpg
or a 82 Meg.tiff file of the same photo. Yet when we take these same two files and print them at 5' x 12' billboard size, the jpg file will appear so grossly grainy and pixelated,
while the.tiff file will maintain a much more coherent presentation of what the original picture looked like.
In other words, large-scale sound systems tend to act as magnifiers for these minute artifacts and differences which lossy audio compression introduces, and there is no
question in my mind that when the same tests are performed in an auditorium or a reasonably anechoic concert hall (in open air even better because no reflections) it
does immediately become quite apparent how much the lossy encoding process actually messes with the information.
It is not merely a function of frequency response, distortion and other lab specs, rather a more fundamental one of the poorly-understood characteristics that give music its
inner dynamic, the 'punch' in the low frequencies, the cleanliness in the top end and tails of reverbs, as well as many times the resultant waveforms of many combined
harmonic sounds in the midrange, probably a bit more so on acoutic instruments, but not always necessarily so.
I would welcome similar tests done on a reasonable sound reinforcement rig, like a typical line array system with 50,000 watts of power in a room which can accommodate
1,500 people, a pretty standard setup for concerts and DJ gigs. (keeping in mind that in such systems there is a digital processor in the chain through which the sound will pass)
There are much deeper implications to this, such as the fact that vinyl and open-reel while flawed to some extent still offer the human ear a much smoother experience
in acoustic spaces of that size, as CD and DVD players do a very poor job of reconstituting the the 'slices' of digital audio after D/A conversion, yes great master clocking will
make the signal sound more bearable, but there is a continuity between the waveforms which analog seems to do much better than most digital systems ever can at the sampling
rates they are currently working at, and which I am sad to report haven't really changed a lot since 1981 when the CD spec was developed, SACD being a step in the right direction.
That these older analog formats are not even included in the tests means pretty much the equivalent of the one-eyed man being crowned the leader of the kingdom of the blind.
Which is why to this day, many of the top professional DJs insist on playing from analog sources such as vinyl, which while they have certain inconvenient artifacts of their own, do offer
something else that the human ear craves for, and is really keenly attuned to: continuity of sound, and the smoothness of a natural waveform. This effect is clearly demonstrated by making
an high-quality open-reel tape copy of a CD, and playing the two side-to-s
I am struggling to understand the deep disconnect at work here...
These people in government have advisors, technical experts and all sorts of qualified people to tell them how worthless this will be.
It boggles the imagination to not even contemplate the number of false positives this will generate, besides encryption, it has been pointed out
many times that all this may do is drive more people to hack their neighbors' wireless networks, using Kismet or other trivial password sniffers.
If up to 10% of all PCs worldwide can be hacked into botnets, it doesn't take a genius to see doing similar things from other people's machines
and let them take the fall for it....
The only explanation I can come up with is that either:
This is just a public rehearsal for a forthcoming Monty Python skit... but a really bad one at that.
Or maybe someone in government volunteering a really Kafka-esque script for Brazil 2, a sequel to one of the already
widely-acknowledged cinematic references in truly depressing thoughts, to first be tested on the public for 'authenticity' on how to
best persecute innocent people with maximum effect?
That such a situation amply demonstrates the obstinate nature of that famous British stiff upper-lip in the face of common
sense, but also cunningly facilitates implementing surveillance and further counter-measures against 'criminalization'. (see above)
Regardless of the answer to these silly questions, one can only wonder what the endgame will be. Enforcement or not, the major content holders
cannot keep going the way they have been, and with ever-dwindling revenue, (especially in the music divisions) will eventually have their assets
ultimately disposed of at the auction block for pennies on the dollar to people like Google, who will love nothing better than to practically give
it away for free, in trying to lure customers to purchase other things, rather than to keep suing them for not buying physical goods in formats
that were once popular during the previous century, and still demanding to charge the same price for it without the old expenses.
And what will this grand adventure have accomplished? There is a name for that special moment in the hunt, when the game is barely walking,
bleeding profusely, surrounded by a pack of growling dogs, but still trying to gore one of them on their way out....In French "La Curée"
That's pretty much what it feels like.... Really!
Scorched Earth Policy..... This too will come to pass.
In all likelihood, the monetary damages recently awarded by juries in both Jammie Thomas and Tenenbaum trial far, far dwarf the amounts that the record labels
actually spent and advanced to the artists and producers when originally acquiring the rights to the master recordings of those very songs that were being shared.
