I mean... is it because they're unprofitable? It's hard to believe they all could be - sure, sci-fi series in general cost a fair bit to make, but all these series (and I'll throw Futurama in as well) certainly seem to have pretty large numbers of dedicated fans.
It's not that they're unprofitable. It's that another show will be far more profitable. Ever notice how all the advertisers on geek TV are penis-enlargement pills and debt relief programs?
You then go on a rambling trying to compare the music industry to ice manufacturers which really has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
I did not compare the music industry to ice manufacturers. I compared the RIAA, essentially a distribution business, to the Southland Ice Co, another distribution business, whose distribution model was about to become outdate, and who managed to survive, not by using RIAA-like tactics to bully people into supporting their business model, but by innovating.
It's not my problem if lexical devices like examples escape you.
We're not talking about how RIAA is going to adapt (which is the moral if the ice story) but rather this whole topic is the power that the RIAA has to take away the rights we currently have on the internet.
So? You responded to me to complain that I'm not talking about what you want to talk about? Stupid.
What data do you have to show this? I would venture to say the opposite is true.
What data do you have to show this?
However my point is that it Doesn't really matter. The RIAA doesn't have the right to take away my rights to do the things I mentioned above.
I agree. If you read my response to you, you should know that and not need to quibble over this point.
Maybe the majority of your friends share illegal files but that's certainly not the majority of the internet.
Most of my friends don't use filesharing at all.
The internet is a big place and I would be willing to bet most of them are law abiding.
Do you have any data to show this?
You're picking nits just to be argumentative, buddy. The fact that you ignore the point of everything I say and pick on ancillary information and subtext kinda supports that. We're on the same side of the RIAA thing, and you're being belligerant for its own sake. Grow up.
Your post is excellent, with one major mistake. Downloading copyrighted material is not illegal.
It depends. There's such a thing as distribution rights. I suppose the downloading part may not be illegal, but the guy on the other hand most certainly is breaking the law.
Republishing it is. Downloading is simply you asking a remote machine for a object labeled "X", and it gives you something.
Yes, I see the distinction you're getting at, and I'm inclined to agree.
It is the same as asking a person to sing you a song, and they sing it. You cannot be arrested for listening, and we would laugh at anyone who suggested otherwise. Downloading is not illegal or even unethical. Only republishing/rebroadcasting/uploading is.
Would you argue then that taking your video camera into a movie theatre and filming it is not illegal? (Note, I'm asking if it shouldn't be illegal, only if it isn't).
Again, I see your point here, and I'm inclined to agree, but the logical argument breaks apart when you have to put it into law.
So why not add a royalty to internet service? Would that make the RIAA/MPAA happy? What would be a fair amount? $1/month from every internet user would be a LOT of money, and should be enough to make even the greediest studio exec happy.
I think that would solve this, but how do you enforce it? Do you charge people a royalty for buying a hard drive, because they might store MP3s on it? That's ridiculous.
I guess your right, the MPAA must own the rights to the videos I put up on my website for friends and family. You know, the family video clips I put up, they must own those because they are on the internet.
That's not what I'm saying, the most cursory examination of my argument would demonstrate that. If the overwhelming majority of internet media sharing was personal home videos and legally-traded music, this wouldn't be an issue.
That's not the case, and you know it's not the case. Repeat: my behavior on-line is not representative of everybody else's. At all.
Even apart from that, many news sites offer video clips of news that they offer, is any of this illegal downloading of copyrighted material?
No, that's legal downloading of copyrighted material. You've been given permission.
Also while I don't produce music, what about the copyright owners wanting to distribute their songs?
The copyright owners are distributing the songs. The musicians typically don't own the copyrights; that's why you sign with a label. Normally, when any author creates an original work, they hold a statutory copyright as an incident of authorship. You can then register your copyright to give it more legal teeth. However, when you go to work for somebody and get paid to produce a creative work, contracts are drafted that transfer the copyright you'd normally hold as an incident of authorship to whomever is paying for the work.
I'm sure you know this, and I can't figure out if you're just being argumentative or what.
As much as they wish it were true, all media is not owned by RIAA/MPAA.
I agree with you there, and thank God for it.
And aside from that, I stream my music from home to my computer at work. If I own these songs, isn't that legal?
You don't own those songs. And it's legal if the rights you've purchased to them permit it. The problem here is that under Fair Use, that should be completely legal, and this is where I firmly come down on your side of this. You've been a good boy, a good consumer, a good citizen, and paid for your music. The RIAA and their ilk are trying to enacting legislation and enforce rights restrictions to prevent you from exercising rights you should have as a good boy who paid for his music.
