Why do you assume that the opinions being expressed are useful and informed?
I would say it is just as likely that it is an utterly uninformed opinion from someone with little understanding of the facts. Like people endlessly writing about how difficult to use Linux is.
Why would you ever assume that because it is simple and easy to broadcast your opinions to the entire planet that you actually have anything worth saying?
Of course, I may be mistaken about this. Last time I looked only certain hate speech is actually prosecuted. You can march down the street with a swastika banner shouting "Kill the Jews!" all day long and nobody will stop you. On the other hand, "Kill all the Fags!" will likely get you arrested.
Fortunately, most of the time the police have a lot better things to do than enforce hate-speech laws. Maybe that does fall onto the school then - if you aren't educated what hate speech is, who's fault is it?
The problem is that Wal-Mart can give you the best deal. Always. If they need to.
OK, so right now they don't always need to. Because of this, they can sell some stuff at higher prices, make more money. Good for them.
The problem is that they are big enough to pressure manufacturers to give them better prices than they give to anyone else. They walk in with a contract that says they get the best price, at least some percentage better than the price given to anyone else. You want your stuff sold at Wal-Mart, you agree. If not, no problem, they go to your manufacturing competition and make the deal with them.
So, Wal-Mart ends up having to give the best prices on everything, all the time. Maybe they make a little less money on each sale. Benefit to them is that at the end of the year, all the other stores are gone. Much easier to have the best price around then.
You don't think they are thinking that way? Wal-Mart has always thought that way.
If easy, handheld, wireless price comparison comes about, big will always win. Why? Because Wal-Mart can pressure vendors to cut prices to them, just as they have been doing for the last 20 years. This cuts the small retailer out completely because their price from the vendor is 10% higher than Wal-Mart's. This means Wal-Mart can sell for 10% less and still make the same margin than the small retailer could.
But, because Wal-Mart can, they can sell it at 12% less than the small retailer - below their cost - and still make money. Goodby small retailer.
Yes, but what is the one thing that could bring Wal-Mart out of a slump?
An information system in the hands of buyers that said they had the lowest price. No other information, just lowest price. So, if you are across the street at Target and can just bop over to Wal-Mart and save $10 on a big item, why wouldn't you?
Next time, you might just start at Wal-Mart and forget about Target. Even if they have better merchandise and a cleaner store.
Let's see - who benefits by having a instant price comparison engine that could deliver results to a wireless handheld device?
The consumer? Maybe, if price is your only data point for making a purchase. If you want to push out everything but price, then Wal-Mart is going to win in the end. They have the purchasing power to (a) make the vendor submit and (b) take a few losses now and then.
The stores? No way. Not only does this create an environment for Wal-Mart to win, it means "better service" means nothing if the only data point is price. When businesses compete only on price, big means everything and the little guy gets crushed.
Local government? They get to absorb the tax losses of the failed businesses that Wal-Mart already crushes, all the while they are giving Wal-Mart a big tax cut to move there anyway. And, at the state level they get to supply food stamps to the Wal-Mart workers that are part time.
I don't see anyone that wins in a situation like this. Watch the Meier commercials sometime - they are all about price and nothing else. If price is the only data point that matters, Wal-Mart has already won and we're just making sure they really keep prices low. Service means nothing, variety means nothing, flexibility means nothing.
The problem is that a significant cost in producing a hardware product - any hardware product - is the software engineering. If a Chinese company could "borrow" the driver for an ATI product, they would be one step closer to producing an ATI replacement product. I am sure they already either are licensing or "borrowing" the hardware bits.
So, ATI knows this. All opening up the driver would do is (a) give people more of an opportunity to screw things up and (b) give a helping hand to people that want to drive them from the marketplace.
Most video drivers these days are pretty large - larger than your average open source project - and unlikley to respond well to being tweaked by people unfamiliar with the architecture. Surely you don't think ATI's drivers are better self-documenting and structured than most open source projects, do you?
