The problem is that people aren't "printing" their own material, they are using what the RIAA puts out. If the RIAA closed shop tomorrow, the face of P2P wouldn't change at all. It would still be used to trade songs that were put out by the RIAA. I have no problem with people using P2P to put out music they own the copyright on, but this is about.001% of the traffic on P2P networks. The RIAA isn't upset because the P2P networks are being used by people to put out music not on the RIAA labels (because that is not what is happening). They are angry because P2P networks are being used to trade music that the copyright owners don't want traded.
I'm sure the RIAA would like to control all distribution, but that is not what this argument is about. They didn't want Napster to stop trading all music, they wanted them to stop trading the music the RIAA controls (which, whether you like it or not is their right). Napster could still be around trading music from indie bands that want their stuff traded on it, but no one is interested in that, they are interested in downloading the newest Britney or Backstreet Boys song. If there was P2P that only traded in non-RIAA songs, the RIAA couldn't touch it, but anyone who makes P2P knows that people won't use it if they can't get what they want, and what they want is what the RIAA owns.
A format doesn't begin mass market acceptance until the fanatic audiophiles buy into it at the beginning, and those are exactly the types of people who will raise the biggest stink about the copy protection, and the lack of digital audio out.
These are exactly the people who won't care about copy protection, because they don't want a lossy copy on their computer. They want these formats for the superior quality, and if you want superior quality, you don't care as much about maiking a lower quality copy. Audiophiles are the ones who still claim the MP3 is a horrible format even though the average person can't tell the difference between cd audio and MP3. They won't care that they can't make a copy of it, because the copy will invariably be of worse quality, and that is exactly what the audiophile doesn't want.
I don't think you understand their position. They are claiming that once electronic surveillance measures that "read" the contents of file transfers is installed to thwart trading of copyrighted materials, that same technology could be easily modified in the near future to block the transmission of ny other digital information. Knowing that the university is reading every single thing you send or receive is likely to put a chill into most people, even if what they are "saying" over computer networks is relatively benign.
Except this is in no way what goes on when a university bans something like Kazaa. They have no idea what is in the packet, they just no the packet is on port X. If it is on port X, they will not allow the packet to go anywhere. The packet could being bomb plans or the newest Britney MP3, they have no idea. This type of FUD is no better than that put out by the RIAA.
Even in that case, where (if?) the person was making a deliberate attempt to undermine the company using false information, I still see no reason why Yahoo, AOL, or any other middle-man company should be at all obligated to get involved.
Because they are the only people who have the information. If someone commits a crime and then hides in my house, I cannot say that they aren't there, just because I don't want to be involved. they are not asking AOL to get involved directly, but to reveal information about the people who may have committed libel. If someone has broken the law (or whatever subsection of the justice system libel falls under, probably torts), you are responsible to not hide information requested by the court about them.
I remember hearing a while ago about some nutbag who made a white supremecist game. The idea was to run around kill as many minorities as you can, in the most horrible way you can. It was advertised along the lines of "run through the hood and hit niggers with bat, shoot all the spics you can" and things like that. Now, I think it would be a fair statement to say that most people (even on/.) would be against this game. So the big question is, what is the real difference between a game that encourages you to kill "spics" and a game that encourages you to kill other people? Is it really that much worse to be a racist than to beat up a prostitute and blow up a police car?
We already know what happens when you can buy MP3s online at a comparable price, people still trade music and don't buy them. A quick Google search came up with this page with links to a few place you can buy legal MP3s. MP3s are available to be legally purchased, but people still are not doing it. That is because for most people, P2P is about getting stuff for free.
While in theory it would be great for banks to support everything out there, the reality is they just can't. They have to pick the biggest browsers and target their software for them. Imagine if they said they supported any browser available, how many different tech people would you need to sort through a problem? "Well, it works on IE, Netscape, and Opera, but Mozilla nd Konquere don't work, we need to figure out the problem and then rework the whole page." And they woudl also have to support user calls on every browser, which could also be a nightmare. This isn;t a generic website, this is banking information. They need to limit the possible ways things can break, which means they need to limit the software that can be used. If there is a problem discovered with Opera (for example) that suddenly means the information going to your browser isn't secure, people will blame the bank, not the browser. If your password gets hacked because Konquer (or IE, or whatever) does something wrong, people will hold the bank responsible, even if it's because they didn't upgrade their own browser.
the same thing goes for software. the whole "falls into the wrong hands" argument works exactly the same as crypto-systems. if a crypto-system falls into the wrong hands (as someone else noted), it will also fall into the right hands, and errors will be fixed.
licensing government software under the gpl opens it up, and in the long run reduces the error rate and effectively, it's security, etc. people still think that if they hide the source to the software, it will be more secure. PLEASE look at what happened to cryptology in recent times and act accordingly.