It would be interesting to compare the average damage paid for stealing something tangible (how many times the value of the object?) versus these obscene amounts for
something of which there is an infinite supply, and the copying of which truly caused very little harm (and which most times the labels themselves bought so cheaply).
Maybe the defense's tactic is to force the issue of disproportionate damage to the crime committed, hoping that one of these cases will ultimately need to go to the Supreme Court ??
Historically, such excesses have never been good press for those who while they may morally be 'right', overstate the harm caused, and therefore the size of the punishment meted out.
Lest we forget, similar punitive practices were the ultimate catalysts for some famous past tea parties in the very same town's harbor where this trial is taking place today.... how fitting!!
Slashdot Mirror
I must surely be one of the lone dissenting voices with this idea, but - as a long-time iPad owner - I often found myself wishing Apple (or anyone else) also offered a hand-held touch-screen model that was twice as large, where reading books and magazines didn't feel so constricted and one could actually enjoy this wonderful portable medium for the experience it should be able to deliver around the household or elsewhere.
Probably won't happen until we have paper-thin computing devices.... but I can't fail to observe that this whole digital revolution keeps manufacturers bringing a lot of their smaller/cheaper/lighter 'innovations' at the expense of a certain comfort and quality standards we all sort of were taking for granted, and which had to do with basic ergonomics and functionality rather than cramming features into something that sacrificed the very essence of the user's experience with the device in question.
[/rant_off]
Funny you came up with the same exact figure that most of these shady Russian sites sold music for.... (AllOfMP3.com, and so many more like Nuloop and such)
I'd say that $0.20 per track is a pretty reasonable price for digital goods, problem is you're starting to run into a conflict with the amount of revenue the law allocates to the composition's publishers and the songwriters they represent, which in the US is a statutory mechanical royalty rate of around $0.09 which did not seem outrageous when songs were selling for $1 or more, but at $0.20 for the whole thing, this has the potential to become a huge problem.
Anyway, my main argument is that the Russian sites must have researched the tipping point that would make people 'click and buy', which for music seems to me remarkably accurate at around $0.15 to $0.25 per song. Of course I wouldn't expect any record label to agree to this, this is a fight that will go on until those on the side of copyright owners who must change their expectations are given no other choice but to grudgingly take it.
Speaking of mechanical royalties, the white elephant in the room that almost everyone is continuing to ignore is that US terrestrial radio is -unlike any other radio networks in the entire world- still exempt from paying royalties to copyright owners for the use of the sound recording due to a long-standing exemption granted to them by Congress in 1933 to build out their FM networks. (they're still building them as we speak) Only publishers get paid, but nothing goes to those who funded and own the sound recording. [yes, publishing and ownership of master recordings are two separate, distinct areas that most people who aren't familiar with the setup tend to bundle as one thing]
To add insult to injury, and because of reciprocity agreements with other countries, this means that the owners of US copyright cannot collect income from radio play from stations in other countries since those foreign artists are not getting paid this income by US radio. That money goes to 'black box', famously shared and redistributed among society members in whatever country this happened
This exemption is therefore costing the owners of sound recordings an double whammy in lost income. This obviously made sense when one hand was washing the other, and radio play helped certain acts sell into the millions. So it was overlooked as a mere promotional expense. But now that records are not selling, the fact that radio is using all of this music for free -by only paying the publishers- is sticking out like a sore thumb.
I'd say for anybody who's mad, that'd be a much more logical place to start looking for some easy and very large additional income streams, rather than blabber on uselessly flapping their wings about online piracy. But it means butting heads with the NAB's tough lobbyists and ruffling a lot of feathers in places we usually don't have much access to, starting with addresses on K Street, District of Columbia.
Also have one of those Dell E6520 Windows 7 Pro 64-bit / Ubuntu dual boot - absolutely awesome machine with a full keypad, customizable media tray where you can put a second hard drive, a very sharp display and tons of expansion ports.
When those Dell boxes work, they're pretty sweet and very reasonably priced. Fingers crossed, mine never had any troubles...
Wishing I had mod points for you... thanks for making my day!!
Except that the article refers to 24-bit linear PCM audio files that are encoded at a sampling rate of 192 kHz (equivalent to 9216 kB/sec compared to the MP3's 192 kB/sec)
Hertz versus kB/sec... totally different units.