Let's review here: someone has found a publicly distributed driver that when properly installed on Windows hides files and folders. It may have some additional and yet unknown functionality and may be coupled with a driver which, under the right circumstances, disables access to a CD drive.
Sony is distributing this as part of some larger, possibly effective DRM system for music CDs.
What I see here is an endless amount of whining about how awful this is. You are overlooking the potential of this. The key here is that this is now out in the wild and can be exploited. The contest should be to come up with creative (and possibly destructive) things to do with these drivers when packaged with other software.
The result of this should be interesting. I think the responsiblity for all of this rests with Sony and First 4 Internet, but I would really like to see something creative done with this, such as an ActiveX control that disables the CD drive of anyone who visits a web site. The point is to make as much use of this as possible. Sony has provided the tool, it is now up to everyone to make as much use of this as possible.
Re:Defiance is a changing the system too
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Modding and the Law
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I trust that you never do anything creative in your life. Certainly not an expect any sort of compensation or reimbursment for it.
There are artists that have decided they have "enough" money and freely distribute their work. That is certainly their right to do that. You, the consumer, do not have the right to make that decision for them. That is pretty much the same thing as your neighbor deciding that you should go to their church. Or the government deciding that since I don't want to work anymore, you should support me because we should all be nice people.
Indian independence was "won" from a country that tired of empire and decided to question their own ability and rightness. Many in England at the time thought it was simply wrong for their empire to exist and that England had no more right to rule than anyone else.
The result was they gave up their empire and retreated to their own shores for economic contraction and near-collapse.
This is the future that the US faces. While we don't have an empire, we do have the nattering nabobs that say we have no more right to "rule" than the savages that behead people on TV. We probably don't have any more "right" and this very admission will almost certainly lead to the dominance of those that would see the US contract and nearly collapse.
The constitution applies to Federal laws, and perhaps state and local ones in some cases. It has no applicability to schools, employers, or anything else.
There is no "school" right to free speech. There is no right to free speech on the job. There is no right to free speech in a shopping mall, if the shopping mall has a rule that says otherwise. And, the First Amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with this because it is not a federal law. So, the government hasn't made a law abridging free speech.
Not unless you think the Federal government gets to review and approve all school rules, employee handbooks and shopping mall rules.
This is perhaps a competitive service to cable and DSL. Unfortunately, it is probably just that, with lower capacity. Let's see, what happens when there are 20 people on the same accept point? You get something that works fine for someone in a Starbucks trying to read email and something that doesn't work at all for downloading the latest 12MB update from Microsoft.
WiFi even at G levels has a maximum bandwith of 54Mb/sec, which translates to about 6MB/sec. Wow, 6MB a second, that's better than most cable systems, right? Wrong. 6MB a second for the access point. This is divided up amongst all the users within range, and possibly over a significant area if each individual access point doesn't have it's own 6MB/sec Internet connection.
In a real-world implementation with some kind of mesh network and relatively few hard-wired connections between them, you are going to quickly run out of bandwidth when people use this as an alternative to a wired connection. Therefore, this isn't any competition at all and serves to just allow people to connect when away from home.
The likelyhood that this will be used as a cheap alternative to a hardwired connection is high. Therefore, there is a high likelyhood that the service will suck from the moment it is turned on.
For every $10,000 they receive in settlements, they could be losing multiples of in lost future business.
What business? Are you still paying for music? Why? None of it goes to the artists. So what possible "future business" is there to lose? This is a fight to the death, and the music business knows it. Their death, because as P2P expands, they lose customers forever.
Come on, you aren't going to try to say you think the RIAA deserves you buying music, are you?
Advertisers, that is. A whole lot of them will crawl out of the woods and you will discover unknown items that can act as radio receivers. Not very smart, software-controlled radios, but things like fillings in your teeth.
