Incidentally they have. 6-7 months ago, a bluetooth dongle/adapter thing was at least $30. Now they're easily had for $10 or less. I bought one the other day for $6.
Wireless has also been falling in price quite a bit over just the last year. To the point where people are giving them away? no, but they are becoming standard components.
I see adding these features in as standard is more a way for Apple to consolidate their lines and features. In other words, From Now On All Apples Have Wireless And Bluetooth. That's a nice thing to be able to say. It's less confusing for consumers and allows developers to assume standard features in the future.
Re:Tell me again now, why buy a PowerBook?
on
New Apples Next Week
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· Score: 2, Interesting
While I do agree that the powerbooks are more in need of an overall boost, there are some notable features that the iBooks lack. For instance, no line-in, no PCMCIA slot, less space for RAM upgrades, slower HDD.
While things like wireless and DVD burning are options that will bring the price up for the ibooks, there still are distinct differences between the lines. It doesn't seem as obvious looking at the quick run-downs on Apple.com, but a good look at the tech specs for the individual lines does reveal more than just cosmetic differences that don't affect the user's experience much.
However, I do think it's a travesty that wireless works better on iBooks than powerbooks. And that iBooks don't have covers that warp and bend over time, causing them to not close.
They're just banning them from matchmaking. All those modders can still play custom games together.
The problem, of course, is that modders get bored just playing against one another when you're all flying across the map. It's less fun w/o the element of surprise. Compare that to going up against 4 or 8 people that aren't modding and don't now what's up, and you can kill them without retribution and win easily. Clearly modders and cheaters will head into matchmaking.
After all, cheating against people you actually know just isn't fun;D
But yeah, it's just matchmaking, not Live overall. So if you have other games that are Live enabled, it doesn't affect them at all.
I don't have the time to invest heavily in any long-term role-playing game, but it's definitely true that with MUDs, it's far easier to actually play a role in an evolving world. Part of that is the smaller community, but another major aspect is that the world is far easier to change. Recode a forest path to go somewhere else due to fallen timber, and you've potentially created ways to new areas, as well as potential bonuses in the old path that not everyone can access immediately (say, access is class- or weapon-based). In a MMORPG, such an undertaking takes serious man-hours to redesign the graphics, pointers, and all that.
So MUDs are far more role playing oriented and yes, exactly -- the game changes. They don't need expansions that simply add a new area; they can easily add and subtract from a set world. I find that environment far more interesting, even if it's not as pretty or intuitive.
Realistically, the only thing that's PC only for expansion is the video card.
Everything else is just stock stuff. Sure, there are mac suppliers that focus on mac compatibility, such as making sure their PCI cards conform to the PCI-X standard that powermacs use.
Harddrives are standard drives, RAM is standard (although you have to, as with any computer, make sure you buy the appropriate kind)... Heck, most "everything else" is already built into the mainboard -- the stock soundcard in macs already supports 24bit recording and CoreAudio, not to mention FW 400/800, Giga ethernet, optical audio...
The only thing that really are "mac only" are the mainboard, chip, and video card.
So no, in no way is Apple a single supplier for parts. They control the initial hardware. What you hack into it after that point is up to you.
Of course, try putting together a dual 64-bit processor desktop system on your own, and let me know how that works out for being cheaper. Or making something that is smaller than the mac mini with more functionality for less cost, or slimmer than the iMac.
This is actually the thing I use Expose the most for. I remember all the talk that it would be most useful for managing windows for applications. When I first started using it, the first things that I really ran into where it proved most useful were how easy it is to grab files and folders and activate expose.
The really cool thing is that if you're holding a file/folder with left-click, expose automatically switches to a "hover-selection" mentality. It knows it's supposed to be used to dig into deeper folders to move things around.
it's a really neat feature. Definitely one of the best aspects of the OS X GUI.
My first line states that education and research is covered under "fair use."
If it were not for fair use, it would be impossible for research and educational papers to use quotes from other sources without permission. That's why news agencies can quote one another, why a review or criticism can quote the source material, and why educational works can use parts of the original text.
So no, you weren't taught incorrectly. You were using fair use, but they didn't explain it to you that way. Note how the quote says "your scholarship or research." It does not say "in your blog or book."