In theory, this is very sound practice. But in reality, how many people will actually look at the government's code and help them? If they have a very specific program to monitor conditions on a missile (or other use that 99.999% of regular programs wouldn't have a use for and couldn't understand with a lot of background knowledge), how many people are actually going to look at it and make any helpful suggestions? Very, very few. While at the same time, every other government and "evil doer" on earth can look at the code and search for flaws in it. The theory of open source is great, but it has to be something that many programmers will actually look at, which doesn't apply to most cases of very specialized program.
Open source works great for Linux and Gnome and KDE, because there are many people who are interested in making it better and using it. It doesn't work nearly as well for little programs that most people don't care about, because you cannot get enough eyes (especially enough knowledgable eyes) to make it worthwhile.
I somewhat agree with this point, but you also have to consider the flipside, which is that many music "traders" want nothing less than completel access not only to rip music to their PC, but to download and trade it freely, without any restrictions at all. When the RIAA has thought about doing encrypted downloads, they were pretty much universally blasted because they wouldn't play on every OS and that people couldn't use them however they wanted (as in trading on Kazaa, etc). Unfortunately, when the RIAA has made moves toward the middle (such as encrypted downloads), the "music traders" have been there to twart them at every turn by breaking their encryption, which just shows to the RIAA that they can't do it without the music being available for free (which is bad for them). I find it amazing people are praising Jimmy Cliff for releasing an encrypted download that you can't burn to cd, trade, or play on some OSes, yet the RIAA was lambasted for the exact same thing. Both extremes aren't playing with a full deck, and unfortunately, most of us are caught in the middle.
It is illegal because you are bypassing the copy-protection on the XBox, which is illegal under the DMCA. We can argue all day that the DMCA is a bad law, but until it is changed/overturned, it is the law. Regular motherboards don't have any copy-protection, so changing them isn't illegal under the DMCA. But the XBox has coopy protection, so by bypassing it you are breaking the law (whether it should be a crime or not).
The openxbox/pc-bioxx 'mod' is a blank flashrom with a parallel header. It could not only be used on an xbox, but on any motherboard that uses 8mbit bioses and has an LPC bus. It has tons of uses aside from piracy or running linux on xbox. Ever want to try that crazy bios hack for your mobo that unlocks freakishly high FSB and vCore settings? Here you go. Why can't they use the "primary function" clause to their benefit in this case? Why not just say the primary function of the device is to replace/play with the bios on the mobo in your PC, and not mention xbox?
If they were sold as "motherboard extenders" or something like that, then it would probably be legitimate. But it's hard to claim the main function is anything other than an XBox mod when they are sold as "XBox mod chips". If they marketted them as "motherboard extenders" they wouldn't sell many, because people wouldn't know that they worked with the XBox. It's a catch-22. If you don't market them as "XBox mod chips", people don't know what they are and won't buy them. If you market them as "XBox mod chips", you are admitting their primary function is to mod an XBox, and will be sued since it is illegal to market them.
think you're missing the point. It's not the strategy that's amusing, it's the fact that it's such a poor effort. Microsoft doesn't offer one reason to use XP that doesn't also exist in Mac OS X. Microsoft Office? They have that for OS X. Multi-user? Yeah, OS X has that. Etc, etc.
But then again, the Apple switch ads don't offer a single reason to use a Mac that WinXP doesn't have. You can burn cds and dvds, which you can do on WinXP. You can make movies, whihc you can do on WinXP. Neither sides has any really good arguements, because people wouldn't respond to the good arguements (things like the cariety of software on Windows vs Mac or the better usage of the power of a Mac vs WinXP). Neither side really will convince someone to switch, it will just hopefully make them check out both and make a decision after looking at both of them.
think Jackson did a good work inside the court room and a bad one outside. It was quite clear from the beginning, that there would be an appeal. In that case he should have tried everything to make it waterproof. But with the interviews he served a broadside of grapeshot to his own cause.