You see, without regulation there would be no power limits. Without power limits it would be a short race to see who could have the biggest gun, er, transmitter. You would be able to pick up their transmissions on your cell phone, your car radio, your TV, your wired telephone and just about every other electronic device. Maybe a few that aren't all that electronic because things act strangely when there is enough power being broadcast.
I guess this guy's idea of "free speech" would include making sure the folks in India could pick up AM radio stations in the US.
It might be interesting to live in a completely unregulated, libertarian paradise. Unfortunately, what this guy is proposing is just eliminate the regulations without any other disincentives. He didn't think it through.
Sorry, if a US citizen kill someone in Canada, you might get extradited to Canada for prosecution, but there is no way you are going to be prosecuted in the US.
Same with killing someone in Brazil. Or Mexico. Or anywhere else for that matter.
Now, the US Justice Department would probably look favorably on an extradition request from just about anywhere for a murderer. And, US law enforcement would probably not bat an eye at helping out in the capture of said murderer. But there is no way they would be prosecuted by a US court.
Maturity is something that nobody can afford in the current business world. It isn't a matter of getting ahead - it is a matter of if you don't do it, your competition will and take your customers. See, the customers want to be served, and they don't really care who is serving them. All they want is what they want, when they want it, at the lowest possible price.
If you have a nice ethical business but someone else (less ethical) sells for 10% less, they will have more customers. Maybe, over time they will have all the customers. That's the WalMart way. It works.
About the only "defense" against this would be to pass laws that say prices are secret - you can only buy based on the ethics and reputation of the seller. You give them your money and they tell you when you have paid enough. But, you can't tell anyone else what you paid.
You will get the straight network feed recorded with network commercials and blank spaces for local commercials to be filled in. Or, all "network commercials" and no blank spaces. But the shows will still be cut and have the same running time - 30 or 60 minutes.
This will in the end just force advertisers to be more watchful and probably restrict their TV ad buying. This will mean less shows get made.
Alternatively, if you want to watch a remix/parody of current shows with a voice-over by some teenager who thinks his smutty remarks are the height of comedy, you will have lots and lots of that stuff to choose from. And some of it might even seem "professionally done".
And, of course, thanks to the pirates, it will all be free. You could pay, if you feel guilty, but why? Nobody else is.
Watch the movie sometime. Surface ships can launch torpedos. The ship size can be very small and a wooden ship (like a PT boat) is almost invisible on radar. Modern torpedos can travel a long way.
The USS Cole was hit by what you could call an "improvised torpedo". I would imagine if someone had access to military weapons, they might be able to do a better job. As torpedos are big, expensive things they are therefore easily sold on the arms market. Everyone wants to have happy arms customers, so I am sure if the US isn't selling them, some other European country is.
Credit card companies deflect all fraud back to the merchant. If the merchant has the card in their hand and follows all of the required procedures with a card-swipe transaction, there is almost no chance of fraud. And, if it does happen, yes, the merchant likely gets to take the loss. For the privilege of letting customers use credit cards.
For online transactions, there is absolutely no protection for merchants - all fraud is paid for by the merchant.
There isn't anything the credit card companies are doing to combat fraud. Just try to get them or anyone else to follow up on a stolen credit card. Forget it.
Region coding was mandated to be part of the DVD specification by governments. Mostly, European if I remember correctly.
The problem is that there are different standards for movies and ratings, so a movie that is perfectly acceptable in the US with an R rating may be illegal to be possess in Japan - they have very strict laws about nudity in some forms. There are similar rules concerning language and violence in other parts of the world.
Similarly, airlines have to get specially edited movies which are legal in all markets where they fly. If you have seen the original movie in the US in a theater you can often see what sort of stuff they left out of the "airline version".
I have not (yet) heard of anyone being prosecuted for importing a single copy of a movie that does not meet local standards. But, I would not bring an NC-17 or unrated movie to Singapore. Similarly, I would not want to be bringing "The Producers" (a comedy about making a play called "Springtime for Hitler") into Germany or possibly France.