Just like how it's perfectly OK to teach a music class and play a modern music track without permission, or even teach children how to play it, it's NOT OK to broadcast that work publically for promotion or entertainment.
Paraphrasing content is standard practice to avoid plagiarism and also works for copyright, as you're using the ideas (uncopyrightable) and not the exact content.
But what you were taught in school falls under the "education" fair use. It's only applicable to scholarly works and those actually pursuing education. The techniques learned in academia for avoiding copyright infringement do not extend outside of academia.
Creative Commons removes some of the constraints of copyright that the author doesn't wish to place on the content in question. Copyright is the whole kit & caboodle. Creative Commons clarifies and relaxes that to a more specific set of rights.
It does nothing to remove copyright. It simply clarifies what users/consumers can do with the work that they wouldn't be able to do under an "All Rights Reserved" system.
He means actual distribution. Fair use covers education, criticism, and parody. It doesn't cover "copying the book to people for promotional purposes, hacking excerpts to show the insides, or creating copies to publish."
What Dvorak misses, and I think what you're also confused by, is that CC does nothing to complicate copyright law. In fact, what CC does is ease the restrictions on copyright.
Under normal copyright law, for someone to take a piece of your work and do something with it, even if it's post it in their blog, is an infringement of copyright. If I were to quote your text on Slashdot here and put it somewhere else, say, in an email to a friend, that's copyright infringement.
Now, most people don't care about it. They don't want their work limited, and they don't want their audience afraid of using their work. However, they also don't want to say "Feel free to copy my stuff!" because what if someone compiles stuff they wrote or created into a book and published it for money? How do they make a distinction that they are waiving copyright for people who just want to copy it and disperse the information for free, vs. those who want to turn a buck?
That's one of the biggest reasons for the CC license. Technically, it expands fair use. It says "Yes, I still have copyright on my work. However, these are the things you can do with it that you wouldn't be able to under an 'All Rights Reserved' copyright statement."
CC is powerful because it informs the audience what they can do with the works they're looking at. In some cases it's text. In others it's pictures, or schematics, recipes, music, whatever. With a music comparison, regular copyright would restrict people from putting it on a P2P network, correct? Under CC, the original author explicitly can state that it's OK to put it on a P2P network, or make copies for friends, or broadcast the work. But that it's not OK to press CDs and sell them to people, or put them on a compilation and sell that, or include it with a radio show that is pay-only.
Looking at that, it's obvious how it does the OPPOSITE of adding complexity to copyright law -- it loosens the copyright of the author in a specific and easy-to-understand way. It points out the copyright of the original author, yet explains what the audience is free to do without repercussions. In this day and age of RIAA lawsuits and C&D letters, I find it exceedingly important to have easy-to-understand-and-use licenses like Creative Commons.
In the past, direct to video meant that it was a crappy show that would flop so horribly at the theaters that it wasn't worth it. It usually showed in the stories, directing, and talent on hand.
Consciously making a direct-to-DVD movie/video that is used as a creative extension is something else entirely.
The big thing about most Disney direct-to-video releases is that they were simply to milk a franchise. "Hey, if we put this out w/ the same name, people will buy it for their kids, and they won't care about quality!"
With the attention DVD releases are getting, though, I could see a direct-to-DVD show or movie perform really well. Given, of course, that it was quality in the first place.
Oddly enough, OS X does have a great deal of modularity, what with the introduction of Core Audio and Core Image.
It's trivial to pipe audio from any program to another, with no latency. It even works with multiple tracks. Similarly, it's now nothing at all to move image data around as if it were text.
For me, dealing with audio and images defines what I do on my computer, for the most part. Sure, the text is there, and I type stuff, but I don't process text in any real way nor do I need to move a lot of it around. Audio and graphics, though... That's why I bought a computer.
Zuh? It's not hidden. They just don't force you to use it.
All of the utils and other programs in the aptly named Utilities folder are, more or less, just GUIs for some standard command-line tool, from fsck to top and more. The catch is that they're right there, with useful interfaces, and they give you a surprisingly high amount of options without forcing you to know everything about everything, even the stuff you're never going to use.