The whole problem was that he had a "cause". As a judge, he should be upholding the law, whether he agress with it or not. His "causes" shouldn't enter into it at all. By virtue of being a banner waver for his "cause" he showed that he could have possibly been tainted in his decision. He shouldn't worry about his "cause", or the appeal, or anything other than making the correct legal decision.
I buy an Xbox (not that I would), it is therefore mine. I chip it, which presumably voids the warranty, but this is still legal because I own it.
This is true, and not even MS is disputing this. They cannot come after you for having chipped your own system. But it is illegal to sell the mod chips (because of the DMCA). They can stop people from selling the mod chip, since making the mod chip and distributing it is illegal.
It seems to me that we are playing Robin Hood here. The RIAA/MPAA is charing WAY too much for the media they distribute. It's one market that does not have to abide by supply and demand.
I'm curious as to how you come to this conclusion. The RIAA cannot create demand for their product. There are thousand of cds that make no or very little money because there is no demand for them, how exactly does the RIAA get around this? They can have all the supply of Yanni cds they want, but if there is no demand, they won't make any. And if they decide to charge too much for their supply, the demand will go down and they won't make as much money (of course this only applies if there is not an easy way to get the music without paying for it).
The only way to avoid supply and demand is to get a product where the demand is unlimited, say oxygen. The RIAA has to deal with supply and demand just as any other group does, they just found a way to make it work for them.
So now the local indy shops that can't match the $8 a CD that the big chains can sell for will go under. They're already more expensive, but it just got pointless for them to even try.
SO people complain when CDs are too expensive, but also when they are too cheap? The CD manufacturers no longer have any control over how much Best Buy et. al. charge for their CDs. The chains like that can afford to take a loss on CDs because their hope is to get people in the door and sucker them into buying some other, more expensive, item. The RIAA actually tried to get them not to sell their CDs at a loss, since it was hurting other CD outlets, but the chains took them to court and won. So you can either complain about the RIAA making prices too high, or the chains making prices too low, but you can't complain about both.
I'll care more when 72 minutes of pure audio doesn't cost 50% more than 2 hours of high quality movie footage with soundtracks in three language plus bonus material, AND I can legally (and easily) store what I buy on my file server. Until then, the MPAA and RIAA can collectively "bite me".
Can we finally stop the comparison between CDs and DVDs, since it is one of the most flawed comparison that exists. A DVD is an aftermarket product of a movie. The money is spent making a movie, not the DVD. The cost of the DVD is fairly small, especially compared to the movie. Marketing is also very small (if anything), because there was so much advertising for the movie very little is needed (although sometimes a lot is done anyway). By the time a DVD comes out, the movies has already made back a portion of the money (hopefully at least a decent portion if not actually made money) in the theatres. Even the extras are cheap, using footage already filmed and maybe bringing in a few people to record an audio soundtrack. All of these things combined make the DVD fairly cheap to produce compared to a CD. A CD has made no money when it is released and must make enough money to pay for every single thing that went into the making/marketing of the CD. Taking an already made movie and slapping it on a DVD and making basically nothing but profit from the sale is a lot different than putting out a CD and hoping the sales pay for the expense of the CD itself.
And just for the record, you can legally and easily store the MP3s you make from a CD you own on your file server. That has already been established. You can't share them with other people, but you are free to rip MP3s from CDs you own and listen to them.
As much I dislike the idea, the **AA should be free to put up anything on P2P services, including fake songs. If the idea of P2P is to share files, these are legitimate files to share. Just because you are looking of the full (illegal) version of the file, and you happen to find their fake version doesn't mean it is any less a legitimate file to be shared. It's the double edged sword of file-sharing. If you claim you have the right to share any file, then they also have the right to share any file.
Now as far as havking people's system (which they have seemed to smartly back away from) or even blocking file-sharing to people's systems, that is just plain wrong. They do not have the authority to perform a DOS (which is basically what they are doing) to a system or to kick that person of the P2P network.
And now, so show how much we believe that Xenu.net should be viewed, we're going to slashdot the hell out of it to make sure no one can see it! Maybe this is the scientologists real plans to take it down?