For what it's worth, most audiophile sites like HDTracks sell high-resolution files that are 24-bit / 96 kHz. (4608 kB/sec)
Very few people (if any) besides fanatical audio buffs would deal with anything above that. DSD (SACD) is different enough that it's hard to compare to this.
TBH, I was likewise a bit shocked by this as well, and it saddened me because I felt that this could have been a real manifesto for these new times we live in, a dignified piece by one of our respected elders and that unbeatably articulated his position in a cogent and measured manner.
The same exact sentiment could have been expressed, but without the 'strong qualifiers' that somehow made their way onto this, as they will invariably become the focal point of many dismissing it as 'extremism'; and it arguably would have made a much stronger impact without calling anyone any names.
Editing is still an option, just send out a press release saying that the wrong version was uploaded to GitHub, or whatever else ranting writers use for version control nowadays.
In the spirit of open-source, a professional writer should take a stab at re-writing this and make it palatable for mass consumption. The ideas are all there. They just need to be expressed in a manner less likely to alienate those who will read it, so that the deeper meaning sinks in, rather than stopping most at the sensationalism of calling the entire media industry "thieves and liars" which will lead them to ignore it outright.
There definitely has to be a way to convey the same exact thoughts, but with this being implied rather than stated. Let the readers illustrate the meaning on their own.
Our lives: nothing but a work in progress...
Required viewing before enacting such punishment-based copyright legislation should be the movie 'Caddyshack'... so that they can get a stark reminder that the game of 'whack-a-mole' usually has no winners.
Somehow watching Bill Murray's epic fail in his attempts at getting those groundhogs should be enough for them to understand that this is a pointless battle that will never, ever be won.
Well, it probably won't happen not the least because the copyright holder would demand payment for letting them watch it!
The next video would be one of Gabe Newell discussing the success Steam has had in making users pay for reasonably-priced content with a convenient platform and easy-to-use interface.
[/wishful_thinking]
I generally agree with the view that we are going down a slippery slope when it comes to individual liberties being subverted to fit the model of special interest groups like the copyright cartel. A couple of things I thought about.
-1) It's worth remembering that Hollywood became what it was when the young movie industry felt stifled and encumbered by Thomas Edison's legal challenges asking everyone to pay license fees to use his inventions on the East Coast, so they decided to move West. (sounds familiar?...) People and companies will move again if there is no breathing room left in the US.
-2) Between China and India there are over 2.5 billion people on the planet to whom this makes no difference whatsoever, as for all intents and purposes, copyright enforcement is non-existent. The market they create is too big to ignore, and general-purpose computing boxes that are fully open and customizable will always be around because of them.
It's very simple. Just calmly tell them you want to opt out. By now they are used to the idea that a small percentage of us will refuse, and they'll just go through with their manual search without much of a fuss. While you are being searched, it's usually pretty easy to mention in passing to that TSA agent that beyond the unknown potential cumulative damage to frequent flyers like myself who would be made to pass through this devices fifty to sixty times a year, they themselves are all possibly working in an unsafe environment, around devices which have been rushed to market without proper long-term testing and whose effects are in truth at best poorly understood; therefore those who remain close to them for long periods of time may be candidates to develop some future problems from this, themselves being - of course - very much included. Let that sink in...
I would expect these units to be removed from all but the most sensitive locations in the not-too-distant future, and become reserved for people who already are a likely security risk, rather than for them to remain in use with the general public. All it'll take is one workplace hazard lawsuit by a TSA screening staff's lawyer looking for the glory of a precedent-setting decision with their names attached to it.
I just don't know how that's going to work out. For example I am getting a lot of free subscriptions to industry-specific magazines that used to be print, now digital-only. While I occasionally read an issue here and there, it certainly is far less than it used to be with the dead-tree edition.
.jpg image of it in iTunes. Yes, the information is there, but arguably it is much less of the immersive experience that it may have previously been; not that I am against digital, just pointing out that in the cost-cutting frenzy most haven't figured out how to replace the very experience provided by what they had with something that has the same impact (beyond the mere information contained in the article or just the song in the case of an LP). So for example in LJ's case, if they are in fact thinking that this is a good move, they should come up with innovative indexing features that allow the reader to have access to the information and browse articles a bit better than clunky .pdf files.