You COULD hack at OS X using just a command line. If, at the login, you enter your username as >command, you plop into a command line and can work that way. You could set up your network, mount your volumes manually, and, well, do pretty much everything.
So yeah. There's no reason Linux can't do it. You don't need to bash users over the head with a command line. It should be there if they want it, yet a mouse-oriented computer user should be able to use the system equally well.
No, it's gotta be something weird. I'm on a 1.8 dualie w/ lots of space on FW drives, and spotlight zips.
I typed in "p." I let it go for about 5 seconds, at which point it had found about 25000 documents, displaying about 15 of the top hits. I then typed in "enny" to make "penny" and after about half a second it continued on to search for the more specific term.
It may be the processors, but I think something else is up. I'm in your boat -- never had a problem with it, and I think it performs great, despite having lots of stuff to look through.
Perhaps the grandparents should delete their spotlight databases and create new ones. Or something...
I'm saying that Amazon doesn't have a good system for checking the legality of items. Not that the items themselves are illegal (as in, they're not selling drugs or something), but that if Amazon has "Trigun Box Set" and someone in the Marketplace lists "Trigun Box Set," how do you know that's not a bootleg? Esp. when it's 1/6th the price of what Amazon is offering, and they claim "New, still in wrap!"
Considering that the marketplace on Amazon lists very minimal information about the actual items, AND many people, when they receive something that appears to be professionally made and have paid relatively little money for it, are happy enough to be completely unaware that it might very well be a bootleg DVD.
In no way am I saying that everything is a bootlegged DVD. It's just that there's no way to know for sure without buying it, and many people are trusting enough of Amazon that if they get a bootleg item that is of sufficiently high quality, they won't even know about it. All they know is that they paid 1/6th of the retail price.
To most everyone else who's familiar with anime, paying 1/6th the price for a box set means "bootleg!"
The problem is discerning whether or not it's actually used or an illegal bootleg. When a box set is available for $30 yet the series new costs $100, it does kind of raise flags on the legality of it.
It's especially hard to compete with free when the free version is of higher quality than the commercial version. It wasn't very long ago where it was nearly impossible to buy Japanese or other foreign film that was subtitled -- the dubbed version was all that was out there. Similarly, Fansubbers work for speed AND quality usually. Most companies will sit on something for far too long. If I were interested in a series, as soon as I heard it was licensed, I would expect release dates. And release dates that were SOON at that.
So while I agree that it's hard to compete with free, I think these companies aren't doing themselves any favors. Perhaps if they were trying to ensure that their releases had the highest video quality possible, or high quality subtitles w/ notes and extras explaining cultural references. Writing is cheap and doesn't require voice talent -- it's why fansubbers can do it for free in their freetime.
I compare it to the Manga market. Manga you can go into a bookstore, such as a borders or B&N, and they'll have manga on the shelves, in a section. They usually have a good chunk of many series, including popular and less popular ones.
There, you can look through it. You can sit in a chair and read the whole thing, if you like. You can say "oh, I heard about this on the intertron, maybe it's interesting," pick it up, leaf through it, and if it catches your eye, well, it's probably $10 or less.
That's not possible for anime. And unlike movie DVDs, where it's a matter of "oh we saw that in teh theater, it was great, I can spend $20 bucks on it," or "critics loved it, and it's on sale for $10, I might as well pick it up," Anime is a $25 per disc market. And that disc contains only 3-4 episodes, all of which bear some part of continuity. W/ the Simpsons, you can buy season 4 if it has your favorite eps. W/ Anime, if you DON'T buy all of the discs, you're really missing out. And what if the story falls apart at the end and you end up hating the show? That's over $100 down the drain.
w/ manga, if you don't like it, you're out maybe $20, and you can flip through the books at a bookstore before you buy.
I mean, books are an ancient medium, yet they're still going strong. I personally am convinced that they will continue to go strong, both in online sales and b&m sales, for as long as people can grab a book and flip through it to see what's inside. Why the movie and music industry thinks people will plink down megabucks for a purchase on something they've never experienced AND have no way to experience beforehand legally AND! have no way to return is beyond my comprehension.