Or did RIAA get their way and I have to buy a copy of each song I listen to for the office, home, car, etc...?
There's no question that they'd love for it to be that way, but you needn't be obtuse here. If media can be played back, it can be duplicated. That's the nature of physics. The problem, again, is the DMCA has criminalized this process by making it illegal to bypass copyright.
The real issue here is that we currently have a number of laws that directly conflict with each other. To enjoy the liberty that has been granted you by court decisions 20 years ago you have to violate other laws.
I'm not defending the RIAA here, far from it. But for you and people like you to even try to pretend that there's no piracy issue and that it isn't costing the industry any money is utterly stupid and naive. They're going about fixing it the wrong way, there's no question, and they're clearly wrong to punish and limit the liberty of legitimate, honest people in an effort to catch the bad guys. I'm on your side in principle, but you have to pull your head out of this fantasy world you envision that peopled only with law-abiding citizens who only download legitimately and never download media illegally.
Streaming music, offering home videos, home pictures from my 6MP camera (not small pictures) all take up a lot of bandwidth. It's shortsightedness like yours that lead to stupid laws and restrictions because whatever you don't need must be "clearly and unquestionable and overwhelmingly illegal downloading of copyrighted material."
What short-sightedness? You misunderstood ONE sentence and have gotten entirely the wr
That will be news to people who use etree.org, archive.org or any other site that allows people to trade shows that they recorded with the musicians' permission. I don't have the bandwidth to waste on the entertainment industry's pop bullshit.
If those people represented an overwhelming majority of internet downloads, there'd be no piracy problem for the RIAA to solve.
Probably not. Nearly 100% of competitive [wfdf.org] discs are discs [discraft.com] and I'm willing to bet that competitive disc sales outweight recreational Frisbee [wham-o.com] sales.
You misunderstood. No matter what kind of disc I buy, I call it a Frisbee, and so do most people. No matter what brand of tissue I buy, I call it Kleenex, no matter what kind of bandage I buy, I call it a Band-Aid, even if our photocopier is a Canon, I tell people to go "Xerox this document." The sales figures are irrelevent. These brands are irrecovably associated with the product type rather than a specific brand of it. The point was to provide an illustration of unbreakable social consciousness. In classic Slashdot form, you've missed the point and instead attacked ancillary data.
Funny, for me it was radio that ingrained the idea of free music into my consciousness. Sure, its ad supported. However, I still get all the free music I want right out of thin air.
That's an excellent point, but I think there are some differences worth discussing. First, you are listening to radio, and you cannot replay the song you want any time you wish, or make copies of it for your buddy. It's played on the radio, with permission from the copyright holder, and you get to listen to it. That's not at all analogous to downloading something off eMule.
Now, you could hit "record" on your boom box and make a copy onto your cassette tape, but you also paid a royalty when you bought that tape that accounted for that kind of use of it. There's no such royalty levvied when you
People don't own information, but you can own rights to how it is used and distributed. And even then, some types of information are immune. You can't copyright a meter stick or height chart and charge people to make them.
The thing I didn't understand is what benefit do ISPs get for actually signing this agreement?
Forgive me, I didn't RTFA, so it may have mentioned this. I'd imagine the legalspeak of this agreement includes some kind of indemnity from prosecution. Shit may roll downhill at your office, but liability keeps rolling uphill until it stops at somebody with enough insurance coverage to pay for somebody else's damages.
You know how people who aren't really involved with something get sued? For example, a contractor loans his scaffolding to a church, and some dude falls off and breaks his back, and the church sues the guy? It sounds like a corrupt, immoral church. The truth is that the guy has medical bills his insurance won't cover, and the church's insurance won't cover it, so it keeps rolling up until it lands on somebody who does have the right insurance - the small business owner in this case, whose scaffolding was involved.
That's why if your name is on the title of a car and an uninsured driver mains somebody with it, they come after you. There's $750,000 that is going to be collected by somebody from somebody else's insurance company, and it'll keep rolling until it hits somebody whose insurance will cover it (or who has the most assets, which they'll possess and force you into bankruptcy - this is why most bankruptcies declared by individuals are a result of medical expenses that can't be paid - they aren't necessarily their own medical expenses, just expenses that they are liable for).
I'm guessing this deal with the RIAA is similar. If they agree to this and carry it out in good faith, then when the RIAA discovers an ISP whose bandwidth has been used for tens of millions of dollars worth of copyright infringement, the rolling turd of liability will bounce over them. Why sue a bunch of 14 year olds with a net worth of about eighty bucks when there's SBC or QWest or whoever with 8 digits of liquidity?