It seems you don't have any recourse, or more precisely, the same recourse as spammers do. This is exactly what many in the/. community have been fighting for in regards to "spammers list". The company has a right to block any site it wants with it's software (just the same way an email server can block any address/domain it wants to). They have no obligation to let anyone using their software see your site. This seems one of those ironic cases of fighting to get the right to block something (spammers in this case) and then other people using that same right against us.
I'd clone my girlfriend (2 or 3 times should be enough)
Which brings up an interesting question. If you clone yourself, and have sex with yourself, are you gay, or is it masturbation? And if you clone you girlfriend, and sleep with them all, is it really cheating?
While agree with Puffy taking good music and making crap, the difference isn't that he makes money, the difference is that he pays for the songs he mutilates and the original artists get credit for their portion. If you look at "Missing You" (I think that's what it's called, the one that sampled the Police's "Every Breathe You Take") you'll see that the Police share writing credit on it, because they wrote the original. Compare that to this where Steinski takes complete credit for everything written on it. The original artists don't get credit, much less paid for their work. You simply cannot take someone's work, claim it as your own and use it however you like. You need their permission to use their work.
The problem isn't as much as the idea that the photographer has a copyright on the images, but rather that they are performing a work for hire.
Isn't this the same arguement used by the RIAA? Musicians are just doing work for hire, so they don't own the copyright on their works, the labels do? Where exactly is the difference between the RIAA saying a musician is doing work for hire and you claiming the photographer is doing work for hire? In both cases it is someone paying an artist to perform their art (in one case they record music, in another they take photos) and then claiming they own the rights to the artists work because they are paying them. The only difference I see is that in one scenario, it is the "evil RIAA" depriving artists of their rights, and in the other it's you getting you're wedding pics cheaper, i.e. no difference.
I'm not making any accusations *cough*, but does this strike anyone else as a great addition to Microsoft's "fuck them over and make them upgrade" business model? Leave a product full of security flaws, and, years later, when people aren't upgrading to the new version, refuse to fix security flaws in the old versions.
While yes, this could fit into your conspiracy theory, eventually software has to stop being supported. Try to get a fix for Wordpefect 4.0 or MacOS 6, there won't be one. Office97 is 5 years old, in computer terms, that is a lifetime. Eventually, old software stops being supported. I think 2 versions and 5 years later is a fair amount of time to support a product.
Production costs are now trivial, with the digital age. You no longer need to rent an enormously expensive studio to record and mix music. You can get by with very simple recording equipment and digital mixing. It is so cheap most successful artists put production studios in their homes. It is so cheap that ingenious young musicians do the entire thing in their garage, and mix it on a computer, for total production costs of about $100 (excluding their time). Marketing is the one thing the major labels can provide that is not cheap. But at to your comment that most CDs lose money, this is quite simply false. No one is going to produce CDs that lose money for long. I am not claiming it cost $1 to make a CD (and I didn't in my prior post either). But production and distribution costs do not come close to justifying the price. Marketing costs do not either. The only justification is collusion, and that is plain and simple. The price of a new Harry Potter DVD is about $18. The price of the soundtrack CD is about $16. Tell me there is not a mismatch between relative value and price between those two.
Production can be done for $100, but it will not be nearly as good. Most large bands still produce in expensive studios, because there is a quality difference. You can produce cheaply, but it won't sound as good. And most CDs (on the order of 80% of them if I remember correctly) do not make enough money to cover the production, pressing and marketing. That is why there are so many bands that only make 1 CD, the label can't afford to let them make another one if the first one didn't make money. the label has to recoup what is looses on the CDs that do make money. They don't know what will make money, so the money-makers have to make up for the chance and failure on the other bands.
As for the "free" distribution over the internet (that other people have brought up), that is an entirely different subject. When discussing the price of CDs, it's hard to say if they were an entirely different product (which distributing over the net would require) that distibution would be cheaper. That's like saying cars don't need to use as much gas as they do, just look at motorcycles, they don't use much.