It was unanimous, but not in the "any P2P software is illegal" sense, but in the "if you push your p2p software as a means for infringing copyright, you're just as guilty"
From a legal perspective, that makes sense. Bittorrent has always been about just "large file distribution" and was initially pushed as an alternative for downloading movie trailers, large Linux distributions, etc. It's gotten a fair amount of traction among a great deal of media sites as a fantastic way for distributing their work. It just so happens that it can be used for illegal purposes, like other technology.
That's a far cry from some p2p software's claims of "Find any song, any movie, any show, in seconds!" Bittorrent was introduced as a means for downloading big files. Plenty of other p2p software was introduced almost explicitly for downloading copyrighted material, and advertised as such.
So while the ruling initially sounds like a blow to p2p software, the wording shows that it's simply a blow to software made and distributed expressly for infringing copyrights. I can understand how "if you're encouraging copyright infringement with your software you're just as guilty" can lead to unanimous agreement.
Well copyright infringement is illegal and carries stiff penalties. The problem is in catching and trying people. Also that assessing damages is exceedingly difficult. I'm sure you've seen all of the statistics saying "Piracy and downloading has cost us X million dollars!" Well, how do you prove that? If you assign an arbitrary amount to the item copied, it's difficult to back that up when people acquired it for free. Even commercial piracy, where people sell bootlegs for less than half the price -- would people have bought those copies for full price?
So it's difficult legally to accuse people of a reasonable amount.
But I don't have a problem with copyright. I do think it's important and that it should be enforced. I DO have a real problem with the essentially perpetual copyright that congress and its lobbyists have been pushing. Works from the 30's and 40's with long-dead producers should by all means have passed into the public domain by now. I can completely understand an artist from the past 20 years wanting to create some income from works they've created, but there should most definitely be more realistic limits on the length of copyright. As it stands now, works can stay locked up for far, far too long, which makes people copyright paranoid (the standard "Oh, don't do that, you're going to get sued for copyright infringement!" scare for fair use and public domain works, due to misinformation) or completely forget that the public domain exists.
That "without intending to return it" is exactly why piracy of the digital kind is a copyright infringement and not theft. You never took something from a party without intending to return it -- you made a duplicate.
The only fair comparison is taking a picture of a painting and showing it to your friends. The museum receives less traffic, the artist may receive less interest in his work because you took a picture. But the museum still has the artwork and the artist hasn't lost anything, other than future revenue. Which, incidentally, is the express purpose of copyright.
Theft is gaining something, arguably of value, and taking that valuable object from someone else, depriving them of said value. Copying the object may decrease the value, but the object remains, with no possession lost. If anything, it costs the pirate MORE money to make copies and distribute those for free, compared to simply stealing outright, as making copies constitutes money invested with no outright gain.
Very true. Not to mention that in many cases, those little boring programs just use a basic serial and then say "Hey, crackers, please don't crack or distribute my app. It's just a basic algorithm, but it's how I make a living."
It sometimes amazes me how many crackers do have a conscience about the smaller guys, and how hard it can be to find passwords or cracks to cheap applications.
I almost liken it to the p2p v. itunes thing. When you can find a song for a buck in 30 seconds, compared to attempting to locate one for free over the course of 30 minutes, for many people the $1 method is a lot easier. For lots of people looking for random utilities or programs, when they find something that works, does a job well, and is cheap, they'll plink down the money for it. At least compared to finding a crack over the course of a week that may or may not work.
The smaller guys can also simply change-up the algorithm for the cracked passwords for each release every few weeks, something the big guys can't really do;D
Being that this is a credit card company, most likely they will do this already. Of course, they probably won't do it until the person with the number requests a new card, but all it takes is a phone call to get one.
Since pretty much all credit card companies are under contract to research fraud on someone's card and not charge their customer for fradulent charges, it's FAR, FAR cheaper for them to send out a new card and cancel the old number than it is for them to wait and get stuck covering those fraudulent charges.
That's one reason why I like credit cards over debit cards. It's one step removed from my real money, so if it gets stolen or abused by someone, I don't have to contend with a drained bank account and a bank that's less than willing to help recover my money.
Slashdot Mirror
Wireless has also been falling in price quite a bit over just the last year. To the point where people are giving them away? no, but they are becoming standard components.