And before somebody attemps to invalidate the entire post by attacking ancillary data... I can't remember 100% if it was 7-11 or Quick-Trip or Kum'n'Go or who. It was an anecdote we were given in microeconomics about 7 years ago in college about the failings of inflexible businesses, so if the details/facts aren't 100% spot-on, my apologies.
Deep down, ISPs know that widespread consumer adoption of high speed internet is ONLY fueled by three things: video, music, and games.
I'd says porn and games are interchangeably #1 and #2. And the rest is clearly and unquestionable and overwhelmingly illegal downloading of copyrighted material.
Remember - just because YOU and YOUR FRIENDS buy what you download, most people do not.
Regardless, they're not going to win this way.
Before refridgeration was a household technology, people who needed ice had it delivered. There were lots of companies that provided this service. There were also lots of dairy-delivery companies too. My grandfather used to deliver milk.
Anyway, enough people had refridgeration in their homes at a certain point that the death of dairy and ice delivery was inevitable. Some companies tried to fight this. Some tried to point out the flaws in home-made ice. Some tried to point out the expense. Some even appealed to consumers on the grounds that good hard-working men were losing jobs because the evil consumer was making his own ice rather than buying it from a good ol' fashioned American company.
It all fell on deaf ears. Only one ice company survived the collapse of their market. It was the company that opened a new type of store - a combination service station/grocery. You could buy ice there, sure. In blocks or bags. You still can. They became 7-11, and not only did they survive the death of the ice market, they went on to insane profits that were never possible in the ice industry.
Now, making ice in your home isn't illegal. Downloading copyrighted music that you haven't purchased is. So the analogy falls apart there. However, the RIAA's approach to solving his is akin to the ice delivery services trying to get in-home freezers banned because it's screwing up their business model.
Well, tough shit. Agile companies that spot trends and capitalize on them survive. Bloated bureaucracies of self-serving directors eventually die. That's capitalism, and that's how it ought to work. It's a shame that their business model is failing because of massive copyright infringement, and not because of a legitimate new business. It's even more of a shame that stuff like iTunes came along as a solution to the piracy problem, when it should have predated it.
They missed the boat on the Internet. Napster was there before iTunes, and the idea of free music is now forever ingrained into the social consciousness of on-line culture. Sometimes companies can divorce a culture of this link, but usually not. All photocopiers are the "Xerox" machine, all tissue is "Kleenex", all flying discs are "Frisbies" all adhesive bandages are "Band-Aids". Even RollerBlade was only partially successful in protecting their brand from being synonymous with the product. These companies would be foolish to spend money on a campaign to break this association.
And that's why the RIAA is foolish. It's too late to stop this. It can't be stopped through legislation, legeal threats, copy protection schemes, the DMCA, or anything else. The only thing that can stop it is for them to find a way to make it more convenient for people to get the music they want at a cost so marginal that paying for the added convenience is worthwhile.
Until and unless you run a very significant risk of getting caught and prosecuted, it won't stop. And people will suffer the eroding of their rights only so much in an effort to protect the revenue streams of millionaires.
There is a shit load of countries that do have strict restriction on firearms, and where criminal gun related deaths are just as high.
Restrictions on personal freedom are NEVER good. In the end - you lose, criminals and politicians win.
I know. Hence I cited the 0.4% death rate figure. Twice as many people die of alcohol poisoning in this country than die from gun-related accidents or homicides. Other than a few fundamentalist Christians, nobody is pushing hard to get "just the hard stuff" banned that "nobody has a legitimate need for." You have no need of 100 proof liquor! We're going to ban it to save lives.
I know you're kinda kidding but you've got a terrific point here. I won't patronize any web site that makes use of cookies, flash, and pop-ups for me to just LOOK at stuff. I just went to Lowe's web site to price products for my bathroom remodeling project. I can't even SEARCH unless I'm willing to accept a cookie. Why in the world do they need to set a cookie for me to search THEIR inventory? There's no legitimate reason. I'll tolerate cookies for session management, but I didn't log and wasn't buying anything, just typed "bathtub" into a search window. Well, first they wanted my zip code, and then when they couldn't set a cookie they wouldn't let me procede.
If you believe otherwise, I've got this nice bridge in London I'd like to sell you.