As for the Harry Potter CD/DVD fiasco, the hardcover of the book is currently $13.97. Certainly the book doesn't cost nearly as much to make as a major motion picture, so why not the outcry about the price mismatch? And the audio book is $34.97! If you're going to scream collusion, shouldn't you do it for a book even moreso than the CD?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that people aren't "printing" their own material, they are using what the RIAA puts out. If the RIAA closed shop tomorrow, the face of P2P wouldn't change at all. It would still be used to trade songs that were put out by the RIAA. I have no problem with people using P2P to put out music they own the copyright on, but this is about .001% of the traffic on P2P networks. The RIAA isn't upset because the P2P networks are being used by people to put out music not on the RIAA labels (because that is not what is happening). They are angry because P2P networks are being used to trade music that the copyright owners don't want traded.
I'm sure the RIAA would like to control all distribution, but that is not what this argument is about. They didn't want Napster to stop trading all music, they wanted them to stop trading the music the RIAA controls (which, whether you like it or not is their right). Napster could still be around trading music from indie bands that want their stuff traded on it, but no one is interested in that, they are interested in downloading the newest Britney or Backstreet Boys song. If there was P2P that only traded in non-RIAA songs, the RIAA couldn't touch it, but anyone who makes P2P knows that people won't use it if they can't get what they want, and what they want is what the RIAA owns.
A format doesn't begin mass market acceptance until the fanatic audiophiles buy into it at the beginning, and those are exactly the types of people who will raise the biggest stink about the copy protection, and the lack of digital audio out.
These are exactly the people who won't care about copy protection, because they don't want a lossy copy on their computer. They want these formats for the superior quality, and if you want superior quality, you don't care as much about maiking a lower quality copy. Audiophiles are the ones who still claim the MP3 is a horrible format even though the average person can't tell the difference between cd audio and MP3. They won't care that they can't make a copy of it, because the copy will invariably be of worse quality, and that is exactly what the audiophile doesn't want.
I don't think you understand their position. They are claiming that once electronic surveillance measures that "read" the contents of file transfers is installed to thwart trading of copyrighted materials, that same technology could be easily modified in the near future to block the transmission of ny other digital information. Knowing that the university is reading every single thing you send or receive is likely to put a chill into most people, even if what they are "saying" over computer networks is relatively benign.
Except this is in no way what goes on when a university bans something like Kazaa. They have no idea what is in the packet, they just no the packet is on port X. If it is on port X, they will not allow the packet to go anywhere. The packet could being bomb plans or the newest Britney MP3, they have no idea. This type of FUD is no better than that put out by the RIAA.
Even in that case, where (if?) the person was making a deliberate attempt to undermine the company using false information, I still see no reason why Yahoo, AOL, or any other middle-man company should be at all obligated to get involved.
Because they are the only people who have the information. If someone commits a crime and then hides in my house, I cannot say that they aren't there, just because I don't want to be involved. they are not asking AOL to get involved directly, but to reveal information about the people who may have committed libel. If someone has broken the law (or whatever subsection of the justice system libel falls under, probably torts), you are responsible to not hide information requested by the court about them.
I remember hearing a while ago about some nutbag who made a white supremecist game. The idea was to run around kill as many minorities as you can, in the most horrible way you can. It was advertised along the lines of "run through the hood and hit niggers with bat, shoot all the spics you can" and things like that. Now, I think it would be a fair statement to say that most people (even on /.) would be against this game. So the big question is, what is the real difference between a game that encourages you to kill "spics" and a game that encourages you to kill other people? Is it really that much worse to be a racist than to beat up a prostitute and blow up a police car?
We already know what happens when you can buy MP3s online at a comparable price, people still trade music and don't buy them. A quick Google search came up with this page with links to a few place you can buy legal MP3s. MP3s are available to be legally purchased, but people still are not doing it. That is because for most people, P2P is about getting stuff for free.
While in theory it would be great for banks to support everything out there, the reality is they just can't. They have to pick the biggest browsers and target their software for them. Imagine if they said they supported any browser available, how many different tech people would you need to sort through a problem? "Well, it works on IE, Netscape, and Opera, but Mozilla nd Konquere don't work, we need to figure out the problem and then rework the whole page." And they woudl also have to support user calls on every browser, which could also be a nightmare. This isn;t a generic website, this is banking information. They need to limit the possible ways things can break, which means they need to limit the software that can be used. If there is a problem discovered with Opera (for example) that suddenly means the information going to your browser isn't secure, people will blame the bank, not the browser. If your password gets hacked because Konquer (or IE, or whatever) does something wrong, people will hold the bank responsible, even if it's because they didn't upgrade their own browser.
the same thing goes for software. the whole "falls into the wrong hands" argument works exactly the same as crypto-systems. if a crypto-system falls into the wrong hands (as someone else noted), it will also fall into the right hands, and errors will be fixed.
licensing government software under the gpl opens it up, and in the long run reduces the error rate and effectively, it's security, etc. people still think that if they hide the source to the software, it will be more secure. PLEASE look at what happened to cryptology in recent times and act accordingly.