OK, so you think region coding should be abandoned? Great! Let's get the governments to remove their local movie editing and approval boards and maybe it will happen.
There is no accountability on the Internet. Domain registration is (or can be) anonymous, so even if you have a domain, it is meaningless. ISPs aren't going to cooperate, especially those outside of the US. It would cost $500,000 to find out who hooked you with thier phishing, so you might as well forget about it.
It's their own damn fault. If you are silly enough to click links that people IM you or email you, then you are silly enough to buy a bridge from a guy on a street corner. This has been happening sinces, well, the beginning of time. The Internet just makes it a lot easiler, anonymous and risk-free. You can't stop it. It's like trying to stop daylight.
I guess it makes the legislators in California feel good, but it isn't going to do anything to stop it. It might stop someone who lives in California, uses their home ISP account to collect information and deposits the money in their parent's bank account.
First, you as an accomplished artist, draw, paint or otherwise render in a physical medium an illustration of a public square. Since it is a public place, you have no rights to your work? That would disappoint quite a lot of people.
Secondly, if the map is or should be public domain, then there should be no reason why anyone cannot take the original, modify it and distribute their own "improved" version of it, including marks indicating that this is the NYC subway system map. Of course if it has imaginary stations on it, that is just my version of reality and you should know better than to question it.
Public domain? I think not. Some sort of reasonable licensing for republication - absolutely. $500 seems extremely reasonable. I guess if you aren't charging for your publication that is a bit of a problem. But the loss of control by making it freely available is a much bigger problem.
Sorry, but the idea that if someone else commits a crime and leaves you with the proceeds that you are innocent is completely wrong.
Someone steals a car and sells it to you for $10. When the car is discovered you are going to lose it and maybe go to jail for receiving stolen property.
Someone robs a bank and gives you $10,000 because you are a nice guy. Do you really think you get to keep it? Do you think you aren't going to jail or at least get some really nice community service sentance?
Some kids drop off some pirated software and music on your computer. Do you think you are immune to prosecution and/or civil suit because you didn't actually do the downloading? Not hardly. You are at least an unwitting accessory. But if you know they are doing it and doing nothing about it, then you are absolutely an accessory if not accomplice.
Yes, it is probably extraordinarily difficult to do what you presume they are doing. So, they probably aren't doing quite that.
But the real point here is to (a) discourage redistribution of materials and (b) present the appearance of locked content. Yes, actually preventing redistribution would be difficult and maybe impossible. But the appearance is what really counts.
Another aspect of this is quite simple: if people would respect the rights of the creator/distributor of content (music, movies, books, software, etc.) there would be no discussion of this. The need would not be there. As it is today, there are two possible enforcements: technical and societal. Both are failing. The cry from more technically astute consumers is that this means all enforcement should be abandoned. This leaves the content owners in a difficult position because they must choose between controlling the distribution of their content and abandoning such control - and the revenue it brings in. Neither is a good choice, but the revenue loss from abandoning control is (or at least should be) 100%.
People talk about "try before buy". Shareware works that way and people have figured it out - 95% don't pay. Suggesting that music can work this way should result in similar numbers. Same with movies and books - check out Steven King's experiences vs. TOR books and others that have used "simply free" schemes. The 95% number seems like a pretty good benchmark figure when people do not have to pay.
If you ask music and movie executives how they can continue in the business they are in with a 95% drop in revenue, they will tell you they cannot. It is pretty much the same way with any other business - nobody can lose 95% of the revenue and stay in operation.
So why are people still paying? There are three reasons:
Guilt. Copyright infringment is subject to both civil and criminal penalties. Granted that these penalties are not often encountered by average people, but the penalties are there. Some people also feel the artist or content owner should be compensated.
Unavailability. If you have a poor dial-up connection, you aren't going to be downloading any movies, regardless of your knowledge level. If you don't understand how to send an attachment with email, you probably can't figure out how to use Bit Torrent or download Kazaa. So, for many people they simply do not have access to the materials they would like to.