This statement is ignorant and naive. Abundant examples exist and can be readily researched to prov you wrong here. There have been and still are cultures in which the human body is not highly sexualized. 14 year olds in nudist colonies do not exist in a state of unending arousal, nor do children who grow up in societies where topless women are the norm. Anybody who has watched 15 minutes of National Geographic should be able to figure this out.
A few hundred years ago? Rifled firearms only emerged at the end of the eighteenth century.
The invention of rifling predates the 18th century by at least 200 years. As for rifled firearms, your date sounds about right to me. In any case:
Now = 2005
"the end of the eighteenth century" = 1795
Now - Then = 210 years, which could be interpretted by most reasonable people to be "a few hundred years".
Boys are still learning to shoot rifles, I just don't think most boys still are. No, not even in America, where the insane massive gun violence rates driven and encouraged by soulless Republicans and NRA nutcases are causing 0.4% of deaths.
I'm not sure how "substantial" of a proportion it is anymore. I think boys who learned to shoot a rifle 30 years ago are learning to shoot pistols now. Most of the people I know who own or know how to fire a gun are pistol owners, and I'm from a pretty rural part of the country (Iowa).
Finally, your response is typical Slashdot attacks on ancillary data which, if adjusted from an extemporaneous guess to a researched fact, doesn't change the validity of my point. So change "As little as a few hundred years ago..." to "As little as 20 years ago..." or "Even today..." and my point is emphasized.
I'm still alive and, unless something has gone horribly wrong sinec 11:03AM, so are you, most likely. In fact, the species has managed to survive EVERY SINGLE MOMENT OF TIME for as long as any of us can remember, and for as long as history records. It's pretty amazing. Now, to stop being a pedantic ass, a serious question - in what way are we not surviving? Apparantly a crop of readers found your point insightful. I really don't. Can you elaborate?
They'd prefer it too. Guaranteed. They won't get intrigued by sex until until their hormones go insane, at which time you should be doing some parenting rather than just dragging them to movies and hoping they pick up the basics. But they love violence at any age, mostly.
Violence is a part of basic survival instincts, and play involving the miming of violence and conflict is not only normal and prevelent in thousands of species, it's probably a healthy outlet. You have to remember that we're not really that far removed from young boys learning to hunt things down with spears basically as soon as they are old enough to know to keep quiet. We're not talking millions of years here, we're talking thousands of years ago. As little as a few hundred years ago, most boys learned how to shoot a rifle. Why? Same reason we all know how to operate a motor vehicle - you need to know how to do it to get by.
The instinct to mime violence can be witnesses on Animal Planet during any number of specials on nearly any mammal. Put two dogs together, what's the first thing they do? Run around and try to bite each other. They're playing, but they're also mimicking basic pack/hunting mentality. They're establishing the alpha dog through mimed violence.
Sex, however, doesn't become interesting until later in life.
I still blame American's ridiculous shame in its own sexuality on coaching from the religious right and the Puritan foundations of the country, but it's not like there's NO GOOD REASON why kids absorb violence more easily than sexuality. Seeing an exposed nipple during the Super Bowl isn't going to damage any of their precious little mental circuits. Nudity doesn't have to equate to sexuality. America hasn't figured that out yet.
Yep. It's pretty well agreed by anybody with significant expertise that access control lists are a superior solution to the quickly-aging permissions system in place on a *Nix machine.
Windows' problem in its permissions implemention, it's in its whole friggen architecture. Windows has traditionally violated most of the fundamental principles of software development, and Microsoft is going back and cleaning them up one by one.
I keep saying this, and I'm going to keep saying it, partially because it irks the geeks and partly because I believe it.
Microsoft and Linux (or another *Nix vendor) will merge forces. By 2015 you will see a Unix kernel in Windows (or what used to be Windows). As Mac has become a BSD family, expect Microsoft to do it eventually too. It's all part of their, "If you can't beat 'em, absorb 'em," philosophy.
"The shuttle's new fuel tank, supposedly redesigned to be safer, has a crack in it. Pictures were sent to the manufacturer who decided that it is too small to be worrisome. Hmm, what caused the Columbia disaster, pieces of foam?"
What a typical inaccurate Slashdot write-up, and a typically ignorant response. First of all, the crack is foam insulation on the external fuel tank, not in the shuttle itself, like your title suggests. Second, the foam is on the external fuel tank, which does not re-enter orbit, it's discarded once the shuttle is in orbit. It won't impact the shuttle's re-entry in to the atmosphere.
Bear in mind that films that suck are sometimes forced to suck by the parent company and the desired rating from the MPAA.
Pearl Harbor was a Disney film intended to be a "feel good" romantic yarn about war staring big-name pretty actors and it had, as I recall, a PG or PG-13 label.
