They haven't committed any crime in their own country, for starters. They may not have committed any crime in the USA, either. I am completely unaware of any laws against tricking someone into giving out their banking information.
The Internet is pretty much a consequences-free zone. You can do anything you like there, such as stealing or what would be considered a hate crime in the offline world and never get prosecuted for it. You can see examples of this every day. And just about every "Internet prosecution" you do see is very selectively done or someone stepped way, way over the line.
Phishing and the public awarenesss of it is one way to keep people away from the Internet if they don't believe they can tell the difference between the real Ebay and the fake one.
The problem is enforcement. Today we have a substantial number of people that believe anything they can access digitally they have the right to redistribute in any manner they can. Unless they are physically prevented from doing so, they will redistribute. Period. Since this redistribution will be done on a world-wide data network, it won't just be limited to "friends and family", it will be the whole planet.
Hence, any creator upon releasing a single copy of their work ceases to be paid for it. They get to make one sale and that's it. And whether this sale is for $1 or $1,000,000 isn't relevent.
Somehow people seem to think that a very insecure system is being perpetrated onto the voting public replacing a secure, error-free manual system.
The problem is that manual counting results in considerable errors introduced during the manual process. Just about all manual processes introduce errors of one sort or another. However, through the history of voting it has been very rare that the margin between the candidates comes anywhere near the margin of error.
This is no longer really true in the US today. Many elections are decided on less than 2% of the vote, many on less on than 1%. Expecting the margin of error in a manually counted election to be significantly less than this is a fantasy. Elections are monitored to reduce or eliminate fraud, not to be accurate to 0.1%. When the margin of error exceeds the difference between votes counted for candidates the outcome is a random event.
Electronic vote collection and counting reduces the margin of error to a level below the margin between recent candidates.
We would all be better off if it was as hard to fire people as it is in some countries. A while back I recall that in Germany after a probationary period it would take at least six months to terminate an employee.
What this means is that as an employer I would be in a position where it is better to not hire anyone and rely on as much part-time temp services as possible. Regardless of any business requirements, the financial and legal obligations take over. Would this be a good thing?
Or, how about the union situation where it is nearly impossible to fire anyone? The most appropriate method of removing employees that aren't working out - for whatever reason - is simply to wait until they retire. This provides an excellent example to everyone around them that working is overrated and completely unnecessary since obviously there are no consequences to goofing off.
Yes, it would be much nicer if nobody could ever be fired, wouldn't it?
The problem with any manual system isn't necessarily that someone wants to alter the outcome... the problem is that today we require accuracy greater than that which can be provided by a manual system.
If the manual system has a 2% error rate - which is pretty good for as messy a manual system as counting votes in most places in the US - then any election where the difference between the candidates is 2% or less is a random selection. People are discovering this and realizing that every recount will offer different results within the error tolerance.
When the difference between the candidates is 10% of the votes and the manual system has an error rate even as high as 5% it doesn't matter. The voting system in the US is designed to accept this level of error and not worry about it at all because it makes no difference. When the difference between candidates is less than the error rate it has led to some notable election results in the past but these have been extremely rare.
Now it seems to be standard for most contested elections. Such that any error rate at all is intolerable.
So tell me, how do you build a manual vote counting system with a 0% error rate?
The idea of a "music business" or a business based on the distribution of any sort of entertainment is centered around being (a) in control of the content and (b) in control of distribution. Today, the folks in the music business are barely in control of the content and not at all in control of distribution.
When people can "sample", "mix" or "re-edit" your content, you aren't in control of it. Trying to establish a "brand" with any sort of material that can be reedited, repackaged and resold the minute it ends up in a customer's hands is no control at all.
Any sort of bargain that people in the entertainment business might have thought they had with customers ended a few years ago. Today, the only reason more than a single copy is sold is inefficiency in today's piracy. Having global organized crime involved with it doesn't help either. The people buying CDs are generally those on dial-up Internet connections or those too old to have heard of Napster and all of its decendents. The fact that these people are spending six times as much as the people paying for downloaded music should be an important clue that virtually nobody is paying for downloaded music - they are just downloading it.