In theory, this is very sound practice. But in reality, how many people will actually look at the government's code and help them? If they have a very specific program to monitor conditions on a missile (or other use that 99.999% of regular programs wouldn't have a use for and couldn't understand with a lot of background knowledge), how many people are actually going to look at it and make any helpful suggestions? Very, very few. While at the same time, every other government and "evil doer" on earth can look at the code and search for flaws in it. The theory of open source is great, but it has to be something that many programmers will actually look at, which doesn't apply to most cases of very specialized program.
Open source works great for Linux and Gnome and KDE, because there are many people who are interested in making it better and using it. It doesn't work nearly as well for little programs that most people don't care about, because you cannot get enough eyes (especially enough knowledgable eyes) to make it worthwhile.
I somewhat agree with this point, but you also have to consider the flipside, which is that many music "traders" want nothing less than completel access not only to rip music to their PC, but to download and trade it freely, without any restrictions at all. When the RIAA has thought about doing encrypted downloads, they were pretty much universally blasted because they wouldn't play on every OS and that people couldn't use them however they wanted (as in trading on Kazaa, etc). Unfortunately, when the RIAA has made moves toward the middle (such as encrypted downloads), the "music traders" have been there to twart them at every turn by breaking their encryption, which just shows to the RIAA that they can't do it without the music being available for free (which is bad for them). I find it amazing people are praising Jimmy Cliff for releasing an encrypted download that you can't burn to cd, trade, or play on some OSes, yet the RIAA was lambasted for the exact same thing. Both extremes aren't playing with a full deck, and unfortunately, most of us are caught in the middle.
It is illegal because you are bypassing the copy-protection on the XBox, which is illegal under the DMCA. We can argue all day that the DMCA is a bad law, but until it is changed/overturned, it is the law. Regular motherboards don't have any copy-protection, so changing them isn't illegal under the DMCA. But the XBox has coopy protection, so by bypassing it you are breaking the law (whether it should be a crime or not).
The openxbox/pc-bioxx 'mod' is a blank flashrom with a parallel header. It could not only be used on an xbox, but on any motherboard that uses 8mbit bioses and has an LPC bus. It has tons of uses aside from piracy or running linux on xbox. Ever want to try that crazy bios hack for your mobo that unlocks freakishly high FSB and vCore settings? Here you go.
Why can't they use the "primary function" clause to their benefit in this case?
Why not just say the primary function of the device is to replace/play with the bios on the mobo in your PC, and not mention xbox?
If they were sold as "motherboard extenders" or something like that, then it would probably be legitimate. But it's hard to claim the main function is anything other than an XBox mod when they are sold as "XBox mod chips". If they marketted them as "motherboard extenders" they wouldn't sell many, because people wouldn't know that they worked with the XBox. It's a catch-22. If you don't market them as "XBox mod chips", people don't know what they are and won't buy them. If you market them as "XBox mod chips", you are admitting their primary function is to mod an XBox, and will be sued since it is illegal to market them.
think you're missing the point. It's not the strategy that's amusing, it's the fact that it's such a poor effort. Microsoft doesn't offer one reason to use XP that doesn't also exist in Mac OS X. Microsoft Office? They have that for OS X. Multi-user? Yeah, OS X has that. Etc, etc.
But then again, the Apple switch ads don't offer a single reason to use a Mac that WinXP doesn't have. You can burn cds and dvds, which you can do on WinXP. You can make movies, whihc you can do on WinXP. Neither sides has any really good arguements, because people wouldn't respond to the good arguements (things like the cariety of software on Windows vs Mac or the better usage of the power of a Mac vs WinXP). Neither side really will convince someone to switch, it will just hopefully make them check out both and make a decision after looking at both of them.
think Jackson did a good work inside the court room and a bad one outside. It was quite clear from the beginning, that there would be an appeal. In that case he should have tried everything to make it waterproof. But with the interviews he served a broadside of grapeshot to his own cause.