A typical Family Guy episode would be rated R if it was in theatres. The MPAA would take one look at Glen Quagmire with a hooker and slap "R" on there.
I know, that's a naive simplification, but Windows is and for most of its life has been a business-oriented program and Microsoft's efforts to turn it into a home PC desktop OS have been clumsy.
Such is the nature of technology. When these things are developed, the creators generally don't envision the applications for Joe Q. Public. Nobody at DARPA foresaw World of Warcraft when they were prototyping the technology that would become the internet.
Whats the point in having money if you dont spend it?
I do spend it. I have to. If I don't spend it, the bank forcloses on my mortgage, takes my car, and they shut off the water and power, the student loan goes into default, etc.
I don't understand people who waste huge amounts of money on dumb stuff or excessive stuff.
What are you going to do with your millions of pennies saved when you're 70?
Use my wealth to attract gold-diggers in their 20's since, by then, my natural good looks will have faded. Duh!
These jokes aren't funny, interesting, clever, or worth repeating. It's not even that they're not believable, it's that they're just stupid. The write-ups aren't funny or clever, they're getting VERY predictable.
Add me to the chorus of increasingly annoyed/. readers who are losing patience with the 4/1 jokes this year. I don't mind that there's no/few legitimate news stories, but do the hoaxes have to be so obvious, uncreative, and simple-minded?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that they're unprofitable. It's that another show will be far more profitable. Ever notice how all the advertisers on geek TV are penis-enlargement pills and debt relief programs?
I did not compare the music industry to ice manufacturers. I compared the RIAA, essentially a distribution business, to the Southland Ice Co, another distribution business, whose distribution model was about to become outdate, and who managed to survive, not by using RIAA-like tactics to bully people into supporting their business model, but by innovating.
It's not my problem if lexical devices like examples escape you.
We're not talking about how RIAA is going to adapt (which is the moral if the ice story) but rather this whole topic is the power that the RIAA has to take away the rights we currently have on the internet.
So? You responded to me to complain that I'm not talking about what you want to talk about? Stupid.
What data do you have to show this? I would venture to say the opposite is true.
What data do you have to show this?
However my point is that it Doesn't really matter. The RIAA doesn't have the right to take away my rights to do the things I mentioned above.
I agree. If you read my response to you, you should know that and not need to quibble over this point.
Maybe the majority of your friends share illegal files but that's certainly not the majority of the internet.
Most of my friends don't use filesharing at all.
The internet is a big place and I would be willing to bet most of them are law abiding.
Do you have any data to show this?
You're picking nits just to be argumentative, buddy. The fact that you ignore the point of everything I say and pick on ancillary information and subtext kinda supports that. We're on the same side of the RIAA thing, and you're being belligerant for its own sake. Grow up.
It depends. There's such a thing as distribution rights. I suppose the downloading part may not be illegal, but the guy on the other hand most certainly is breaking the law.
Republishing it is. Downloading is simply you asking a remote machine for a object labeled "X", and it gives you something.
Yes, I see the distinction you're getting at, and I'm inclined to agree.
It is the same as asking a person to sing you a song, and they sing it. You cannot be arrested for listening, and we would laugh at anyone who suggested otherwise. Downloading is not illegal or even unethical. Only republishing/rebroadcasting/uploading is.
Would you argue then that taking your video camera into a movie theatre and filming it is not illegal? (Note, I'm asking if it shouldn't be illegal, only if it isn't).
Again, I see your point here, and I'm inclined to agree, but the logical argument breaks apart when you have to put it into law.
I think that would solve this, but how do you enforce it? Do you charge people a royalty for buying a hard drive, because they might store MP3s on it? That's ridiculous.
That's not what I'm saying, the most cursory examination of my argument would demonstrate that. If the overwhelming majority of internet media sharing was personal home videos and legally-traded music, this wouldn't be an issue.
That's not the case, and you know it's not the case. Repeat: my behavior on-line is not representative of everybody else's. At all.
Even apart from that, many news sites offer video clips of news that they offer, is any of this illegal downloading of copyrighted material?
No, that's legal downloading of copyrighted material. You've been given permission.
Also while I don't produce music, what about the copyright owners wanting to distribute their songs?
The copyright owners are distributing the songs. The musicians typically don't own the copyrights; that's why you sign with a label. Normally, when any author creates an original work, they hold a statutory copyright as an incident of authorship. You can then register your copyright to give it more legal teeth. However, when you go to work for somebody and get paid to produce a creative work, contracts are drafted that transfer the copyright you'd normally hold as an incident of authorship to whomever is paying for the work.