How will this end? Well, for starters it can be assumed that music distribution on physical media will end pretty soon. No more "record stores". Probably music "promotion" will end as well, and that will take VH1, MTV and most of the ClearChannel radio stations with it. This will have an pretty widespread effect, so if you are involved in a business that in any way interacts with physical distribution of entertainment media - such as selling big bulky CD cases or radio station advertising - you can just kiss your job goodbye.
Yes, the music CD is dead. The "music business" is probably dead as well, killed off by greedy younglings that want to collect all the songs they can for free. Movies? Probably the idea of a movie studio producing a DVD for profit rather than as an advertising vehicle will be gone soon as well. You might see some "theater-only" productions, where the only attraction would be that it is never, ever going to be available anywhere else but a movie theater.
The number one reason this isn't done is the difference between the hardware manufactured by the driver author and the hardware manufactured by slave labor in China is the driver. Period. The chips are nearly a commodity now. There isn't anything unique about that - it is how they are used in the software.
15-20 years ago, it is was the design of the hardware that was where the value was. Today, it is mostly the software running the hardware.
An open driver just means that they are giving away whatever value the design has to the factory in China which will sell the same unit for half the price. Not a real effective way to stay in business.
Unfortunately, you are combining a bunch of stuff which has very little to do with each other.
Yes, copyright protection allows the limitation of distributing unathorized copies. Nothing much about copying, just about distribution.
Patent protection is about a concept, not a specific implementation. So the idea of "source disclosure" doesn't really apply - you aren't patenting a specific piece of software but patenting the idea that the software is making use of it.
Trade secret is the traditional means of protecting software and the concepts behind them. It has worked since the 1960's and has many less onerous issues when compared to patents and the like.
Trademarks... well, in general the courts have taken the attitude that conflicts that are designed to mislead are bad and conflicts that have little opportunity to mislead are not violations. Therefore it would be extremely difficult to have issues with calling a bicycle "Windows" but if you wanted to have a Linux distribution called Windows there would be little mistaking what the intent was.
I would prefer even more strenuous enforcement of trademarks. I think a registrar that accepts the registration for a domain name that clearly is intended to mislead should be fined out of existance. I think a Chinese company that imports a product with a name clearly designed to mislead people into believing it is made by someone else should be banned from exporting anything for 20 years. I'm sure you can come up with some more examples like this.
Fingerprint scanners come in a variety of forms. The optical ones can be spoofed pretty simply.
The RF ones can't be. They work very well and are extremely easy to use and accurate. No way can they be spoofed by anything except a finger. And some versions can detect a pulse so even a cut-off finger that was warm wouldn't work.
This is something to make you think. I am actually considering doing this. Some people might not think it was very funny.
Around in the 80's there was a song released by Neil Diamond called "Heartlight". It was an ET-theme "turn on your heart light..." I recently moved into a new house where they assumed you would be replacing all of the overhead lights with ceiling fans, so they put in really ugly lights that were very, very cheap. These lights are very breast-shaped and everyone seeing them calls them "nipple lights" or "tit lights".
So, how about if I make a nice music video of the lights being turned on and off with Neil Diamond's music in the background... except the word "heart" is replaced by a very different voice saying "tit"?
Would this be fair use? Would Neil Diamond (or his agents, distribution company, etc.) be within reason for suing should I post this video on the Internet for all to download? Clearly, this oversteps the line of simply a parody - it is using his original material in a way that he did not intend in a way that devalues the original material.
Just think about "Turn on your... TIT... light..." with a video of a ceiling light being turned on. Some people might think this was pretty funny. Might be pretty popular on YouTube.
Because we can do this now, easily, should we be able to? What about a re-rub of the movie Mary Poppins with Mary's voice replaced by a trash-talkin' African American girl where about every fifth word was "muthr-fuckin"? Do you think Disney would find this flattering?
How about taking a Boston Pops recording and adding some off-key "mistakes" just to make it more "accessible"? All in good fun, I assure you.
Hear, hear. You have probably stumbled across one of the true secrets of computer programming.
It is hard work.
