Yes, part of the discovery process is the judge orders the defendent to turn over the computer (and probably lots of media, thumb drives and anything else nearby that might be relevent) to be examined. Usually in the cases we have heard about, the examiner is contracted to the plaintiff. The defense gets to hire their own examiner to review all the evidence as well. It is certainly a battle of the experts, and in this case Jammie seems to have a really bad expert. They tried dragging all sorts of irrelvent crap into the process which pretty much clearly says to anyone with experience in these things that there was no real refutation of the evidence.
She's guilty, they had her and everyone on the defense knew it and was trying to throw as much noice into the mix as possible to confuse things. Might have worked, but probably wouldn't. Add in purjury and swapping hard drives and all this is going to do is piss off the judge.
That is what MediaSentry collected - external records. Based on that, they were able to get a court order to examine her hard drive, which she apparently hid from them. So she has more problems with spoilation of evidence. And perjury. She might actually end up in jail because of this, you know.
The problem is, there is the additional multiplier - the number of downloaders that got copies of those 24 songs. In a lot of ways, this is the real problem. It is unknown how many downloaders there were and there are no logs.
To minimize this activity would be wrong, and assuming there were zero downloaders would likely be inaccurate as well as just plain wrong.
Assuming everyone on the planet downloaded the songs and multipling the penalty by 6 billion would be a bit extreme.
So, for copyright cases there is this little thing the legal system in the US agreed upon a long time ago called "statutory damages" which more or less stands for we have no clue what the real damage was but the legal system wants to discourage this and compensate the rightsholder. So the figure was arrived at a long time ago.
Now you can argue that statutory damages should not apply because there isn't any proof of redistribution. I think that is the real outcome of this trial - can you assign statutory damages for simply making the material available whether or not anyone actually takes it.
It is mostly a problem with scale. True, most people wouldn't have a problem with your giving a CD to your mother. But just about everyone can see the problem with giving the same CD to everyone on the planet. Which is exactly what P2P file sharing is all about.
They can't sell digital copies for the same amount as hard copies because their customers know that it costs them significantly less money to produce.
Where do people keep getting this idea? I can produce a 100-page book for about $2. If I were going to print 100,000 of them it would be more like $0.50 each. The shipping costs per book are extremely low. You might be able to convince me that the total cost for printing and shipping any mass-market book is $1. Maybe.
No way is it much more than that, because if it was I would be in the book business. When I can independently produce a book for $2 in small quantities I have to think that either I am the greatest genius ever to walk the face of the Earth, or maybe the book publishers know what they are doing and it is really, really cheap to print books.
What you are paying for in a book is the content, not the book. I assure you my book that sells fo $50 didn't cost $10 to print. Or even $5. Or likely even $2 even though they made only around 2500 of them. The Kindle edition is a little less than $40. The $10 discount has nothing whatsoever to do with the cost of printing and shipping the book.
Digital content has no intrinsic cost, so it's not much of a subsidy on their behalf.
As long as you are willing to cut the creator out. What, do you think creating books is simple and easy, so easy anyone can do it? Well, I guess anyone could if they wanted - but the result of 99% of the population is unreadable drivel. Read many blogs lately?
Either the creativity and effort is worth something or it isn't. If it isn't, then everything digital should be free and we are stuck with whatever slime oozes forth. Because nobody is going to put forth the effort to produce quality books. Books, yes. Quality books, no.
Iran is pretty much committed to wiping out Israel. Israel is offensive to their religion. Some people in the US might not like Israel being wiped out and would take great offense to a government in the US that stood by and let it happen.
To prevent Israel from being wiped out, Israel will certainly prevent Iran from really having nuclear weapons. An Israeli attack on Iran would likely cause a response. The US can either stand behind Israel or join in. Not supporting Israel in this case would cost Obama the Jewish vote and maybe quite a few others. While he can call Israelis "occupiers" and compare the plight of Palestinians to black slaves, when it comes down to a post-attack situation he really has no choice if he wants any chance at a 2nd term.
It might have something to do with the respect given to any country that actively uses stoning and beheading as a way to enforce laws. Different from the West? Heck yes!
It will be plenty entertaining to watch and read about the people getting killed in Iran in response to their revolting against the government. They aren't going to win anything, but it will be entertaining to watch.
That is what the West is all about. Entertainment.
When an election is held in a country where the real power of the government is in the hands of the clerics rather than the so-called "president", it is pretty meaningless.
When the people go to vote and there can be an armed person standing there suggesting the right way to vote - and who is to say that didn't happen in some areas - the idea of a "free" election is rather confused.
When the votes are counted by the government - the government ruled not by the president but by the clerics, why would anyone suspect the counting would not result in the winner being exactly who the clerics want?
Some people in Iran may wish for a free election, but they didn't get one. They haven't had one since before 1979. I seriously doubt they are going to get one anytime soon.
Since in the 1970's I have been hearing about how both abortion and letting people "die with dignity" is just pushing things closer and closer to euthanaisa. Sometimes of the unwilling.
The problem is the whole "value of life" question. Quality of life is a measure of this as well. The idea is that if there isn't a real quality of life, then it no longer needs to be lived. Similarly, if your life isn't valuable, then maybe it would be better in someone else's hands. Of course this is all related to the concept of "useless mouths", where people without much value or quality of life are consuming resources that could be better utilized.
Obviously, Terry Schiavo didn't have much quality of life. There seemed to be little argument that she wasn't going to recover. So, obviously she would be better off dead. Certainly her husband and his new wife-to-be couldn't really move on with their lives without taking care of this little problem. So it seems perfectly justified to kill her so everone else could move on.
