Understand that "computing" is now a commodity. Devices which perform this are commonly available, as is software. Many of these commodity users simply want to be users of this and nothing more. They don't really care a whit about the source code, making changes, learning how to make changes, and so on. They want a finished product that they can use, nothing more.
Open source certainly has people that are focused on the availability of the source to dig in and make changes or understand bugs. Nice, but that isn't where the bulk of the current "computing users" sit at all. The difference between Windows and Linux is still, in large measure, that Windows users can be simple "users" without any understanding of the underlying system. Linux "users" tend towards those that are not content to be "users" of technology. Linux isn't going to get very far on the desktop until people can be just "users". That, in my opinion, is a long ways off.
Sure, open source makes it possible to make changes. But what percentage of the "computing users" want to learn all that stuff?
Let's see here. You are claiming that people of average intelligence will download a copy of a song (free), like it and then run out and purchase the CD (not free) so they can listen to it... some more?
I think just about everyone with enough technical know-how to download music in the first place understands this basic free-not free equation and can see that one leads to a loss of $20 from their pocket while the other alternative does not. I'm betting on most people keeping the $20, but I suppose I could be wrong.
I know when it comes to other things like software there are really very few people that decide to register shareware (5% at best) and the number of people running out to buy a copy of Windows XP after trying a pirated version is about zero. Maybe even slightly negative.
My company recently purchased a PC from a supposedly legitimate vendor. On the itemized list of stuff that was included was "Microsoft Windows XP Home". Unfortunately, what was on the PC was a product code that had already been registered. No media, no COA, no little sticker.
Now, if they had sold the system without an OS, we would have used one of our Windows licenses on it and that would have been that. But, they claimed to put a licensed copy of Windows on the computer and did not.
I called Microsoft worked my way through their piracy hotline. What do you know, a few days later a new OEM copy of Windows showed up in the mail.
If you get sold a copy of Windows, you have the right to expect a legal copy of Windows. Period.
If you don't actively defend a trademark, it is revoked. So, if Systemax (dba TigerDirect) doesn't proceed to sue Apple over their inappropriate use of "Tiger", they will end up being called something besides TigerDirect. Period.
So there is no way they are going to drop it. Win, and they get to keep the name. Lose, and they get to change the name that has been used for almost 20 years.
Absolutely. The internet "sharing" of anything that can be "shared" means nobody with anything digital is going to be able to derive any money from it. This is the target that many claim is where they want things to go.
I don't think they have thought about where this ends up. I don't think the end of the road is certain, but I'll bet it means curtailed development of entertainment in digital form.
I break the law every day - I drive faster than the legal speed limit. As long as I limit myself to that, I'm probably not going to be bothered much.
Murder, on the other hand, is also illegal. Nothing wrong with breaking the law, huh?
Treason, or perhaps more accurately, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, including financial backing, is also illegal. While I think it is every radical muslim extremist's right to practice their religion, I would very much like it if we didn't encourage them so damn much in the USA. How about a little enforcement there?
Oh, and for those not clued in, trying to "run" a checkpoint at 60MPH when it is manned by guys with guns gets you shot at, often a lot. When the road being protected is one of the more hazardous places in Iraq, it gets you a lot of automatic weapons fire. No surprises there.
DSL is a dead-end technology. It depends on a copper pair from the phone to the CO. Fine for "old" neighborhoods that haven't yet been upgraded. The minute they rip the copper out and replace it with fiber to a local distribution unit, DSL dies.
My current house has a fiber-to-copper distribution unit in an underground vault. For the 200+ homes served by it, it means at least 600 miles less copper wire between the vault and the CO. This is clearly the future for telephone service - until it is fiber to every home.
DSL is a technology that piggybacks on running RF over obsolete wiring that happens to be capable of carrying it.
And do you really want government-supplied, government mandated and government-controlled wireless service? With the monitoring, CPPA protection and everything that goes with that?
Sorry, guns are here. You can suppress people from buying guns legally, but you can't ever stop people buying, selling and trading guns illegally.