Packaging. They feel they are getting something that a naked download doesn't offer to them.
None of these reasons are going to hold up long-term, although the unavailability one is going to last the longest. What people on the forefront of the copyright issue need to understand is that it is all free now. Go and get it. Make it your duty to keep other people out of the record stores, video stores and so forth. When someone wants to buy a new DVD, give them one!
The result of militant action will be one of a relatively few possibilities. Think about it. What can happen?
Death penalty for copyright infringment.
Collapse of all media companies - no more large corporations.
Artists wake up and decide that the Internet is the only distribution medium that counts.
End of Western civilization.
You get the idea. However, with the current state of affairs - only a small drop in media revenue, if even that, things will continue as they are today. Of course, any DRM scheme can be beaten and the result of a single crack can be redistributed far and wide on the Internet removing any possibility of future sales.
And, if pushed hard enough, the media companies will have no choice but to either (a) cease operation or (b) lobby for the death penalty for copyright infringement.
It may take killing a bunch of people, but if people get it into their heads that "democracy = death", the government will succeed in suppressing it enough. See, they don't need to suppress it 100%, just enough so that people do not associate "democracy" with "eternal bliss".
Yes, it might be tough to impose that for a while, but we are talking about a country that mostly succeeded in putting forth the idea that "education = evil" for quite some time. How did they do it? Death, and plenty of it in gory excess.
You just have to be focused on the end goal and not care about the messy little details that get in the way between here and the goal. Since we are talking about the ruling oligarchy getting pushed out of power if they do not succeed, there is plenty of motivation. It isn't just some old men's lives we are talking about - it is their children as well. Funny, people do lots of odd things to ensure their children's future.
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Why do you assume that the opinions being expressed are useful and informed?
I would say it is just as likely that it is an utterly uninformed opinion from someone with little understanding of the facts. Like people endlessly writing about how difficult to use Linux is.
Why would you ever assume that because it is simple and easy to broadcast your opinions to the entire planet that you actually have anything worth saying?
Therefore, any anti-Semitic comments are illegal.
Of course, I may be mistaken about this. Last time I looked only certain hate speech is actually prosecuted. You can march down the street with a swastika banner shouting "Kill the Jews!" all day long and nobody will stop you. On the other hand, "Kill all the Fags!" will likely get you arrested.
Fortunately, most of the time the police have a lot better things to do than enforce hate-speech laws. Maybe that does fall onto the school then - if you aren't educated what hate speech is, who's fault is it?
OK, so right now they don't always need to. Because of this, they can sell some stuff at higher prices, make more money. Good for them.
The problem is that they are big enough to pressure manufacturers to give them better prices than they give to anyone else. They walk in with a contract that says they get the best price, at least some percentage better than the price given to anyone else. You want your stuff sold at Wal-Mart, you agree. If not, no problem, they go to your manufacturing competition and make the deal with them.
So, Wal-Mart ends up having to give the best prices on everything, all the time. Maybe they make a little less money on each sale. Benefit to them is that at the end of the year, all the other stores are gone. Much easier to have the best price around then.
You don't think they are thinking that way? Wal-Mart has always thought that way.
If easy, handheld, wireless price comparison comes about, big will always win. Why? Because Wal-Mart can pressure vendors to cut prices to them, just as they have been doing for the last 20 years. This cuts the small retailer out completely because their price from the vendor is 10% higher than Wal-Mart's. This means Wal-Mart can sell for 10% less and still make the same margin than the small retailer could.
But, because Wal-Mart can, they can sell it at 12% less than the small retailer - below their cost - and still make money. Goodby small retailer.
Yes, but what is the one thing that could bring Wal-Mart out of a slump?
An information system in the hands of buyers that said they had the lowest price. No other information, just lowest price. So, if you are across the street at Target and can just bop over to Wal-Mart and save $10 on a big item, why wouldn't you?