I'm sure you know this, and I can't figure out if you're just being argumentative or what.
As much as they wish it were true, all media is not owned by RIAA/MPAA.
I agree with you there, and thank God for it.
And aside from that, I stream my music from home to my computer at work. If I own these songs, isn't that legal?
You don't own those songs. And it's legal if the rights you've purchased to them permit it. The problem here is that under Fair Use, that should be completely legal, and this is where I firmly come down on your side of this. You've been a good boy, a good consumer, a good citizen, and paid for your music. The RIAA and their ilk are trying to enacting legislation and enforce rights restrictions to prevent you from exercising rights you should have as a good boy who paid for his music.
Or did RIAA get their way and I have to buy a copy of each song I listen to for the office, home, car, etc...?
There's no question that they'd love for it to be that way, but you needn't be obtuse here. If media can be played back, it can be duplicated. That's the nature of physics. The problem, again, is the DMCA has criminalized this process by making it illegal to bypass copyright.
The real issue here is that we currently have a number of laws that directly conflict with each other. To enjoy the liberty that has been granted you by court decisions 20 years ago you have to violate other laws.
I'm not defending the RIAA here, far from it. But for you and people like you to even try to pretend that there's no piracy issue and that it isn't costing the industry any money is utterly stupid and naive. They're going about fixing it the wrong way, there's no question, and they're clearly wrong to punish and limit the liberty of legitimate, honest people in an effort to catch the bad guys. I'm on your side in principle, but you have to pull your head out of this fantasy world you envision that peopled only with law-abiding citizens who only download legitimately and never download media illegally.
Streaming music, offering home videos, home pictures from my 6MP camera (not small pictures) all take up a lot of bandwidth. It's shortsightedness like yours that lead to stupid laws and restrictions because whatever you don't need must be "clearly and unquestionable and overwhelmingly illegal downloading of copyrighted material."
What short-sightedness? You misunderstood ONE sentence and have gotten entirely the wr
If those people represented an overwhelming majority of internet downloads, there'd be no piracy problem for the RIAA to solve.
You misunderstood. No matter what kind of disc I buy, I call it a Frisbee, and so do most people. No matter what brand of tissue I buy, I call it Kleenex, no matter what kind of bandage I buy, I call it a Band-Aid, even if our photocopier is a Canon, I tell people to go "Xerox this document." The sales figures are irrelevent. These brands are irrecovably associated with the product type rather than a specific brand of it. The point was to provide an illustration of unbreakable social consciousness. In classic Slashdot form, you've missed the point and instead attacked ancillary data.
That's an excellent point, but I think there are some differences worth discussing. First, you are listening to radio, and you cannot replay the song you want any time you wish, or make copies of it for your buddy. It's played on the radio, with permission from the copyright holder, and you get to listen to it. That's not at all analogous to downloading something off eMule.
Now, you could hit "record" on your boom box and make a copy onto your cassette tape, but you also paid a royalty when you bought that tape that accounted for that kind of use of it. There's no such royalty levvied when you
$ cp ComfortablyNumb.mp3 /my/buddies/machine
People don't own information, but you can own rights to how it is used and distributed. And even then, some types of information are immune. You can't copyright a meter stick or height chart and charge people to make them.
Forgive me, I didn't RTFA, so it may have mentioned this. I'd imagine the legalspeak of this agreement includes some kind of indemnity from prosecution. Shit may roll downhill at your office, but liability keeps rolling uphill until it stops at somebody with enough insurance coverage to pay for somebody else's damages.
You know how people who aren't really involved with something get sued? For example, a contractor loans his scaffolding to a church, and some dude falls off and breaks his back, and the church sues the guy? It sounds like a corrupt, immoral church. The truth is that the guy has medical bills his insurance won't cover, and the church's insurance won't cover it, so it keeps rolling up until it lands on somebody who does have the right insurance - the small business owner in this case, whose scaffolding was involved.
That's why if your name is on the title of a car and an uninsured driver mains somebody with it, they come after you. There's $750,000 that is going to be collected by somebody from somebody else's insurance company, and it'll keep rolling until it hits somebody whose insurance will cover it (or who has the most assets, which they'll possess and force you into bankruptcy - this is why most bankruptcies declared by individuals are a result of medical expenses that can't be paid - they aren't necessarily their own medical expenses, just expenses that they are liable for).