You go into a bar in Chicago and say "I want to buy a gun" and three people will come up to you and say "How much you got?". This is on Sunday afternoon - if you do this on Friday night you are likely to get hustled out of the bar with several people saying "Not so loud" - because they want your sale rather than their competitors getting it.
Do you think there is a "Brady" waiting period for these sales? How about a background check? Forget it. There are so many guns being imported into the US today from Eastern Europe and China that it would take an army to just go around and collect them all up.
Sound a bit like drugs? Exactly - what do the people buying guns illegally have in common with drug dealers? Often, they are the same people.
Gun control is for idiots. Somehow, people in the US have it in their heads that they should be able to shoot people, and regardless of how illegal it is to do so, it is going to happen. Removing legal guns just eliminates any hope you might have of defending yourself. Ask someone about how it is going in England sometime. Lots of gun control, lots of illegal guns too.
THat just gets the University in lots of trouble. Judges take a very, very dim view of destruction of evidence, and the proof needed that there was evidence isn't all that great. Something about on the order of "reasonable people keep logs, you seem like reasonable people, so where are the logs?" No logs equals spoliation, which is a criminal matter, not civil. And, "my boss told me to" isn't a very good defense. Likely as not, everyone gets fined and some folks get jail time.
Yes, but is it right to put the man out of work collecting welfare when he would be perfectly willing to work 16 hours a day shoveling coal. Half the mess we're in today is because we think that some jobs are beneath human dignity. It turns out that being on welfare, stuck existing on the whim of the government for your food and housing, is a little bit worse that working at some physical labor job.
Just an idea here, but what if the "answer" for this is that there is a new, soon-to-be-released Chinese camera called "Niikon" that will be in every Wal-Mart next week. They just copied the ROM from a Nikon and there wasn't anything Nikon could do about it. Except now, with the new.NEF format change, they can block it from being imported into the USA because of a "DMCA violation", which without the "encryption" they could not do.
Think this is a potential reason why they might do something like this? It make a certain kind of sense, dragging "encryption" into Digital Photography for no apparent reason, other than perhaps legal ones.
For some reason which isn't disclosed, Nikon seems to have needed to reinforce the proprietary nature of the.NEF format. There are several potential reasons for this, starting with someone creating a new digitial camera "Niikon" that produces.NEF files for 1/10 the cost - of course it is 1/20 the quality but your average consumer isn't interested in that. Just the cost. You think a public-domain standardized file format would be better? It might be for the user and really, really bad for the company. Guess who wins?
As for what their device produces and the rights over what is produces, I don't see any restrictions there at all. It produces a funny format file that you run through something to get a printable picture. End of story.
The problem is that weaker IP (against Apple, for Sony in your case) means that some cheap Chinese company can come and "clone" the iPod and sell it for $49.99. Quality? Naa - it would be crap. But, it would look mostly like an iPod and contain exactly the same copied ROM that is in the iPod. So, it would completely interoperate with iTunes.
That is what neither Sony nor Apple wants. And even today this kind of thing happens, even with the IP laws we have. Fortunately, for both the companies and the consumers, it is pretty rare.
Why "new business model" would that be? Do you have one? I'm sure that some people would like to hear about it. What you are suggesting is that there is just one "global entertainment industry", and that simply isn't true. Sony doesn't share revenue with BMG, and they certainly don't do deals with Pixar. Now, if there was one giant media conglomerate that owned all of the "entertainment" you might have a point.
You say they are going to get their money anyway - why? From who? The government? Because we have seen what "free music" and "free movies" are, and for the most part we like it. It is much nicer to download whatever you want for free than have to go to a store. I don't see any payment method that is going to convince people they should now run out and buy something - anything - that would support the individual entertainment companies. Again, if there was just one guy like Ted Turner that owned everything then maybe you might have a point. But that doesn't exist and isn't likely to.