The whole problem was that he had a "cause". As a judge, he should be upholding the law, whether he agress with it or not. His "causes" shouldn't enter into it at all. By virtue of being a banner waver for his "cause" he showed that he could have possibly been tainted in his decision. He shouldn't worry about his "cause", or the appeal, or anything other than making the correct legal decision.
I buy an Xbox (not that I would), it is therefore mine. I chip it, which presumably voids the warranty, but this is still legal because I own it.
This is true, and not even MS is disputing this. They cannot come after you for having chipped your own system. But it is illegal to sell the mod chips (because of the DMCA). They can stop people from selling the mod chip, since making the mod chip and distributing it is illegal.
It seems to me that we are playing Robin Hood here. The RIAA/MPAA is charing WAY too much for the media they distribute. It's one market that does not have to abide by supply and demand.
I'm curious as to how you come to this conclusion. The RIAA cannot create demand for their product. There are thousand of cds that make no or very little money because there is no demand for them, how exactly does the RIAA get around this? They can have all the supply of Yanni cds they want, but if there is no demand, they won't make any. And if they decide to charge too much for their supply, the demand will go down and they won't make as much money (of course this only applies if there is not an easy way to get the music without paying for it).
The only way to avoid supply and demand is to get a product where the demand is unlimited, say oxygen. The RIAA has to deal with supply and demand just as any other group does, they just found a way to make it work for them.
So now the local indy shops that can't match the $8 a CD that the big chains can sell for will go under. They're already more expensive, but it just got pointless for them to even try.
SO people complain when CDs are too expensive, but also when they are too cheap? The CD manufacturers no longer have any control over how much Best Buy et. al. charge for their CDs. The chains like that can afford to take a loss on CDs because their hope is to get people in the door and sucker them into buying some other, more expensive, item. The RIAA actually tried to get them not to sell their CDs at a loss, since it was hurting other CD outlets, but the chains took them to court and won. So you can either complain about the RIAA making prices too high, or the chains making prices too low, but you can't complain about both.
I'll care more when 72 minutes of pure audio doesn't cost 50% more than 2 hours of high quality movie footage with soundtracks in three language plus bonus material, AND I can legally (and easily) store what I buy on my file server. Until then, the MPAA and RIAA can collectively "bite me".
Can we finally stop the comparison between CDs and DVDs, since it is one of the most flawed comparison that exists. A DVD is an aftermarket product of a movie. The money is spent making a movie, not the DVD. The cost of the DVD is fairly small, especially compared to the movie. Marketing is also very small (if anything), because there was so much advertising for the movie very little is needed (although sometimes a lot is done anyway). By the time a DVD comes out, the movies has already made back a portion of the money (hopefully at least a decent portion if not actually made money) in the theatres. Even the extras are cheap, using footage already filmed and maybe bringing in a few people to record an audio soundtrack. All of these things combined make the DVD fairly cheap to produce compared to a CD. A CD has made no money when it is released and must make enough money to pay for every single thing that went into the making/marketing of the CD. Taking an already made movie and slapping it on a DVD and making basically nothing but profit from the sale is a lot different than putting out a CD and hoping the sales pay for the expense of the CD itself.
And just for the record, you can legally and easily store the MP3s you make from a CD you own on your file server. That has already been established. You can't share them with other people, but you are free to rip MP3s from CDs you own and listen to them.
As much I dislike the idea, the **AA should be free to put up anything on P2P services, including fake songs. If the idea of P2P is to share files, these are legitimate files to share. Just because you are looking of the full (illegal) version of the file, and you happen to find their fake version doesn't mean it is any less a legitimate file to be shared. It's the double edged sword of file-sharing. If you claim you have the right to share any file, then they also have the right to share any file.
Now as far as havking people's system (which they have seemed to smartly back away from) or even blocking file-sharing to people's systems, that is just plain wrong. They do not have the authority to perform a DOS (which is basically what they are doing) to a system or to kick that person of the P2P network.
And now, so show how much we believe that Xenu.net should be viewed, we're going to slashdot the hell out of it to make sure no one can see it! Maybe this is the scientologists real plans to take it down?