I see adding these features in as standard is more a way for Apple to consolidate their lines and features. In other words, From Now On All Apples Have Wireless And Bluetooth. That's a nice thing to be able to say. It's less confusing for consumers and allows developers to assume standard features in the future.
While things like wireless and DVD burning are options that will bring the price up for the ibooks, there still are distinct differences between the lines. It doesn't seem as obvious looking at the quick run-downs on Apple.com, but a good look at the tech specs for the individual lines does reveal more than just cosmetic differences that don't affect the user's experience much.
However, I do think it's a travesty that wireless works better on iBooks than powerbooks. And that iBooks don't have covers that warp and bend over time, causing them to not close.
The problem, of course, is that modders get bored just playing against one another when you're all flying across the map. It's less fun w/o the element of surprise. Compare that to going up against 4 or 8 people that aren't modding and don't now what's up, and you can kill them without retribution and win easily. Clearly modders and cheaters will head into matchmaking.
After all, cheating against people you actually know just isn't fun ;D
But yeah, it's just matchmaking, not Live overall. So if you have other games that are Live enabled, it doesn't affect them at all.
Heck, the G5 already looks like it could be substituted out for various engine parts, or at least fit in with most modern "blocks" under the hood.
So MUDs are far more role playing oriented and yes, exactly -- the game changes. They don't need expansions that simply add a new area; they can easily add and subtract from a set world. I find that environment far more interesting, even if it's not as pretty or intuitive.
Oh, if only I had the time...
Everything else is just stock stuff. Sure, there are mac suppliers that focus on mac compatibility, such as making sure their PCI cards conform to the PCI-X standard that powermacs use.
Harddrives are standard drives, RAM is standard (although you have to, as with any computer, make sure you buy the appropriate kind)... Heck, most "everything else" is already built into the mainboard -- the stock soundcard in macs already supports 24bit recording and CoreAudio, not to mention FW 400/800, Giga ethernet, optical audio...
The only thing that really are "mac only" are the mainboard, chip, and video card.
So no, in no way is Apple a single supplier for parts. They control the initial hardware. What you hack into it after that point is up to you.
Of course, try putting together a dual 64-bit processor desktop system on your own, and let me know how that works out for being cheaper. Or making something that is smaller than the mac mini with more functionality for less cost, or slimmer than the iMac.
Not to mention that both holidays usually involve some sort of fireworks. Timely AND applicable!
The really cool thing is that if you're holding a file/folder with left-click, expose automatically switches to a "hover-selection" mentality. It knows it's supposed to be used to dig into deeper folders to move things around.
it's a really neat feature. Definitely one of the best aspects of the OS X GUI.
If it were not for fair use, it would be impossible for research and educational papers to use quotes from other sources without permission. That's why news agencies can quote one another, why a review or criticism can quote the source material, and why educational works can use parts of the original text.
So no, you weren't taught incorrectly. You were using fair use, but they didn't explain it to you that way. Note how the quote says "your scholarship or research." It does not say "in your blog or book."
Just like how it's perfectly OK to teach a music class and play a modern music track without permission, or even teach children how to play it, it's NOT OK to broadcast that work publically for promotion or entertainment.
Paraphrasing content is standard practice to avoid plagiarism and also works for copyright, as you're using the ideas (uncopyrightable) and not the exact content.
But what you were taught in school falls under the "education" fair use. It's only applicable to scholarly works and those actually pursuing education. The techniques learned in academia for avoiding copyright infringement do not extend outside of academia.
It does nothing to remove copyright. It simply clarifies what users/consumers can do with the work that they wouldn't be able to do under an "All Rights Reserved" system.
What Dvorak misses, and I think what you're also confused by, is that CC does nothing to complicate copyright law. In fact, what CC does is ease the restrictions on copyright.
Under normal copyright law, for someone to take a piece of your work and do something with it, even if it's post it in their blog, is an infringement of copyright. If I were to quote your text on Slashdot here and put it somewhere else, say, in an email to a friend, that's copyright infringement.
Now, most people don't care about it. They don't want their work limited, and they don't want their audience afraid of using their work. However, they also don't want to say "Feel free to copy my stuff!" because what if someone compiles stuff they wrote or created into a book and published it for money? How do they make a distinction that they are waiving copyright for people who just want to copy it and disperse the information for free, vs. those who want to turn a buck?