It is all free now - and anyone between the ages of 0-25 knows it. I don't think there is a way of putting the geni back in the bottle. Apple iTunes is an abberation - they are charging for stuff that you can get elsewhere for free.
I suspect we are going to see things happen a lot like they have in China. Recorded music will become rare - the only recordings will be non-commercial stuff that people tape at concerts themselves and share on the Internet. You can believe there will be a movement to prevent that as well. You will also see a big change in radio station formats, because they will not exist as 24-hour-a-day ads for buying recordings. Sure, there will still be some people selling recycled "historic" Britney Spears and "classic" Menudo but I wouldn't expect much spam about it.
The "business" of recorded music is just about over, worldwide.
Problem is that you're not stealing one $10 DVD - you are stealing millions of them. Or at least thousands.
Let's be real and assume the cost of posting one DVD on the Internet is $100,000 in lost sales. That would be only 10,000 people downloading it that might have bought it - ignoring the 10,000,000 other people downloading it that wouldn't have.
See, three years for stealing $100,000 is nothing.
He obviously studied "software patents" in a very abstract sense and thinks they point to perceivable objects in the world. Things you could "mark" somehow.
The problem is much closer to a chemical plant and its products. Sure, there may be a single patent on a product like a drain cleaner, but there can be hundreds of patents on the machines used to produce this chemical product.
Most software patents that are really troublesome are not the products on the products themselves but patents on tools and techniques used to make the products. These are hidden away and no amount of "marking" is going have any benefit whatsoever on this sort of usage.
Yes, I am listed as the inventor on at least two software patents. I think they are all silly, but today that is the price one has to pay - cross-licensing. You violate someone's patent and the defense is they are violating your's. So you cross-license and everyone is happy again. It is closely tied in with both the VC and legal communities, and until they go away software patents aren't likely to either.
I want TV movies about decapitation and evisceration. How about cannibalism? Why is this apparently censored? Why is scat-eating confined to a few porn sites? How come this isn't more prevalent? I'm sure there are plenty of people that would really like to get up every morning to a nice cannibalism story in the newspaper with lots of neat pictures.
We are headed down the road of lowest common denominator, if not worse. We can certainly celebrate our freedoms.
Except the "good deal" doesn't exist. You can't compete with free, and everyone "knows" that music is free now.
There is no way the RIAA or any other group is going to convince people they should pay for something that they have been told, shown and see for themselves is free.
iTunes is a little more convenient, so the $0.99 per song doesn't seem like it is that big a burden, but it is still there - because you can't tell me that every iPod user uses iTunes exclusively.
At this point, copyright commands zero respect among almost everyone under 40. This is the new "business model" we have to figure out a way to adapt to. People buy books because it is just too much trouble to print and bind your own - when a "good" e-book reader comes out, that will likely disappear as well. Why not? If we're just moving bits around, why shouldn't the cost be zero? Unless someone comes up with an answer to that that the current under-40 crowd can get behind, I'd say that "free, zero-cost, no charge" music, software, porn and anything else covered by copyright is the rule of the future.
The original computers were "hardended" Series/1 machines from IBM. There were five of them which were configured to provide redundancy. Three of them "voted" on every answer and the majority won if there was a difference.
The technology was considerably beyond 360-type hardware. I believe 360's were very low scale integration if not discrete transistors. Series/1 machines were minicomputers designed for rackmount applications.
Only real "hardened 360" I know of is the original F15 avionics, which I believe was a repackaged 360/40.
1. Removing someone from your list of spam targets is called "listwashing", and most anti-spam advocates are real keen on keeping you from being able to do that. The point is to shut you down, not to stop you from sending mail to them.
2. You say that your list is 100% opt-in. Any anti-spammer will tell you that isn't good enough - it needs to be double-opt-in with confirmation. And besides, it doesn't matter what you say - spammers lie.
3. RBL's are perfect for eliminating the usefulness of the email system for commercial use - this is the entire point of the anti-spam movement. If email is only useful for informal, friend-to-friend communications and useless and unreliable for things like order confirmations, newsletters and other commercial stuff, they have won.