Lots of people don't get that at all. Lots of management types assume that because person A wrote this code in a week that person B should be able to fix it in a week. Not true at all.
Sometimes it takes person B a week (or a month) to figure out what in the heck person A was doing. Open source is not immune to this. Hiring someone that was not involved in the original development of some random open-source project of moderate complexity can be an exercise in training the person in the coding style and knowledge of the original developer. Having the source is not understanding the source, or even being able to fix problems in it. As a general rule, if you don't know what you are doing trying to "fix" something is far more likely to cause problems than it is to actually fix the original problem.
Right now, P2P networks generally distribute pretty inferior content. But this will change. When that happens - as it has to a large extent in China, you will see some dynamics change.
Today what drives most retail stores is promotion. Sure, they get revenue from sales, but in most cases there is a direct link between promotion and sales. At least that is how the retail folks see it and have seen it since at least 1950. Today, promotion is paid for from some pretty deep pockets of the manufacturers and content owners.
Can you have a free book? Absolutely. Will anyone ever find out about it? Maybe. According to the retail market thinking today, nobody will ever find out about it and nobody will ever read it. Same goes for music - if nobody is paying the radio stations to play it, it won't get played. If nobody pays for posters, no one will find out it is there.
OK, perhaps the retail mindset is a little extreme, but for the last 60-70 years this has been pretty firmly entrenched in how the marketplace - and to some extent society in general - works. We have music videos not because they are fun to watch but because they are a promotional tool. We have the phrase "loss leader" because a particular retail advertising trick works.
What you propose will end "promotional" spending on entertainment. Overnight. This is not a small evolutionary change but a great big revolutionary one. One that I doubt anyone has really thought through all of the consequences of. Sure, it would be nice to get everything for free. But the consequences of this has ripples that extend much further than you would imagine.
I seriously doubt that something like this will happen in the US and Western Europe without having an economic impact that is completely unforeseen. And it is big and dangerous enough that it isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Unless the pirates really do win and start distributing prime-quality content wide enough to put media companies out of business. It could happen. But I hope you don't work in a job that is supported by any sort of promotional spending. Of any sort at all.
Once these people (without much exposure to the "real" world) have more disposable income the spammers and con men are going to have a field day with them.
I don't know where it will stop, but I am sure these people don't understand that they shouldn't agree to help the son of a former Nigerian general move his money around.
How about selling cars with speedometers calibrated to 180MPH when the top legal speed is 75MPH? Isn't that exactly the same thing?
How about advertising cars with 300HP engines that when measured by anyone else says more like 50HP?
Everyone inflates everything. It has been going on for a very long time, long before the invention of the electric light bulb. In truth the only thing the ISP's are missing is the word "burst" which Joe Sixpack wouldn't understand anyway.
You miss the fact that people talk and even sometimes use the Internet to compare rates. Price rules about 90% of the decisions in the US, maybe more like 99%.
So, if an ISP is charging "realistic" rates they will have zero customers - losing them all to SBC-Yahoo DSL at $14.95 a month. If SBC-Yahoo claims "50 times faster than dial-up" and your ISP claims "your bandwidth will depend on what is available and might be only 10 times as fast as dial-up" how long will clueless Joe Sixpack stick around before switching to the ISP that tells him what he wants to hear?
There are no points for being honest when it doesn't count. In this case only people using P2P applications and BitTorrent clients are pounding on their connection 24x7. So they are the only ones that notice. Joe and his web browsing doesn't really care as long as it is fast.
Authors CAN have rights to their work, AND use the law to protect them, WITHOUT using DRM.
How? Today, when we have people spending every bit of free time they have to destroy the economic viability of so-called "intellectual property"? When we have people cheered on by the media for "cracking" DRM systems and pirating software, movies and music?
There is no law on the Internet and most of the people using it have figured that part out. There is no way to enforce copyright when 99% of the broadband user community says there is not such a right.
The problem is that almost nobody today, and absolutely nobody in the future, will "respect" copyright. Therefore, in the future no DRM = no revenue. Copyright has been proven over the last 10 years to be an obsolete concept to everyone under 30. As this group ages, I would not expect copyright to get any better treatment.