That's one of the biggest reasons for the CC license. Technically, it expands fair use. It says "Yes, I still have copyright on my work. However, these are the things you can do with it that you wouldn't be able to under an 'All Rights Reserved' copyright statement."
CC is powerful because it informs the audience what they can do with the works they're looking at. In some cases it's text. In others it's pictures, or schematics, recipes, music, whatever. With a music comparison, regular copyright would restrict people from putting it on a P2P network, correct? Under CC, the original author explicitly can state that it's OK to put it on a P2P network, or make copies for friends, or broadcast the work. But that it's not OK to press CDs and sell them to people, or put them on a compilation and sell that, or include it with a radio show that is pay-only.
Looking at that, it's obvious how it does the OPPOSITE of adding complexity to copyright law -- it loosens the copyright of the author in a specific and easy-to-understand way. It points out the copyright of the original author, yet explains what the audience is free to do without repercussions. In this day and age of RIAA lawsuits and C&D letters, I find it exceedingly important to have easy-to-understand-and-use licenses like Creative Commons.
Consciously making a direct-to-DVD movie/video that is used as a creative extension is something else entirely.
The big thing about most Disney direct-to-video releases is that they were simply to milk a franchise. "Hey, if we put this out w/ the same name, people will buy it for their kids, and they won't care about quality!"
With the attention DVD releases are getting, though, I could see a direct-to-DVD show or movie perform really well. Given, of course, that it was quality in the first place.
It's trivial to pipe audio from any program to another, with no latency. It even works with multiple tracks. Similarly, it's now nothing at all to move image data around as if it were text.
For me, dealing with audio and images defines what I do on my computer, for the most part. Sure, the text is there, and I type stuff, but I don't process text in any real way nor do I need to move a lot of it around. Audio and graphics, though... That's why I bought a computer.
All of the utils and other programs in the aptly named Utilities folder are, more or less, just GUIs for some standard command-line tool, from fsck to top and more. The catch is that they're right there, with useful interfaces, and they give you a surprisingly high amount of options without forcing you to know everything about everything, even the stuff you're never going to use.
You COULD hack at OS X using just a command line. If, at the login, you enter your username as >command, you plop into a command line and can work that way. You could set up your network, mount your volumes manually, and, well, do pretty much everything.
So yeah. There's no reason Linux can't do it. You don't need to bash users over the head with a command line. It should be there if they want it, yet a mouse-oriented computer user should be able to use the system equally well.
I typed in "p." I let it go for about 5 seconds, at which point it had found about 25000 documents, displaying about 15 of the top hits. I then typed in "enny" to make "penny" and after about half a second it continued on to search for the more specific term.
It may be the processors, but I think something else is up. I'm in your boat -- never had a problem with it, and I think it performs great, despite having lots of stuff to look through.
Perhaps the grandparents should delete their spotlight databases and create new ones. Or something...
Considering that the marketplace on Amazon lists very minimal information about the actual items, AND many people, when they receive something that appears to be professionally made and have paid relatively little money for it, are happy enough to be completely unaware that it might very well be a bootleg DVD.
In no way am I saying that everything is a bootlegged DVD. It's just that there's no way to know for sure without buying it, and many people are trusting enough of Amazon that if they get a bootleg item that is of sufficiently high quality, they won't even know about it. All they know is that they paid 1/6th of the retail price.
To most everyone else who's familiar with anime, paying 1/6th the price for a box set means "bootleg!"
The problem is discerning whether or not it's actually used or an illegal bootleg. When a box set is available for $30 yet the series new costs $100, it does kind of raise flags on the legality of it.
So while I agree that it's hard to compete with free, I think these companies aren't doing themselves any favors. Perhaps if they were trying to ensure that their releases had the highest video quality possible, or high quality subtitles w/ notes and extras explaining cultural references. Writing is cheap and doesn't require voice talent -- it's why fansubbers can do it for free in their freetime.
There, you can look through it. You can sit in a chair and read the whole thing, if you like. You can say "oh, I heard about this on the intertron, maybe it's interesting," pick it up, leaf through it, and if it catches your eye, well, it's probably $10 or less.