Next time, you might just start at Wal-Mart and forget about Target. Even if they have better merchandise and a cleaner store.
The consumer? Maybe, if price is your only data point for making a purchase. If you want to push out everything but price, then Wal-Mart is going to win in the end. They have the purchasing power to (a) make the vendor submit and (b) take a few losses now and then.
The stores? No way. Not only does this create an environment for Wal-Mart to win, it means "better service" means nothing if the only data point is price. When businesses compete only on price, big means everything and the little guy gets crushed.
Local government? They get to absorb the tax losses of the failed businesses that Wal-Mart already crushes, all the while they are giving Wal-Mart a big tax cut to move there anyway. And, at the state level they get to supply food stamps to the Wal-Mart workers that are part time.
I don't see anyone that wins in a situation like this. Watch the Meier commercials sometime - they are all about price and nothing else. If price is the only data point that matters, Wal-Mart has already won and we're just making sure they really keep prices low. Service means nothing, variety means nothing, flexibility means nothing.
The problem is that a significant cost in producing a hardware product - any hardware product - is the software engineering. If a Chinese company could "borrow" the driver for an ATI product, they would be one step closer to producing an ATI replacement product. I am sure they already either are licensing or "borrowing" the hardware bits.
So, ATI knows this. All opening up the driver would do is (a) give people more of an opportunity to screw things up and (b) give a helping hand to people that want to drive them from the marketplace.
Most video drivers these days are pretty large - larger than your average open source project - and unlikley to respond well to being tweaked by people unfamiliar with the architecture. Surely you don't think ATI's drivers are better self-documenting and structured than most open source projects, do you?
Sony is distributing this as part of some larger, possibly effective DRM system for music CDs.
What I see here is an endless amount of whining about how awful this is. You are overlooking the potential of this. The key here is that this is now out in the wild and can be exploited. The contest should be to come up with creative (and possibly destructive) things to do with these drivers when packaged with other software.
The result of this should be interesting. I think the responsiblity for all of this rests with Sony and First 4 Internet, but I would really like to see something creative done with this, such as an ActiveX control that disables the CD drive of anyone who visits a web site. The point is to make as much use of this as possible. Sony has provided the tool, it is now up to everyone to make as much use of this as possible.
There are artists that have decided they have "enough" money and freely distribute their work. That is certainly their right to do that. You, the consumer, do not have the right to make that decision for them. That is pretty much the same thing as your neighbor deciding that you should go to their church. Or the government deciding that since I don't want to work anymore, you should support me because we should all be nice people.
The result was they gave up their empire and retreated to their own shores for economic contraction and near-collapse.
This is the future that the US faces. While we don't have an empire, we do have the nattering nabobs that say we have no more right to "rule" than the savages that behead people on TV. We probably don't have any more "right" and this very admission will almost certainly lead to the dominance of those that would see the US contract and nearly collapse.
There is no "school" right to free speech. There is no right to free speech on the job. There is no right to free speech in a shopping mall, if the shopping mall has a rule that says otherwise. And, the First Amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with this because it is not a federal law. So, the government hasn't made a law abridging free speech.
Not unless you think the Federal government gets to review and approve all school rules, employee handbooks and shopping mall rules.
WiFi even at G levels has a maximum bandwith of 54Mb/sec, which translates to about 6MB/sec. Wow, 6MB a second, that's better than most cable systems, right? Wrong. 6MB a second for the access point. This is divided up amongst all the users within range, and possibly over a significant area if each individual access point doesn't have it's own 6MB/sec Internet connection.
In a real-world implementation with some kind of mesh network and relatively few hard-wired connections between them, you are going to quickly run out of bandwidth when people use this as an alternative to a wired connection. Therefore, this isn't any competition at all and serves to just allow people to connect when away from home.
The likelyhood that this will be used as a cheap alternative to a hardwired connection is high. Therefore, there is a high likelyhood that the service will suck from the moment it is turned on.