The movement of all manufacturing to third-world areas, including China, is certainly a problem.
But I'm a lot more worried about folks that want me to exercise my "right to die". Perhaps before I'm good and ready to go. I'm a lot more worried about that than someone passing a law against saying "F..K" on the radio.
As far as medical research is concerned, I think there is a equally a fear that if you can get $100 for your embryo that people will do this for the money. Just for the money. Just like people sell their blood today. Haven't heard about that? Well, listen up! Yes, if it is legal, people will make people (or potential people) just for money.
One of the concerns of stem-cell researchers is about supply. If they come up with a technique that really, really works, where are they going to get a steady supply of nice fresh cells? If you had cancer and could be cured, but it would require someone to have an abortion to get the cells, would you do it?
This is an escalating battle. The more you think you deserve to avoid ads, the more ads-per-second there will be for you to avoid.
See, the fact that you are avoiding them means that they might have an affect on you, therefore they are working.
As to the advertisers finding another way to advertise, sorry, not going to happen. Their model works and it can be proven. Trying to subvert the system so that ads do not work in the future will just mean that Tivo goes out of business. No business was ever "sucessful" based on destroying someone's livelyhood.
As Guido says, "It's not nice to F___ with another man's livelyhood."
The minute you can separate the ability to maintain your fair-use rights, first-sale doctrine rights and the ability to play the music on any device you chose - and - assure people that the music cannot be freely distributed without payment, DRM will dry up and go away.
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Open source certainly has people that are focused on the availability of the source to dig in and make changes or understand bugs. Nice, but that isn't where the bulk of the current "computing users" sit at all. The difference between Windows and Linux is still, in large measure, that Windows users can be simple "users" without any understanding of the underlying system. Linux "users" tend towards those that are not content to be "users" of technology. Linux isn't going to get very far on the desktop until people can be just "users". That, in my opinion, is a long ways off.
Sure, open source makes it possible to make changes. But what percentage of the "computing users" want to learn all that stuff?
I think just about everyone with enough technical know-how to download music in the first place understands this basic free-not free equation and can see that one leads to a loss of $20 from their pocket while the other alternative does not. I'm betting on most people keeping the $20, but I suppose I could be wrong.
I know when it comes to other things like software there are really very few people that decide to register shareware (5% at best) and the number of people running out to buy a copy of Windows XP after trying a pirated version is about zero. Maybe even slightly negative.
Now, if they had sold the system without an OS, we would have used one of our Windows licenses on it and that would have been that. But, they claimed to put a licensed copy of Windows on the computer and did not.
I called Microsoft worked my way through their piracy hotline. What do you know, a few days later a new OEM copy of Windows showed up in the mail.
If you get sold a copy of Windows, you have the right to expect a legal copy of Windows. Period.
Right.
And, if they don't make Apple stop using the name, they may lose rights to use the name themselves because they didn't defend it.
So there is no way they are going to drop it. Win, and they get to keep the name. Lose, and they get to change the name that has been used for almost 20 years.
I don't think they have thought about where this ends up. I don't think the end of the road is certain, but I'll bet it means curtailed development of entertainment in digital form.
Murder, on the other hand, is also illegal. Nothing wrong with breaking the law, huh?
Treason, or perhaps more accurately, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, including financial backing, is also illegal. While I think it is every radical muslim extremist's right to practice their religion, I would very much like it if we didn't encourage them so damn much in the USA. How about a little enforcement there?
Oh, and for those not clued in, trying to "run" a checkpoint at 60MPH when it is manned by guys with guns gets you shot at, often a lot. When the road being protected is one of the more hazardous places in Iraq, it gets you a lot of automatic weapons fire. No surprises there.
My current house has a fiber-to-copper distribution unit in an underground vault. For the 200+ homes served by it, it means at least 600 miles less copper wire between the vault and the CO. This is clearly the future for telephone service - until it is fiber to every home.