I'm guessing this deal with the RIAA is similar. If they agree to this and carry it out in good faith, then when the RIAA discovers an ISP whose bandwidth has been used for tens of millions of dollars worth of copyright infringement, the rolling turd of liability will bounce over them. Why sue a bunch of 14 year olds with a net worth of about eighty bucks when there's SBC or QWest or whoever with 8 digits of liquidity?
And before somebody attemps to invalidate the entire post by attacking ancillary data ... I can't remember 100% if it was 7-11 or Quick-Trip or Kum'n'Go or who. It was an anecdote we were given in microeconomics about 7 years ago in college about the failings of inflexible businesses, so if the details/facts aren't 100% spot-on, my apologies.
I'd says porn and games are interchangeably #1 and #2. And the rest is clearly and unquestionable and overwhelmingly illegal downloading of copyrighted material.
Remember - just because YOU and YOUR FRIENDS buy what you download, most people do not.
Regardless, they're not going to win this way.
Before refridgeration was a household technology, people who needed ice had it delivered. There were lots of companies that provided this service. There were also lots of dairy-delivery companies too. My grandfather used to deliver milk.
Anyway, enough people had refridgeration in their homes at a certain point that the death of dairy and ice delivery was inevitable. Some companies tried to fight this. Some tried to point out the flaws in home-made ice. Some tried to point out the expense. Some even appealed to consumers on the grounds that good hard-working men were losing jobs because the evil consumer was making his own ice rather than buying it from a good ol' fashioned American company.
It all fell on deaf ears. Only one ice company survived the collapse of their market. It was the company that opened a new type of store - a combination service station/grocery. You could buy ice there, sure. In blocks or bags. You still can. They became 7-11, and not only did they survive the death of the ice market, they went on to insane profits that were never possible in the ice industry.
Now, making ice in your home isn't illegal. Downloading copyrighted music that you haven't purchased is. So the analogy falls apart there. However, the RIAA's approach to solving his is akin to the ice delivery services trying to get in-home freezers banned because it's screwing up their business model.
Well, tough shit. Agile companies that spot trends and capitalize on them survive. Bloated bureaucracies of self-serving directors eventually die. That's capitalism, and that's how it ought to work. It's a shame that their business model is failing because of massive copyright infringement, and not because of a legitimate new business. It's even more of a shame that stuff like iTunes came along as a solution to the piracy problem, when it should have predated it.
They missed the boat on the Internet. Napster was there before iTunes, and the idea of free music is now forever ingrained into the social consciousness of on-line culture. Sometimes companies can divorce a culture of this link, but usually not. All photocopiers are the "Xerox" machine, all tissue is "Kleenex", all flying discs are "Frisbies" all adhesive bandages are "Band-Aids". Even RollerBlade was only partially successful in protecting their brand from being synonymous with the product. These companies would be foolish to spend money on a campaign to break this association.
And that's why the RIAA is foolish. It's too late to stop this. It can't be stopped through legislation, legeal threats, copy protection schemes, the DMCA, or anything else. The only thing that can stop it is for them to find a way to make it more convenient for people to get the music they want at a cost so marginal that paying for the added convenience is worthwhile.
Until and unless you run a very significant risk of getting caught and prosecuted, it won't stop. And people will suffer the eroding of their rights only so much in an effort to protect the revenue streams of millionaires.
There's a few to keep you busy.
Restrictions on personal freedom are NEVER good. In the end - you lose, criminals and politicians win.
I know. Hence I cited the 0.4% death rate figure. Twice as many people die of alcohol poisoning in this country than die from gun-related accidents or homicides. Other than a few fundamentalist Christians, nobody is pushing hard to get "just the hard stuff" banned that "nobody has a legitimate need for." You have no need of 100 proof liquor! We're going to ban it to save lives.
Just lost my business.
If you believe otherwise, I've got this nice bridge in London I'd like to sell you.
This statement is ignorant and naive. Abundant examples exist and can be readily researched to prov you wrong here. There have been and still are cultures in which the human body is not highly sexualized. 14 year olds in nudist colonies do not exist in a state of unending arousal, nor do children who grow up in societies where topless women are the norm. Anybody who has watched 15 minutes of National Geographic should be able to figure this out.
The invention of rifling predates the 18th century by at least 200 years. As for rifled firearms, your date sounds about right to me. In any case:
Now = 2005
"the end of the eighteenth century" = 1795
Now - Then = 210 years, which could be interpretted by most reasonable people to be "a few hundred years".
Boys are still learning to shoot rifles, I just don't think most boys still are. No, not even in America, where the insane massive gun violence rates driven and encouraged by soulless Republicans and NRA nutcases are causing 0.4% of deaths.