While I understand that they have to go with the times, it seems to me that going digital-only has its own set of challenges, and that very few publishers have really bridged the gap that will make their digital publication attractive, with features that make it easy to search, cross-reference and with the types of niceties that would make someone want to pay for it, like a bonus yearly archive or something of that sort.
Honestly I am not sure that I will be renewing under those circumstances, just because I find that - for better or for worse - I tend to read less of those digital editions that I would if the same magazine was still in physical form.
There are many areas of our lives that this digital revolution has been totally restructuring, but while the cost-cutting and efficiency measures do make a great deal of sense when looking at it from the standpoint of a publication's survival, the way the customers relate to this new product is sometimes profoundly less of a pleasurable experience.
Another prime example of that is the tactile difference between holding a full LP sleeve in your hand, and looking at the
All of this cost-saving is great, but I sort of deplore that what replaces it doesn't nearly have the same level of convenience and friendliness yet. The challenge is therefore for digital publishers to come up with new killer features and ways to organize the information they are presenting in a way that leverages the platform they are on rather than using it as a crutch, and which will ultimately motivate their readership to subscribe. Make it a compelling upgrade, not a letdown!
Using apps like Little Snitch, it's trivial to block the server requests (which happen about once a day) that the OS is making when it tries to 'phone home'.
They actually come in groups of three, including iphone-wu.apple.com, location.apple.com or something of that ilk.
This is obviously much more of an issue on any iOS device, where the user has little to no control of what's taking place behind the fancy window dressing, and for which no such firewall is made available for purchase through Apple's app store that I know of.
Anyway, for a computer that's staying in one place, a case could be made for the lack of need to know it is staying there all the time. Butt off my activities unless you give me the opt-in choice to be the one that decides whether to provide your company with this information or not. In fact, it could be argued that for home computers the only use for this sort of stuff is targeted advertising somewhere down the road, once users have accepted the idea that being tracked is normal.
Another potential crime which is not often spoken about was that in doing so, he also inadvertently managed to prove that the then-governor of Alaska was using her private email account for conducting state business, something against which there are very strict compliance rules, and that according to many was a clear breach of protocol on her part. These emails are supposed to be archived and later visible to anyone who wishes to see how state business is conducted, but cannot if she used a private account. In a similar vein, the Republicans in power during the Bush years suffered an unfortunate and accidental 'total erasure' all their emails from the White House servers including any backups there may have been for a period of well over a year, which only the more cynical among us would link to the possibility that this may just have been done so that no incriminating evidence could ever be found with regards to what was really discussed when the war in Iraq was started under false pretenses, and other trivial, inconsequential matters. "Real Americans" would far more readily accept the idea that the government losing all of this data and never keeping a single backup of it was a totally unexpected thing, and that's that.
Yes, I think that what this young man did is reprehensible, but so are the other points above, none of which ever got pursued (to my knowledge). That stinks of a real and pretty obvious double-standard of accountability. Sweeping them under the carpet by employing some other distraction was the only magic trick required...
No wonder they hate ***leaks so much. The sort of action which might just begrudgingly force them to come clean about their own practices and start having to play by the rules themselves. For that reason, expect stiffer sentences for similar crimes in the future, to prevent anyone from ever seeing all of this dirty laundry being aired.
Inbefore the obligatory quote from Terry Gilliam's prophetic movie masterpiece Brazil with the mistake between 'Buttle' and 'Tuttle', and the ensuing pandemonium.
Might this be a rare case of cooler heads having prevailed? One would certainly hope so, but that's probably not the real reason.
Regardless of what caused this backtracking, with the economy in the toilet, deterioration conditions in Afghanistan and a few other really urgent considerations like the upcoming mid-term elections, could the Obama administration have decided to pick battles to fight that will actually matter?
It would be interesting to revisit this thread and all of its comments in 10 years' time to compare notes on what really happened.
By then it may feel so anachronistic and quaintly out of place that the reader might well wonder why no lawmaking body could foresee the consequences of infinite copying, the end of artificial scarcity coming, and all of the consequences thereof.
No matter what SCOTUS ends up with as an opinion, the realities on the ground will be so different by then that one can wonder how much this really matters at all. (sorry for the cheerleader)
Maybe the real deal will be something along the lines of what Charles Stross wrote in his most excellent book Accelerando ?
The carcasses of the record business purchased by Russian organized crime and turned into a for-profit extortion racket, exacting demands for payment on things that were created by people who died fifty years ago...