What business? Are you still paying for music? Why? None of it goes to the artists. So what possible "future business" is there to lose? This is a fight to the death, and the music business knows it. Their death, because as P2P expands, they lose customers forever.
Come on, you aren't going to try to say you think the RIAA deserves you buying music, are you?
You see, without regulation there would be no power limits. Without power limits it would be a short race to see who could have the biggest gun, er, transmitter. You would be able to pick up their transmissions on your cell phone, your car radio, your TV, your wired telephone and just about every other electronic device. Maybe a few that aren't all that electronic because things act strangely when there is enough power being broadcast.
I guess this guy's idea of "free speech" would include making sure the folks in India could pick up AM radio stations in the US.
It might be interesting to live in a completely unregulated, libertarian paradise. Unfortunately, what this guy is proposing is just eliminate the regulations without any other disincentives. He didn't think it through.
Sorry, if a US citizen kill someone in Canada, you might get extradited to Canada for prosecution, but there is no way you are going to be prosecuted in the US.
Same with killing someone in Brazil. Or Mexico. Or anywhere else for that matter.
Now, the US Justice Department would probably look favorably on an extradition request from just about anywhere for a murderer. And, US law enforcement would probably not bat an eye at helping out in the capture of said murderer. But there is no way they would be prosecuted by a US court.
Maturity is something that nobody can afford in the current business world. It isn't a matter of getting ahead - it is a matter of if you don't do it, your competition will and take your customers. See, the customers want to be served, and they don't really care who is serving them. All they want is what they want, when they want it, at the lowest possible price.
If you have a nice ethical business but someone else (less ethical) sells for 10% less, they will have more customers. Maybe, over time they will have all the customers. That's the WalMart way. It works.
About the only "defense" against this would be to pass laws that say prices are secret - you can only buy based on the ethics and reputation of the seller. You give them your money and they tell you when you have paid enough. But, you can't tell anyone else what you paid.
You will get the straight network feed recorded with network commercials and blank spaces for local commercials to be filled in. Or, all "network commercials" and no blank spaces. But the shows will still be cut and have the same running time - 30 or 60 minutes.
This will in the end just force advertisers to be more watchful and probably restrict their TV ad buying. This will mean less shows get made.
Alternatively, if you want to watch a remix/parody of current shows with a voice-over by some teenager who thinks his smutty remarks are the height of comedy, you will have lots and lots of that stuff to choose from. And some of it might even seem "professionally done".
And, of course, thanks to the pirates, it will all be free. You could pay, if you feel guilty, but why? Nobody else is.
The USS Cole was hit by what you could call an "improvised torpedo". I would imagine if someone had access to military weapons, they might be able to do a better job. As torpedos are big, expensive things they are therefore easily sold on the arms market. Everyone wants to have happy arms customers, so I am sure if the US isn't selling them, some other European country is.
For online transactions, there is absolutely no protection for merchants - all fraud is paid for by the merchant.
There isn't anything the credit card companies are doing to combat fraud. Just try to get them or anyone else to follow up on a stolen credit card. Forget it.
The problem is that there are different standards for movies and ratings, so a movie that is perfectly acceptable in the US with an R rating may be illegal to be possess in Japan - they have very strict laws about nudity in some forms. There are similar rules concerning language and violence in other parts of the world.
Similarly, airlines have to get specially edited movies which are legal in all markets where they fly. If you have seen the original movie in the US in a theater you can often see what sort of stuff they left out of the "airline version".
I have not (yet) heard of anyone being prosecuted for importing a single copy of a movie that does not meet local standards. But, I would not bring an NC-17 or unrated movie to Singapore. Similarly, I would not want to be bringing "The Producers" (a comedy about making a play called "Springtime for Hitler") into Germany or possibly France.
OK, so you think region coding should be abandoned? Great! Let's get the governments to remove their local movie editing and approval boards and maybe it will happen.