We have problems with piracy because people cannot control themselves enough to have "fair use" rights and not redistribute everything they can.
We have problems because people have to sue someone, anyone whenever they get hurt or lose something. They can't take responsibility for their own actions, even when these actions are clearly their fault.
We now want to rail against a law that makes something that could make some people lose control illegal. Why is this a surprise? How is this any different than "tort reform" which is needed because someone burns themselves with hot coffee and sues the restaurant? How is this different than any of the laws in the US like Megan's Law, Polly's Law, etc. etc. etc.
You have seen this coming for a long while and we all deserve it.
All these problems will be fixed, and soon. Better pirated material quality - you are seeing web sites now that advertise telecine downloads vs. camcorder capture downloads so you can actually know who has the better quality. When more people in the US have broadband, the time to download will be greatly reduced.
Face it, CD sales are just going to end soon. DVD sales a little while after that. When Dell starts shipping computers with BearShare preinstalled that will be really a sign that it is over.
Re:How Downloading Pirated Video Cost Me $400+
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· Score: 2, Funny
Why did you do this? Was the downloaded copy of poor quality? Took too long? Inconvenient? All of these problems can be fixed and will be over time.
The idea that this is some kind of marketing channel is absurd. You downloaded one show and gave up because the pirates aren't doing a good enough job. By purchasing the product you are undercutting your entire generation and all people that are demanding free access to entertainment everywhere.
No, this is a form of advertising because for every person that gives up there are 10 that do not and just download the whole lot. Then, because their friends might not want to download it all, burns a DVD so everyone can share.
What is needed here is to stop the halfway measures and make sure not one more CD or DVD is ever sold in the US. Stand outside WalMart and hand out URLs to download sites. Go up to people in a checkout line and say "did you know you can get that for free?" Push the envelope. Stop the sales.
If this is done, a response will come. Either we will be living in a world where only amature productions exist or someone will figure out how to stop the piracy. One way or another, there will be a solution.
Re:Steal This Film fails to persuade...
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Steal This Film
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· Score: 1
The problem with "fair use" today is that nobody wants to "play fair". Today it is easier to redistribute digital content around the world than it is to make a tape or disc to play in your car.
The answer from many young people is that because it is so easy and cheap to do so, they should be allowed to do it freely. Obviously, this attitude doesn't have a lot of deep thinking behind it, as this movie shows.
The other side that people keep ignoring is that non-digital physical distribution is still necessary today. There are a lot of people that are either not "connected" or otherwise choose to buy physical objects. Nearly all of the "abolish the RIAA!" rhetoric that you hear utterly fails to address these people. WalMart is still selling CDs. When they stop perhaps we can talk about there only being digital distribution and the complete elimination of physical CDs, DVDs and so on.
People seem to have some idea that seeds from crops will germinate.
This was perhaps true in the 1940's. The "Green Revolution" beginning in the 1960's with all-hybrid crops put an end to that. No farmer in the US plants seeds from crops grown - they are all sterile. Perhaps some low-yield farmer in Bangledesh plants crop seeds this way today. Certainly nobody else does.
If you are worried about corporate seed control, we are there already. Do some reading. We have been there since at least 1970. We would all be starving if non-hybrid crops were being grown today.
The problem is in some places it is legal to rob banks, if you do it in the right way. There are certainly places where defrauding people of their money is not considered a crime. Places where the age of consent is 12, so photos of nude 13-year-old boys are perfectly appropriate.
So if you are operating from a country where the law allows you to take money from an electronic system because their laws weren't written with electronic banking in mind, who is to stop you? Do you think the victim's country's laws should apply? Isn't that just a case of the US or EU enforcing its laws on everyone? I doubt that is going to work in Bangledesh or the Cayman Islands. If "banking secrecy" is the cornerstone of a country's economy, it is going to be very difficult to prosecute someone, or even find them.
It comes down to a few ways this can work:
everyone has the same laws
extraterritory enforcement of the victim's laws
Some UN agency rife with corruption and payoffs that promises the world and accomplishes nothing.