DSL is a technology that piggybacks on running RF over obsolete wiring that happens to be capable of carrying it.
And do you really want government-supplied, government mandated and government-controlled wireless service? With the monitoring, CPPA protection and everything that goes with that?
You go into a bar in Chicago and say "I want to buy a gun" and three people will come up to you and say "How much you got?". This is on Sunday afternoon - if you do this on Friday night you are likely to get hustled out of the bar with several people saying "Not so loud" - because they want your sale rather than their competitors getting it.
Do you think there is a "Brady" waiting period for these sales? How about a background check? Forget it. There are so many guns being imported into the US today from Eastern Europe and China that it would take an army to just go around and collect them all up.
Sound a bit like drugs? Exactly - what do the people buying guns illegally have in common with drug dealers? Often, they are the same people.
Gun control is for idiots. Somehow, people in the US have it in their heads that they should be able to shoot people, and regardless of how illegal it is to do so, it is going to happen. Removing legal guns just eliminates any hope you might have of defending yourself. Ask someone about how it is going in England sometime. Lots of gun control, lots of illegal guns too.
THat just gets the University in lots of trouble. Judges take a very, very dim view of destruction of evidence, and the proof needed that there was evidence isn't all that great. Something about on the order of "reasonable people keep logs, you seem like reasonable people, so where are the logs?" No logs equals spoliation, which is a criminal matter, not civil. And, "my boss told me to" isn't a very good defense. Likely as not, everyone gets fined and some folks get jail time.
Profit was removed as a condition some time ago. I believe it was at least 1996, perhaps in the copyright revision in 1976.
Yes, but is it right to put the man out of work collecting welfare when he would be perfectly willing to work 16 hours a day shoveling coal. Half the mess we're in today is because we think that some jobs are beneath human dignity. It turns out that being on welfare, stuck existing on the whim of the government for your food and housing, is a little bit worse that working at some physical labor job.
Think this is a potential reason why they might do something like this? It make a certain kind of sense, dragging "encryption" into Digital Photography for no apparent reason, other than perhaps legal ones.
First off, I don't see the "money" here at all.
For some reason which isn't disclosed, Nikon seems to have needed to reinforce the proprietary nature of the .NEF format. There are several potential reasons for this, starting with someone creating a new digitial camera "Niikon" that produces .NEF files for 1/10 the cost - of course it is 1/20 the quality but your average consumer isn't interested in that. Just the cost. You think a public-domain standardized file format would be better? It might be for the user and really, really bad for the company. Guess who wins?
As for what their device produces and the rights over what is produces, I don't see any restrictions there at all. It produces a funny format file that you run through something to get a printable picture. End of story.
That is what neither Sony nor Apple wants. And even today this kind of thing happens, even with the IP laws we have. Fortunately, for both the companies and the consumers, it is pretty rare.
You say they are going to get their money anyway - why? From who? The government? Because we have seen what "free music" and "free movies" are, and for the most part we like it. It is much nicer to download whatever you want for free than have to go to a store. I don't see any payment method that is going to convince people they should now run out and buy something - anything - that would support the individual entertainment companies. Again, if there was just one guy like Ted Turner that owned everything then maybe you might have a point. But that doesn't exist and isn't likely to.
It is all free now - and anyone between the ages of 0-25 knows it. I don't think there is a way of putting the geni back in the bottle. Apple iTunes is an abberation - they are charging for stuff that you can get elsewhere for free.
I suspect we are going to see things happen a lot like they have in China. Recorded music will become rare - the only recordings will be non-commercial stuff that people tape at concerts themselves and share on the Internet. You can believe there will be a movement to prevent that as well. You will also see a big change in radio station formats, because they will not exist as 24-hour-a-day ads for buying recordings. Sure, there will still be some people selling recycled "historic" Britney Spears and "classic" Menudo but I wouldn't expect much spam about it.
The "business" of recorded music is just about over, worldwide.