I've resisted from posting and getting dragged into this poorly worded question (how can you prove what isn't?)
/. readers, who may have had little or no direct interaction and dealings with indie labels, which needless to say have historically been responsible for breaking out a lot of very innovative talent. Besides the old distribution and manufacturing duties, the primary functions of such a label are to help with the artist's image, promotion, publicity, airplay, guide their career with a choice of songs, producer, and many other things that most professional musicians do not have time, resources or the inclination to be doing when they are busy making music and performing it. Cue in the obligatory contrarian "I did it all myself" to negate this statement, but most successful creative people would prefer focusing on what they are good at instead of dealing with merchandising, filling out aggregator licensing agreements or dealing with graphic artists. That there are a few who are an exception to this doesn't make it any different for the majority of music professionals out there, whether artists, composers, etc... who really WANT someone by their side to partner with them in making their release a successful one, rather than merely just adding yet another entry into the dustbins of recorded music.
Not speaking about the four major music labels, but there appear to be some misconceptions about the role of record labels among many
But on the artistic side of things, there is no question that today, many artists are not able to spend the time necessary for crafting songs with the same kind of quality and loving care they once did. Again, those who think that having a copy of Garage Band or Cubase along with two microphones and a cheap Mackie board at home is enough to make fantastic music are in my opinion mostly deluded on thinking that they can come close or even beat teams of well-honed and dedicated professionals at the top of their craft, whether those be recording engineers, assistants, drum techs, roadies, as well as arrangers (who even remembers those?), or the dedicated studios and the maintenance technicians that provided the environment needed to comfortably record one-of-a-kind performance without any technical glitches, and so on.
What has happened is that the entire ecology that supported record-making has imploded, and while a few of those at the top of their trade still find work elsewhere or for wealthy artists, most of the people that were associated with recording studios and making music professionally have moved on to other related activities like audio for broadcasting, gaming, advertising or movies. The budgets just aren't there for the most part anymore, to put together full-fledged recording sessions with great professional players.
Yes, as many like to immediately point out it is possible to do most of this stuff very inexpensively on one's laptop... yet having access to the gear does not ensure that those who operate it have a modicum of taste, experience and knowledge to turn these simple tools into something that will make tantalizing, mind-blowing recordings, and that they will have the expertise to coax that special magically inspired performance out of an artist, and so on. Of course, it is possible to do everything by yourself, but the chances of the results of this being on the same level as Stevie Wonder and Prince are so infinitesimally small that one could easily wonder why it should even be mentioned at all, except as a straw man argument.
To deny the combined expertise, know-how and vast irreplaceable contributions to record-making that all of these side helpers have traditionally brought to the table has recently been a popular point of view harbored by those who feel they know better, which they are welcome to in a sense, because the sheer mediocrity, overall uninspired and depressingly bland results of such one-man-band recording sessions are right now cluttering more people's in-boxes that one co
Reminds me of that old 'Midnight Love' ad that ran on BET in the 80's.
"Hey Brother, what's this fine record playing?"
"Midnight Love"
"Say, could I borrow it?"
"No my brother, you gotta get your own"
Multiple email accounts? Maybe not, but multiple iPads FTW!!
This is more of a question than anything, as I find this to be a fascinating topic, but have little experience in managing corporate networks.
At what point does it make sense to have your users having to run all that they do on a virtual machine, which if anything gets compromised can just be rolled back without too much fuss?
Also, does it make sense to move a lot of what people do to some sort of hosted app infrastructure (private cloud for example) where the lockdown can occur in an easier and more granular manner as all of the apps are managed by IT only, or is this just a pipe dream that's at least another 10 years away?
Still, in the end it all has to do with your users not practicing safe browsing, double-clicking on attachments that they did not expect, and the likes.
I do like fuzzyfuzzyfungus, magamiako1 and Z34107's suggestions very much, seems fairly practical yet transparent to the users. (wish I had mod points for you guys, but not today!)
But regardless, I guess in some sense any of these solutions seem like they are going to be quite costly and labor-intensive, from a business owner's perspective should those long-term costs not be taken into account when comparing them to deploying a network of machines running Linux or OS-X (and Windows apps inside a VM on those)? Does this all have to do with many corporate apps only working in a Windows network, and with legacy code not being able to be migrated away from a Microsoft-centric platform?
Sorry for sounding naive, but this is not my area of expertise...