I guess it makes the legislators in California feel good, but it isn't going to do anything to stop it. It might stop someone who lives in California, uses their home ISP account to collect information and deposits the money in their parent's bank account.
Two problems with the "public domain" idea.
First, you as an accomplished artist, draw, paint or otherwise render in a physical medium an illustration of a public square. Since it is a public place, you have no rights to your work? That would disappoint quite a lot of people.
Secondly, if the map is or should be public domain, then there should be no reason why anyone cannot take the original, modify it and distribute their own "improved" version of it, including marks indicating that this is the NYC subway system map. Of course if it has imaginary stations on it, that is just my version of reality and you should know better than to question it.
Public domain? I think not. Some sort of reasonable licensing for republication - absolutely. $500 seems extremely reasonable. I guess if you aren't charging for your publication that is a bit of a problem. But the loss of control by making it freely available is a much bigger problem.
Someone steals a car and sells it to you for $10. When the car is discovered you are going to lose it and maybe go to jail for receiving stolen property.
Someone robs a bank and gives you $10,000 because you are a nice guy. Do you really think you get to keep it? Do you think you aren't going to jail or at least get some really nice community service sentance?
Some kids drop off some pirated software and music on your computer. Do you think you are immune to prosecution and/or civil suit because you didn't actually do the downloading? Not hardly. You are at least an unwitting accessory. But if you know they are doing it and doing nothing about it, then you are absolutely an accessory if not accomplice.
But the real point here is to (a) discourage redistribution of materials and (b) present the appearance of locked content. Yes, actually preventing redistribution would be difficult and maybe impossible. But the appearance is what really counts.
Another aspect of this is quite simple: if people would respect the rights of the creator/distributor of content (music, movies, books, software, etc.) there would be no discussion of this. The need would not be there. As it is today, there are two possible enforcements: technical and societal. Both are failing. The cry from more technically astute consumers is that this means all enforcement should be abandoned. This leaves the content owners in a difficult position because they must choose between controlling the distribution of their content and abandoning such control - and the revenue it brings in. Neither is a good choice, but the revenue loss from abandoning control is (or at least should be) 100%.
People talk about "try before buy". Shareware works that way and people have figured it out - 95% don't pay. Suggesting that music can work this way should result in similar numbers. Same with movies and books - check out Steven King's experiences vs. TOR books and others that have used "simply free" schemes. The 95% number seems like a pretty good benchmark figure when people do not have to pay.
If you ask music and movie executives how they can continue in the business they are in with a 95% drop in revenue, they will tell you they cannot. It is pretty much the same way with any other business - nobody can lose 95% of the revenue and stay in operation.
So why are people still paying? There are three reasons:
None of these reasons are going to hold up long-term, although the unavailability one is going to last the longest. What people on the forefront of the copyright issue need to understand is that it is all free now. Go and get it. Make it your duty to keep other people out of the record stores, video stores and so forth. When someone wants to buy a new DVD, give them one!
The result of militant action will be one of a relatively few possibilities. Think about it. What can happen?
You get the idea. However, with the current state of affairs - only a small drop in media revenue, if even that, things will continue as they are today. Of course, any DRM scheme can be beaten and the result of a single crack can be redistributed far and wide on the Internet removing any possibility of future sales.
And, if pushed hard enough, the media companies will have no choice but to either (a) cease operation or (b) lobby for the death penalty for copyright infringement.
Yes, it might be tough to impose that for a while, but we are talking about a country that mostly succeeded in putting forth the idea that "education = evil" for quite some time. How did they do it? Death, and plenty of it in gory excess.
You just have to be focused on the end goal and not care about the messy little details that get in the way between here and the goal. Since we are talking about the ruling oligarchy getting pushed out of power if they do not succeed, there is plenty of motivation. It isn't just some old men's lives we are talking about - it is their children as well. Funny, people do lots of odd things to ensure their children's future.