I'm not sure how "substantial" of a proportion it is anymore. I think boys who learned to shoot a rifle 30 years ago are learning to shoot pistols now. Most of the people I know who own or know how to fire a gun are pistol owners, and I'm from a pretty rural part of the country (Iowa).
Finally, your response is typical Slashdot attacks on ancillary data which, if adjusted from an extemporaneous guess to a researched fact, doesn't change the validity of my point. So change "As little as a few hundred years ago..." to "As little as 20 years ago..." or "Even today..." and my point is emphasized.
I'm still alive and, unless something has gone horribly wrong sinec 11:03AM, so are you, most likely. In fact, the species has managed to survive EVERY SINGLE MOMENT OF TIME for as long as any of us can remember, and for as long as history records. It's pretty amazing. Now, to stop being a pedantic ass, a serious question - in what way are we not surviving? Apparantly a crop of readers found your point insightful. I really don't. Can you elaborate?
Violence is a part of basic survival instincts, and play involving the miming of violence and conflict is not only normal and prevelent in thousands of species, it's probably a healthy outlet. You have to remember that we're not really that far removed from young boys learning to hunt things down with spears basically as soon as they are old enough to know to keep quiet. We're not talking millions of years here, we're talking thousands of years ago. As little as a few hundred years ago, most boys learned how to shoot a rifle. Why? Same reason we all know how to operate a motor vehicle - you need to know how to do it to get by.
The instinct to mime violence can be witnesses on Animal Planet during any number of specials on nearly any mammal. Put two dogs together, what's the first thing they do? Run around and try to bite each other. They're playing, but they're also mimicking basic pack/hunting mentality. They're establishing the alpha dog through mimed violence.
Sex, however, doesn't become interesting until later in life.
I still blame American's ridiculous shame in its own sexuality on coaching from the religious right and the Puritan foundations of the country, but it's not like there's NO GOOD REASON why kids absorb violence more easily than sexuality. Seeing an exposed nipple during the Super Bowl isn't going to damage any of their precious little mental circuits. Nudity doesn't have to equate to sexuality. America hasn't figured that out yet.
Windows' problem in its permissions implemention, it's in its whole friggen architecture. Windows has traditionally violated most of the fundamental principles of software development, and Microsoft is going back and cleaning them up one by one.
I keep saying this, and I'm going to keep saying it, partially because it irks the geeks and partly because I believe it.
Microsoft and Linux (or another *Nix vendor) will merge forces. By 2015 you will see a Unix kernel in Windows (or what used to be Windows). As Mac has become a BSD family, expect Microsoft to do it eventually too. It's all part of their, "If you can't beat 'em, absorb 'em," philosophy.
What a typical inaccurate Slashdot write-up, and a typically ignorant response. First of all, the crack is foam insulation on the external fuel tank, not in the shuttle itself, like your title suggests. Second, the foam is on the external fuel tank, which does not re-enter orbit, it's discarded once the shuttle is in orbit. It won't impact the shuttle's re-entry in to the atmosphere.
Pearl Harbor was a Disney film intended to be a "feel good" romantic yarn about war staring big-name pretty actors and it had, as I recall, a PG or PG-13 label.
A typical Family Guy episode would be rated R if it was in theatres. The MPAA would take one look at Glen Quagmire with a hooker and slap "R" on there.
Or MacOS X.
Problem solved.
I know, that's a naive simplification, but Windows is and for most of its life has been a business-oriented program and Microsoft's efforts to turn it into a home PC desktop OS have been clumsy.
Such is the nature of technology. When these things are developed, the creators generally don't envision the applications for Joe Q. Public. Nobody at DARPA foresaw World of Warcraft when they were prototyping the technology that would become the internet.
I do spend it. I have to. If I don't spend it, the bank forcloses on my mortgage, takes my car, and they shut off the water and power, the student loan goes into default, etc.
I don't understand people who waste huge amounts of money on dumb stuff or excessive stuff.
What are you going to do with your millions of pennies saved when you're 70?
Use my wealth to attract gold-diggers in their 20's since, by then, my natural good looks will have faded. Duh!
These jokes aren't funny, interesting, clever, or worth repeating. It's not even that they're not believable, it's that they're just stupid. The write-ups aren't funny or clever, they're getting VERY predictable. Add me to the chorus of increasingly annoyed /. readers who are losing patience with the 4/1 jokes this year. I don't mind that there's no/few legitimate news stories, but do the hoaxes have to be so obvious, uncreative, and simple-minded?