In the spirit of trying to find a song for everything,
all I can think of when reading this is : "iMe A River"....
Found something on Boing-Boing's comments which might make us take this with a grain of salt:
Here (with his permission) is a comment from Stan Taffel, who is a media preservationist and posted this to the Association of Moving Image Archivists listserv (AMIA-L). According to Stan, this controversy has been orchestrated by a fan club person who sells copies of the shows. Stan also tells me he's just been speaking with a company who is trying to secure a license to release the shows. Again, I'm just reporting what others have said, and have no personal stake or opinion other than that these shows should be made available to those who fervently want to see them.
Stan's comment:
"I have spoken to my source at CBS and am happy to report that the "hype" is just what it is; all hype.
CBS is ready and willing to sub license any property (as they did with Studio One etc.) for a fee.
Laura Leff, the "President" of the Jack Benny Fan Club she began a few years ago, is very good at
generating P R and has done a very good job at starting a Facebook petition against CBS and getting
articles and giving interviews pleading for the release of 25 Benny shows. She says that CBS has "locked"
these films away and will not be preserved. This is not the case.
The 25 Benny shows as well as the full run of the series is stored in state of the art facilities. The film elements
are safe and in good shape. CBS is also aware of the fact that Ms. Leff has a library of many existing shows
and charges for making copies; dupes of both copywritten and PD shows are offered from her website.
While I applaud her tenacity and love for Jack Benny (she organized a fine website and a convention a few
years ago), it seems that the truth has been diluted and the actual state of the predicament has been reported
in error. She is great at "self promoting". What it boils down to is this: She is a huge fan who just wants to
have copies of the shows and has gone this route to try and obtain them. CBS doesn't know how she was
"supervising" a transfer of one of the color shows as that is not her job. True, it was an NBC special and
maybe she was invited to see a conversion but "supervising"? She is friends with Joan Benny (Jack's
daughter) so perhaps that's how she was invited to see the inner workings. She has gained attention to her
fan club and her plight, however misrepresented it is.
CBS is not the enemy here; they will sub contract The Jack Benny out. As these are supposedly P D shows
(and that's not definite) there are other sources to locate them and once they're out, anyone can dupe them
and sell them for no fee. CBS isn't the only source for 16mm kinescopes. They even told her to try to find
them through other avenues, fully aware she wants to add them to her "collection".
Should these films be available - of course. However, business is business and CBS pays for the storage
of these and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of elements and that's not cheap. To give copies to her
for her archive is not so simple even if she pays for her copies. Maybe some company will come forward
and these shows will be seen. Time will tell."
Without wanting to add too much to the anti-copyright vituperations, has anyone considered how difficult it must truly be for a lawyer sensing a great case such as this one, with hundreds of billable hours (regardless of the outcome) to refrain themselves from telling their clients that serving papers to one of the planet's largest corporate behemoths is the only option, when in reality they pretty much know that they are guaranteed to lose the case but will still manage to milk the estate for plenty of money by going that route, and that this will be the closest they'll ever come to being 'cool with the in crowd' ?
How Darwinian! In that sense,they are taking the role of parasite, which as we all know is necessary for the ecosystem to function properly.
Looks like Robert Heinlein wrote this, and it does feel fairly applicable to this situation:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped or turned back, for their private benefit."
Hope no one else posted this.... apologies if this is a duplicate post.
Obviously, what he failed to foresee is that corporations could in fact have the government change common law, by employing the services of enough lobbyists.
I find it really disturbing that no one ever brings up the fact that these results will vary widely depending on the size of the listening space.
.jpg .tiff file of the same photo. Yet when we take these same two files and print them at 5' x 12' billboard size, the jpg file will appear so grossly grainy and pixelated, .tiff file will maintain a much more coherent presentation of what the original picture looked like.
While my own experience is that at home (Genelec 1031A, Shure EC530 in-ear monitors, etc..) or in a small studio it is somewhat difficult to pick those
differences out, as soon as the same test is conducted in a larger acoustic space, they jump out to the point that it is obscene and hard to ignore.
As I have already said many times in previous posts here, we can sit here and argue all day long about which looks better on our laptop's LCD monitor, a 65 Kbytes
or a 82 Meg
while the
In other words, large-scale sound systems tend to act as magnifiers for these minute artifacts and differences which lossy audio compression introduces, and there is no
question in my mind that when the same tests are performed in an auditorium or a reasonably anechoic concert hall (in open air even better because no reflections) it
does immediately become quite apparent how much the lossy encoding process actually messes with the information.