Cyber crime is going to be consequences-free for a long time to come. If this guy had been doing this from a different country, he might never have been prosecuted just because of the hassle. If he was in Romania, he likely would never have been caught, much less prosecuted. If he was in Bangledesh nobody would have even investigated.
Slashdot Mirror
They haven't committed any crime in their own country, for starters. They may not have committed any crime in the USA, either. I am completely unaware of any laws against tricking someone into giving out their banking information.
The Internet is pretty much a consequences-free zone. You can do anything you like there, such as stealing or what would be considered a hate crime in the offline world and never get prosecuted for it. You can see examples of this every day. And just about every "Internet prosecution" you do see is very selectively done or someone stepped way, way over the line.
Phishing and the public awarenesss of it is one way to keep people away from the Internet if they don't believe they can tell the difference between the real Ebay and the fake one.
The problem is enforcement. Today we have a substantial number of people that believe anything they can access digitally they have the right to redistribute in any manner they can. Unless they are physically prevented from doing so, they will redistribute. Period. Since this redistribution will be done on a world-wide data network, it won't just be limited to "friends and family", it will be the whole planet.
Hence, any creator upon releasing a single copy of their work ceases to be paid for it. They get to make one sale and that's it. And whether this sale is for $1 or $1,000,000 isn't relevent.
Somehow people seem to think that a very insecure system is being perpetrated onto the voting public replacing a secure, error-free manual system.
The problem is that manual counting results in considerable errors introduced during the manual process. Just about all manual processes introduce errors of one sort or another. However, through the history of voting it has been very rare that the margin between the candidates comes anywhere near the margin of error.
This is no longer really true in the US today. Many elections are decided on less than 2% of the vote, many on less on than 1%. Expecting the margin of error in a manually counted election to be significantly less than this is a fantasy. Elections are monitored to reduce or eliminate fraud, not to be accurate to 0.1%. When the margin of error exceeds the difference between votes counted for candidates the outcome is a random event.
Electronic vote collection and counting reduces the margin of error to a level below the margin between recent candidates.
We would all be better off if it was as hard to fire people as it is in some countries. A while back I recall that in Germany after a probationary period it would take at least six months to terminate an employee.
What this means is that as an employer I would be in a position where it is better to not hire anyone and rely on as much part-time temp services as possible. Regardless of any business requirements, the financial and legal obligations take over. Would this be a good thing?
Or, how about the union situation where it is nearly impossible to fire anyone? The most appropriate method of removing employees that aren't working out - for whatever reason - is simply to wait until they retire. This provides an excellent example to everyone around them that working is overrated and completely unnecessary since obviously there are no consequences to goofing off.
Yes, it would be much nicer if nobody could ever be fired, wouldn't it?
The problem with any manual system isn't necessarily that someone wants to alter the outcome... the problem is that today we require accuracy greater than that which can be provided by a manual system.
If the manual system has a 2% error rate - which is pretty good for as messy a manual system as counting votes in most places in the US - then any election where the difference between the candidates is 2% or less is a random selection. People are discovering this and realizing that every recount will offer different results within the error tolerance.
When the difference between the candidates is 10% of the votes and the manual system has an error rate even as high as 5% it doesn't matter. The voting system in the US is designed to accept this level of error and not worry about it at all because it makes no difference. When the difference between candidates is less than the error rate it has led to some notable election results in the past but these have been extremely rare.
Now it seems to be standard for most contested elections. Such that any error rate at all is intolerable.
So tell me, how do you build a manual vote counting system with a 0% error rate?
The idea of a "music business" or a business based on the distribution of any sort of entertainment is centered around being (a) in control of the content and (b) in control of distribution. Today, the folks in the music business are barely in control of the content and not at all in control of distribution.
When people can "sample", "mix" or "re-edit" your content, you aren't in control of it. Trying to establish a "brand" with any sort of material that can be reedited, repackaged and resold the minute it ends up in a customer's hands is no control at all.