It seems you don't have any recourse, or more precisely, the same recourse as spammers do. This is exactly what many in the /. community have been fighting for in regards to "spammers list". The company has a right to block any site it wants with it's software (just the same way an email server can block any address/domain it wants to). They have no obligation to let anyone using their software see your site. This seems one of those ironic cases of fighting to get the right to block something (spammers in this case) and then other people using that same right against us.
I'd clone my girlfriend (2 or 3 times should be enough)
Which brings up an interesting question. If you clone yourself, and have sex with yourself, are you gay, or is it masturbation? And if you clone you girlfriend, and sleep with them all, is it really cheating?
While agree with Puffy taking good music and making crap, the difference isn't that he makes money, the difference is that he pays for the songs he mutilates and the original artists get credit for their portion. If you look at "Missing You" (I think that's what it's called, the one that sampled the Police's "Every Breathe You Take") you'll see that the Police share writing credit on it, because they wrote the original. Compare that to this where Steinski takes complete credit for everything written on it. The original artists don't get credit, much less paid for their work. You simply cannot take someone's work, claim it as your own and use it however you like. You need their permission to use their work.
The problem isn't as much as the idea that the photographer has a copyright on the images, but rather that they are performing a work for hire.
Isn't this the same arguement used by the RIAA? Musicians are just doing work for hire, so they don't own the copyright on their works, the labels do? Where exactly is the difference between the RIAA saying a musician is doing work for hire and you claiming the photographer is doing work for hire? In both cases it is someone paying an artist to perform their art (in one case they record music, in another they take photos) and then claiming they own the rights to the artists work because they are paying them. The only difference I see is that in one scenario, it is the "evil RIAA" depriving artists of their rights, and in the other it's you getting you're wedding pics cheaper, i.e. no difference.
I'm not making any accusations *cough*, but does this strike anyone else as a great addition to Microsoft's "fuck them over and make them upgrade" business model? Leave a product full of security flaws, and, years later, when people aren't upgrading to the new version, refuse to fix security flaws in the old versions.
While yes, this could fit into your conspiracy theory, eventually software has to stop being supported. Try to get a fix for Wordpefect 4.0 or MacOS 6, there won't be one. Office97 is 5 years old, in computer terms, that is a lifetime. Eventually, old software stops being supported. I think 2 versions and 5 years later is a fair amount of time to support a product.
Production costs are now trivial, with the digital age. You no longer need to rent an enormously expensive studio to record and mix music. You can get by with very simple recording equipment and digital mixing. It is so cheap most successful artists put production studios in their homes. It is so cheap that ingenious young musicians do the entire thing in their garage, and mix it on a computer, for total production costs of about $100 (excluding their time). Marketing is the one thing the major labels can provide that is not cheap. But at to your comment that most CDs lose money, this is quite simply false. No one is going to produce CDs that lose money for long.
I am not claiming it cost $1 to make a CD (and I didn't in my prior post either). But production and distribution costs do not come close to justifying the price. Marketing costs do not either. The only justification is collusion, and that is plain and simple.
The price of a new Harry Potter DVD is about $18. The price of the soundtrack CD is about $16. Tell me there is not a mismatch between relative value and price between those two.
Production can be done for $100, but it will not be nearly as good. Most large bands still produce in expensive studios, because there is a quality difference. You can produce cheaply, but it won't sound as good. And most CDs (on the order of 80% of them if I remember correctly) do not make enough money to cover the production, pressing and marketing. That is why there are so many bands that only make 1 CD, the label can't afford to let them make another one if the first one didn't make money. the label has to recoup what is looses on the CDs that do make money. They don't know what will make money, so the money-makers have to make up for the chance and failure on the other bands.
As for the "free" distribution over the internet (that other people have brought up), that is an entirely different subject. When discussing the price of CDs, it's hard to say if they were an entirely different product (which distributing over the net would require) that distibution would be cheaper. That's like saying cars don't need to use as much gas as they do, just look at motorcycles, they don't use much.
As for the Harry Potter CD/DVD fiasco, the hardcover of the book is currently $13.97. Certainly the book doesn't cost nearly as much to make as a major motion picture, so why not the outcry about the price mismatch? And the audio book is $34.97! If you're going to scream collusion, shouldn't you do it for a book even moreso than the CD?