Let's be real and assume the cost of posting one DVD on the Internet is $100,000 in lost sales. That would be only 10,000 people downloading it that might have bought it - ignoring the 10,000,000 other people downloading it that wouldn't have.
See, three years for stealing $100,000 is nothing.
The problem is much closer to a chemical plant and its products. Sure, there may be a single patent on a product like a drain cleaner, but there can be hundreds of patents on the machines used to produce this chemical product.
Most software patents that are really troublesome are not the products on the products themselves but patents on tools and techniques used to make the products. These are hidden away and no amount of "marking" is going have any benefit whatsoever on this sort of usage.
Yes, I am listed as the inventor on at least two software patents. I think they are all silly, but today that is the price one has to pay - cross-licensing. You violate someone's patent and the defense is they are violating your's. So you cross-license and everyone is happy again. It is closely tied in with both the VC and legal communities, and until they go away software patents aren't likely to either.
I want TV movies about decapitation and evisceration. How about cannibalism? Why is this apparently censored? Why is scat-eating confined to a few porn sites? How come this isn't more prevalent? I'm sure there are plenty of people that would really like to get up every morning to a nice cannibalism story in the newspaper with lots of neat pictures.
We are headed down the road of lowest common denominator, if not worse. We can certainly celebrate our freedoms.
There is no way the RIAA or any other group is going to convince people they should pay for something that they have been told, shown and see for themselves is free.
iTunes is a little more convenient, so the $0.99 per song doesn't seem like it is that big a burden, but it is still there - because you can't tell me that every iPod user uses iTunes exclusively.
At this point, copyright commands zero respect among almost everyone under 40. This is the new "business model" we have to figure out a way to adapt to. People buy books because it is just too much trouble to print and bind your own - when a "good" e-book reader comes out, that will likely disappear as well. Why not? If we're just moving bits around, why shouldn't the cost be zero? Unless someone comes up with an answer to that that the current under-40 crowd can get behind, I'd say that "free, zero-cost, no charge" music, software, porn and anything else covered by copyright is the rule of the future.
The technology was considerably beyond 360-type hardware. I believe 360's were very low scale integration if not discrete transistors. Series/1 machines were minicomputers designed for rackmount applications.
Only real "hardened 360" I know of is the original F15 avionics, which I believe was a repackaged 360/40.
2. You say that your list is 100% opt-in. Any anti-spammer will tell you that isn't good enough - it needs to be double-opt-in with confirmation. And besides, it doesn't matter what you say - spammers lie.
3. RBL's are perfect for eliminating the usefulness of the email system for commercial use - this is the entire point of the anti-spam movement. If email is only useful for informal, friend-to-friend communications and useless and unreliable for things like order confirmations, newsletters and other commercial stuff, they have won.
See? You must be new to this.
But I'm a lot more worried about folks that want me to exercise my "right to die". Perhaps before I'm good and ready to go. I'm a lot more worried about that than someone passing a law against saying "F..K" on the radio.
As far as medical research is concerned, I think there is a equally a fear that if you can get $100 for your embryo that people will do this for the money. Just for the money. Just like people sell their blood today. Haven't heard about that? Well, listen up! Yes, if it is legal, people will make people (or potential people) just for money.
One of the concerns of stem-cell researchers is about supply. If they come up with a technique that really, really works, where are they going to get a steady supply of nice fresh cells? If you had cancer and could be cured, but it would require someone to have an abortion to get the cells, would you do it?
See, the fact that you are avoiding them means that they might have an affect on you, therefore they are working.
As to the advertisers finding another way to advertise, sorry, not going to happen. Their model works and it can be proven. Trying to subvert the system so that ads do not work in the future will just mean that Tivo goes out of business. No business was ever "sucessful" based on destroying someone's livelyhood.
As Guido says, "It's not nice to F___ with another man's livelyhood."
The minute you can separate the ability to maintain your fair-use rights, first-sale doctrine rights and the ability to play the music on any device you chose - and - assure people that the music cannot be freely distributed without payment, DRM will dry up and go away.