Any sort of bargain that people in the entertainment business might have thought they had with customers ended a few years ago. Today, the only reason more than a single copy is sold is inefficiency in today's piracy. Having global organized crime involved with it doesn't help either. The people buying CDs are generally those on dial-up Internet connections or those too old to have heard of Napster and all of its decendents. The fact that these people are spending six times as much as the people paying for downloaded music should be an important clue that virtually nobody is paying for downloaded music - they are just downloading it.
How will this end? Well, for starters it can be assumed that music distribution on physical media will end pretty soon. No more "record stores". Probably music "promotion" will end as well, and that will take VH1, MTV and most of the ClearChannel radio stations with it. This will have an pretty widespread effect, so if you are involved in a business that in any way interacts with physical distribution of entertainment media - such as selling big bulky CD cases or radio station advertising - you can just kiss your job goodbye.
Yes, the music CD is dead. The "music business" is probably dead as well, killed off by greedy younglings that want to collect all the songs they can for free. Movies? Probably the idea of a movie studio producing a DVD for profit rather than as an advertising vehicle will be gone soon as well. You might see some "theater-only" productions, where the only attraction would be that it is never, ever going to be available anywhere else but a movie theater.
The number one reason this isn't done is the difference between the hardware manufactured by the driver author and the hardware manufactured by slave labor in China is the driver. Period. The chips are nearly a commodity now. There isn't anything unique about that - it is how they are used in the software.
15-20 years ago, it is was the design of the hardware that was where the value was. Today, it is mostly the software running the hardware.
An open driver just means that they are giving away whatever value the design has to the factory in China which will sell the same unit for half the price. Not a real effective way to stay in business.
Unfortunately, you are combining a bunch of stuff which has very little to do with each other.
Yes, copyright protection allows the limitation of distributing unathorized copies. Nothing much about copying, just about distribution.
Patent protection is about a concept, not a specific implementation. So the idea of "source disclosure" doesn't really apply - you aren't patenting a specific piece of software but patenting the idea that the software is making use of it.
Trade secret is the traditional means of protecting software and the concepts behind them. It has worked since the 1960's and has many less onerous issues when compared to patents and the like.
Trademarks... well, in general the courts have taken the attitude that conflicts that are designed to mislead are bad and conflicts that have little opportunity to mislead are not violations. Therefore it would be extremely difficult to have issues with calling a bicycle "Windows" but if you wanted to have a Linux distribution called Windows there would be little mistaking what the intent was.
I would prefer even more strenuous enforcement of trademarks. I think a registrar that accepts the registration for a domain name that clearly is intended to mislead should be fined out of existance. I think a Chinese company that imports a product with a name clearly designed to mislead people into believing it is made by someone else should be banned from exporting anything for 20 years. I'm sure you can come up with some more examples like this.
Fingerprint scanners come in a variety of forms. The optical ones can be spoofed pretty simply.
The RF ones can't be. They work very well and are extremely easy to use and accurate. No way can they be spoofed by anything except a finger. And some versions can detect a pulse so even a cut-off finger that was warm wouldn't work.
This is something to make you think. I am actually considering doing this. Some people might not think it was very funny.
... TIT ... light..." with a video of a ceiling light being turned on. Some people might think this was pretty funny. Might be pretty popular on YouTube.
Around in the 80's there was a song released by Neil Diamond called "Heartlight". It was an ET-theme "turn on your heart light..." I recently moved into a new house where they assumed you would be replacing all of the overhead lights with ceiling fans, so they put in really ugly lights that were very, very cheap. These lights are very breast-shaped and everyone seeing them calls them "nipple lights" or "tit lights".
So, how about if I make a nice music video of the lights being turned on and off with Neil Diamond's music in the background... except the word "heart" is replaced by a very different voice saying "tit"?
Would this be fair use? Would Neil Diamond (or his agents, distribution company, etc.) be within reason for suing should I post this video on the Internet for all to download? Clearly, this oversteps the line of simply a parody - it is using his original material in a way that he did not intend in a way that devalues the original material.
Just think about "Turn on your
Because we can do this now, easily, should we be able to? What about a re-rub of the movie Mary Poppins with Mary's voice replaced by a trash-talkin' African American girl where about every fifth word was "muthr-fuckin"? Do you think Disney would find this flattering?