It is not merely a function of frequency response, distortion and other lab specs, rather a more fundamental one of the poorly-understood characteristics that give music its
inner dynamic, the 'punch' in the low frequencies, the cleanliness in the top end and tails of reverbs, as well as many times the resultant waveforms of many combined
harmonic sounds in the midrange, probably a bit more so on acoutic instruments, but not always necessarily so.
I would welcome similar tests done on a reasonable sound reinforcement rig, like a typical line array system with 50,000 watts of power in a room which can accommodate
1,500 people, a pretty standard setup for concerts and DJ gigs. (keeping in mind that in such systems there is a digital processor in the chain through which the sound will pass)
There are much deeper implications to this, such as the fact that vinyl and open-reel while flawed to some extent still offer the human ear a much smoother experience
in acoustic spaces of that size, as CD and DVD players do a very poor job of reconstituting the the 'slices' of digital audio after D/A conversion, yes great master clocking will
make the signal sound more bearable, but there is a continuity between the waveforms which analog seems to do much better than most digital systems ever can at the sampling
rates they are currently working at, and which I am sad to report haven't really changed a lot since 1981 when the CD spec was developed, SACD being a step in the right direction.
That these older analog formats are not even included in the tests means pretty much the equivalent of the one-eyed man being crowned the leader of the kingdom of the blind.
Which is why to this day, many of the top professional DJs insist on playing from analog sources such as vinyl, which while they have certain inconvenient artifacts of their own, do offer
something else that the human ear craves for, and is really keenly attuned to: continuity of sound, and the smoothness of a natural waveform. This effect is clearly demonstrated by making
an high-quality open-reel tape copy of a CD, and playing the two side-to-s
These people in government have advisors, technical experts and all sorts of qualified people to tell them how worthless this will be.
It boggles the imagination to not even contemplate the number of false positives this will generate, besides encryption, it has been pointed out
many times that all this may do is drive more people to hack their neighbors' wireless networks, using Kismet or other trivial password sniffers.
If up to 10% of all PCs worldwide can be hacked into botnets, it doesn't take a genius to see doing similar things from other people's machines
and let them take the fall for it....
The only explanation I can come up with is that either:
widely-acknowledged cinematic references in truly depressing thoughts, to first be tested on the public for 'authenticity' on how to
best persecute innocent people with maximum effect?
sense, but also cunningly facilitates implementing surveillance and further counter-measures against 'criminalization'. (see above)
Regardless of the answer to these silly questions, one can only wonder what the endgame will be. Enforcement or not, the major content holders
cannot keep going the way they have been, and with ever-dwindling revenue, (especially in the music divisions) will eventually have their assets
ultimately disposed of at the auction block for pennies on the dollar to people like Google, who will love nothing better than to practically give
it away for free, in trying to lure customers to purchase other things, rather than to keep suing them for not buying physical goods in formats
that were once popular during the previous century, and still demanding to charge the same price for it without the old expenses.
And what will this grand adventure have accomplished? There is a name for that special moment in the hunt, when the game is barely walking,
bleeding profusely, surrounded by a pack of growling dogs, but still trying to gore one of them on their way out....In French "La Curée"
That's pretty much what it feels like.... Really!
Scorched Earth Policy..... This too will come to pass.
Thought I'd add a little footnote to this.
In all likelihood, the monetary damages recently awarded by juries in both Jammie Thomas and Tenenbaum trial far, far dwarf the amounts that the record labels
actually spent and advanced to the artists and producers when originally acquiring the rights to the master recordings of those very songs that were being shared.
It would be interesting to compare the average damage paid for stealing something tangible (how many times the value of the object?) versus these obscene amounts for
something of which there is an infinite supply, and the copying of which truly caused very little harm (and which most times the labels themselves bought so cheaply).
Maybe the defense's tactic is to force the issue of disproportionate damage to the crime committed, hoping that one of these cases will ultimately need to go to the Supreme Court ??
Historically, such excesses have never been good press for those who while they may morally be 'right', overstate the harm caused, and therefore the size of the punishment meted out.
Lest we forget, similar punitive practices were the ultimate catalysts for some famous past tea parties in the very same town's harbor where this trial is taking place today.... how fitting!!
Z.