That's not possible for anime. And unlike movie DVDs, where it's a matter of "oh we saw that in teh theater, it was great, I can spend $20 bucks on it," or "critics loved it, and it's on sale for $10, I might as well pick it up," Anime is a $25 per disc market. And that disc contains only 3-4 episodes, all of which bear some part of continuity. W/ the Simpsons, you can buy season 4 if it has your favorite eps. W/ Anime, if you DON'T buy all of the discs, you're really missing out. And what if the story falls apart at the end and you end up hating the show? That's over $100 down the drain.
w/ manga, if you don't like it, you're out maybe $20, and you can flip through the books at a bookstore before you buy.
I mean, books are an ancient medium, yet they're still going strong. I personally am convinced that they will continue to go strong, both in online sales and b&m sales, for as long as people can grab a book and flip through it to see what's inside. Why the movie and music industry thinks people will plink down megabucks for a purchase on something they've never experienced AND have no way to experience beforehand legally AND! have no way to return is beyond my comprehension.
From a legal perspective, that makes sense. Bittorrent has always been about just "large file distribution" and was initially pushed as an alternative for downloading movie trailers, large Linux distributions, etc. It's gotten a fair amount of traction among a great deal of media sites as a fantastic way for distributing their work. It just so happens that it can be used for illegal purposes, like other technology.
That's a far cry from some p2p software's claims of "Find any song, any movie, any show, in seconds!" Bittorrent was introduced as a means for downloading big files. Plenty of other p2p software was introduced almost explicitly for downloading copyrighted material, and advertised as such.
So while the ruling initially sounds like a blow to p2p software, the wording shows that it's simply a blow to software made and distributed expressly for infringing copyrights. I can understand how "if you're encouraging copyright infringement with your software you're just as guilty" can lead to unanimous agreement.
So it's difficult legally to accuse people of a reasonable amount.
But I don't have a problem with copyright. I do think it's important and that it should be enforced. I DO have a real problem with the essentially perpetual copyright that congress and its lobbyists have been pushing. Works from the 30's and 40's with long-dead producers should by all means have passed into the public domain by now. I can completely understand an artist from the past 20 years wanting to create some income from works they've created, but there should most definitely be more realistic limits on the length of copyright. As it stands now, works can stay locked up for far, far too long, which makes people copyright paranoid (the standard "Oh, don't do that, you're going to get sued for copyright infringement!" scare for fair use and public domain works, due to misinformation) or completely forget that the public domain exists.
The only fair comparison is taking a picture of a painting and showing it to your friends. The museum receives less traffic, the artist may receive less interest in his work because you took a picture. But the museum still has the artwork and the artist hasn't lost anything, other than future revenue. Which, incidentally, is the express purpose of copyright.
Theft is gaining something, arguably of value, and taking that valuable object from someone else, depriving them of said value. Copying the object may decrease the value, but the object remains, with no possession lost. If anything, it costs the pirate MORE money to make copies and distribute those for free, compared to simply stealing outright, as making copies constitutes money invested with no outright gain.
I liken it to Google's success in the ad world. Little text ads that are based on the page content. And they've had great success.
It sometimes amazes me how many crackers do have a conscience about the smaller guys, and how hard it can be to find passwords or cracks to cheap applications.
I almost liken it to the p2p v. itunes thing. When you can find a song for a buck in 30 seconds, compared to attempting to locate one for free over the course of 30 minutes, for many people the $1 method is a lot easier. For lots of people looking for random utilities or programs, when they find something that works, does a job well, and is cheap, they'll plink down the money for it. At least compared to finding a crack over the course of a week that may or may not work.
The smaller guys can also simply change-up the algorithm for the cracked passwords for each release every few weeks, something the big guys can't really do ;D
Since pretty much all credit card companies are under contract to research fraud on someone's card and not charge their customer for fradulent charges, it's FAR, FAR cheaper for them to send out a new card and cancel the old number than it is for them to wait and get stuck covering those fraudulent charges.
That's one reason why I like credit cards over debit cards. It's one step removed from my real money, so if it gets stolen or abused by someone, I don't have to contend with a drained bank account and a bank that's less than willing to help recover my money.