How about taking a Boston Pops recording and adding some off-key "mistakes" just to make it more "accessible"? All in good fun, I assure you.
Hear, hear. You have probably stumbled across one of the true secrets of computer programming.
It is hard work.
Lots of people don't get that at all. Lots of management types assume that because person A wrote this code in a week that person B should be able to fix it in a week. Not true at all.
Sometimes it takes person B a week (or a month) to figure out what in the heck person A was doing. Open source is not immune to this. Hiring someone that was not involved in the original development of some random open-source project of moderate complexity can be an exercise in training the person in the coding style and knowledge of the original developer. Having the source is not understanding the source, or even being able to fix problems in it. As a general rule, if you don't know what you are doing trying to "fix" something is far more likely to cause problems than it is to actually fix the original problem.
Why isn't registering www.bank0famerica.com handled properly - by rejecting it?
Why would some scamming registrar accept such a domain name registration in the first place?
Right now, P2P networks generally distribute pretty inferior content. But this will change. When that happens - as it has to a large extent in China, you will see some dynamics change.
Today what drives most retail stores is promotion. Sure, they get revenue from sales, but in most cases there is a direct link between promotion and sales. At least that is how the retail folks see it and have seen it since at least 1950. Today, promotion is paid for from some pretty deep pockets of the manufacturers and content owners.
Can you have a free book? Absolutely. Will anyone ever find out about it? Maybe. According to the retail market thinking today, nobody will ever find out about it and nobody will ever read it. Same goes for music - if nobody is paying the radio stations to play it, it won't get played. If nobody pays for posters, no one will find out it is there.
OK, perhaps the retail mindset is a little extreme, but for the last 60-70 years this has been pretty firmly entrenched in how the marketplace - and to some extent society in general - works. We have music videos not because they are fun to watch but because they are a promotional tool. We have the phrase "loss leader" because a particular retail advertising trick works.
What you propose will end "promotional" spending on entertainment. Overnight. This is not a small evolutionary change but a great big revolutionary one. One that I doubt anyone has really thought through all of the consequences of. Sure, it would be nice to get everything for free. But the consequences of this has ripples that extend much further than you would imagine.
I seriously doubt that something like this will happen in the US and Western Europe without having an economic impact that is completely unforeseen. And it is big and dangerous enough that it isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Unless the pirates really do win and start distributing prime-quality content wide enough to put media companies out of business. It could happen. But I hope you don't work in a job that is supported by any sort of promotional spending. Of any sort at all.
Sorry, but you are wrong.
Once these people (without much exposure to the "real" world) have more disposable income the spammers and con men are going to have a field day with them.
I don't know where it will stop, but I am sure these people don't understand that they shouldn't agree to help the son of a former Nigerian general move his money around.
In Arizona paper is recyclable. Shredded paper is not. Because of contamination concerns, if you shred it, it goes in a landfill.
How about selling cars with speedometers calibrated to 180MPH when the top legal speed is 75MPH? Isn't that exactly the same thing?
How about advertising cars with 300HP engines that when measured by anyone else says more like 50HP?
Everyone inflates everything. It has been going on for a very long time, long before the invention of the electric light bulb. In truth the only thing the ISP's are missing is the word "burst" which Joe Sixpack wouldn't understand anyway.
You miss the fact that people talk and even sometimes use the Internet to compare rates. Price rules about 90% of the decisions in the US, maybe more like 99%.
So, if an ISP is charging "realistic" rates they will have zero customers - losing them all to SBC-Yahoo DSL at $14.95 a month. If SBC-Yahoo claims "50 times faster than dial-up" and your ISP claims "your bandwidth will depend on what is available and might be only 10 times as fast as dial-up" how long will clueless Joe Sixpack stick around before switching to the ISP that tells him what he wants to hear?
There are no points for being honest when it doesn't count. In this case only people using P2P applications and BitTorrent clients are pounding on their connection 24x7. So they are the only ones that notice. Joe and his web browsing doesn't really care as long as it is fast.
How? Today, when we have people spending every bit of free time they have to destroy the economic viability of so-called "intellectual property"? When we have people cheered on by the media for "cracking" DRM systems and pirating software, movies and music?
There is no law on the Internet and most of the people using it have figured that part out. There is no way to enforce copyright when 99% of the broadband user community says there is not such a right.
The problem is that almost nobody today, and absolutely nobody in the future, will "respect" copyright. Therefore, in the future no DRM = no revenue. Copyright has been proven over the last 10 years to be an obsolete concept to everyone under 30. As this group ages, I would not expect copyright to get any better treatment.
We have problems with piracy because people cannot control themselves enough to have "fair use" rights and not redistribute everything they can.
We have problems because people have to sue someone, anyone whenever they get hurt or lose something. They can't take responsibility for their own actions, even when these actions are clearly their fault.
We now want to rail against a law that makes something that could make some people lose control illegal. Why is this a surprise? How is this any different than "tort reform" which is needed because someone burns themselves with hot coffee and sues the restaurant? How is this different than any of the laws in the US like Megan's Law, Polly's Law, etc. etc. etc.
You have seen this coming for a long while and we all deserve it.
All these problems will be fixed, and soon. Better pirated material quality - you are seeing web sites now that advertise telecine downloads vs. camcorder capture downloads so you can actually know who has the better quality. When more people in the US have broadband, the time to download will be greatly reduced.
Face it, CD sales are just going to end soon. DVD sales a little while after that. When Dell starts shipping computers with BearShare preinstalled that will be really a sign that it is over.
Why did you do this? Was the downloaded copy of poor quality? Took too long? Inconvenient? All of these problems can be fixed and will be over time.
The idea that this is some kind of marketing channel is absurd. You downloaded one show and gave up because the pirates aren't doing a good enough job. By purchasing the product you are undercutting your entire generation and all people that are demanding free access to entertainment everywhere.
No, this is a form of advertising because for every person that gives up there are 10 that do not and just download the whole lot. Then, because their friends might not want to download it all, burns a DVD so everyone can share.
What is needed here is to stop the halfway measures and make sure not one more CD or DVD is ever sold in the US. Stand outside WalMart and hand out URLs to download sites. Go up to people in a checkout line and say "did you know you can get that for free?" Push the envelope. Stop the sales.
If this is done, a response will come. Either we will be living in a world where only amature productions exist or someone will figure out how to stop the piracy. One way or another, there will be a solution.
The answer from many young people is that because it is so easy and cheap to do so, they should be allowed to do it freely. Obviously, this attitude doesn't have a lot of deep thinking behind it, as this movie shows.
The other side that people keep ignoring is that non-digital physical distribution is still necessary today. There are a lot of people that are either not "connected" or otherwise choose to buy physical objects. Nearly all of the "abolish the RIAA!" rhetoric that you hear utterly fails to address these people. WalMart is still selling CDs. When they stop perhaps we can talk about there only being digital distribution and the complete elimination of physical CDs, DVDs and so on.
People seem to have some idea that seeds from crops will germinate.
This was perhaps true in the 1940's. The "Green Revolution" beginning in the 1960's with all-hybrid crops put an end to that. No farmer in the US plants seeds from crops grown - they are all sterile. Perhaps some low-yield farmer in Bangledesh plants crop seeds this way today. Certainly nobody else does.
If you are worried about corporate seed control, we are there already. Do some reading. We have been there since at least 1970. We would all be starving if non-hybrid crops were being grown today.
So if you are operating from a country where the law allows you to take money from an electronic system because their laws weren't written with electronic banking in mind, who is to stop you? Do you think the victim's country's laws should apply? Isn't that just a case of the US or EU enforcing its laws on everyone? I doubt that is going to work in Bangledesh or the Cayman Islands. If "banking secrecy" is the cornerstone of a country's economy, it is going to be very difficult to prosecute someone, or even find them.
It comes down to a few ways this can work:
Cyber crime is going to be consequences-free for a long time to come. If this guy had been doing this from a different country, he might never have been prosecuted just because of the hassle. If he was in Romania, he likely would never have been caught, much less prosecuted. If he was in Bangledesh nobody would have even investigated.