Except, the more we do this publicly with lots of attention the closer and closer we get to real precedents for the question of what to do with Grandpa? See, Grandpa doesn't seem to have much quality of life anymore and it is really inconvenient to have to consider Grandpa when we would rather be doing something else. And between feeding him and his medications there is a lot of money being spent there that would be better spent on other things. So why can't we just carefully dispose of Grandpa? After all, there isn't much quality of life left, especially since Grandma died.
The justifications just get easier and easier with each and every case. I've seen things progress quite a bit from the 1970's and the trend is disturbing. Clearly the idea of "partial birth abortion" wasn't even throught of in 1970 and the difference between that and just plain infanticide would have been clearly zero. So really, how far are we from Grandpa being more trouble than he's worth?
Terry Schiavo was absolutely not just some meaningless person that needed to be killed off. She was a symbol that most people in the US utterly failed to recognize.
I think the point of ISP's suspecting copyright infringing users is pretty simple, and one that has yet to be tried out.
Real simple. There is no safe harbor for what your customers are doing. If they are doing illegal things that the ISP can detect and block - something that is probably not far off - they have an obligation to do so. Failure to do so means they are an accomplice and liable for damages, at least contributory damages.
Today nobody has tried this approach because it is not clear that an ISP can detect copyright infringement in a clear and unambiguous way. Should this change, ISPs will certainly be viewed differently in the US.
Eliminate need for anyone else to sign up by sharing everything downloaded.
The result of, say five people, doing this is the service has zero subscribers six months out and everything they are trying to block is pretty much impossible to block. This differs from the current situation not one tiny little bit.
The only way this is a success is to (a) prevent downloading, not just sharing and (b) make it universal so you can't download stuff on any ISP anywhere. (a) is technically challanging to do, perhaps so challanging as to be impossible. (b) is completely impractical on a worldwide basis.
Doomed from the beginning. It might have an effect, but not for long.
PDA? The FDA does not inspect restaurants. It is a matter for the public health department of the municipalty or county. They may be held accountable to some sort of FDA standard, but enforcement to the restaurant is not at the federal level.
And no, most restaurants do not post any sort of ranking by the FDA, public health department or anyone else. What does scare them here in Arizona is getting a low grade by the TV station that does their own "Dirty Dining" report, which is completely separate from anything else. And can be used as a club to beat restaurants into submission if they aren't friends of the TV station.
Nice try for big government. But it doesn't work that way.
The problem with corprate data is that it would likely become just as private as that of other persons.
The problem with transactions is today some of the cost and risk are mitigated through other means. So you get a cheaper price at the grocery store because the store is selling their scan data. Don't want to participate? Then pay higher prices.
Anonymous sale? Sure, you can buy a pack of gum anonymously. But just try to buy soemthing big. Today, we all benefit from the retailer offering financing to buyers. You might take the discount and the financing. Or, you are getting an overall lower price because some buyers (not you) are signing up for the financing which untimately makes the store more money. Preventing this sort of thing - which is exactly what limiting information transfers will do - and we all pay more everywhere.
I think the first step is to eliminate credit cards and financing at the retail level. If you don't have the cash to buy a car, then don't. The problem is that the economy has grown since 1890 by quite a bit because of retail financing, easy credit and the like. While stuffing the credit genii back in the bottle is certainly possible, the result is a contraction of the economy to 1890 (or thereabouts) levels.
I don't see "information privacy" and "easy credit" being easily combined. And probably one huge difference between USA and European countries is easy credit and the significant boost in retail buying power that provides.
The problem is the pizza store that does not collect information for marketing purposes loses out to the ones that do. They want your phone number so they can connect it with other purchases in person and by phone. They can then mail coupons to their customers specifically at much lower cost than doing a blanket mailing to everyone in the city.
So the pizza place that doesn't ask for your phone number is doomed to fail. Because they aren't as efficent in marketing their product as others are.
The problem is, we currently have laws in the US that clearly state that if you collect information or aggregate it in various ways, you own it. This allows the company that creates a list of companies that manufacture metal products to copyright that collection and sell it. And, further, to allow them to sue people that simply duplicate their list and try to sell that.
So what do you do about a company that collects scan data from supermarkets and markets various analyses of this data? Today, their product is an aggregation and analysis of what could be considered private information. Yes, this is a multimillion dollar business that produces information vital to retail companies.
Similarly, the growth of the "credit industry" started with local and regional credit bureaus. They still exist in some places - it isn't just Equifax and TransUnion. They would have to be closed as well. And most of the loan offices that offer secured loans to people. Because they couldn't get information they rely on to operate with a reasonable expectation of getting loans repaid.
I think all in all for something like what you propose we are talking about eliminating somewhere north of 10% of the economy of the US. Probably not a real popular idea when people figure out the whole picture.
So how do you do it so as to not impact the economy in this manner?
See, the problem is a lack of follow through. If a bomb went off on a train every day for three days you can assume the fourth day there would be no riders.
It does not take one Stinger missle to shut down air travel. It takes three.
Clearly what is needed is a better grade of terrorist commander. If they exhibit just slighly more dedication we would have no air travel, train travel or much of anything else.
Watch the movie Traitor. Should someone implement the plot described in that movie - 50 bombs on 50 buses - we would be living in a whole different world. So far, we are still waiting for something like that.
Today there are thousands of people that have been through various training camps and are supposedly ready for martyrdom. If they are serious about wanting to change the West, they better start blowing stuff up again.
The truth of the matter is that if you make something available on the Internet, it is there for the taking. If you make something in digital form and someone else makes it available on the Internet, again it is just there. Once it is out there, all control is lost.
There used to be these things like ethics, copyright and common decency. They are pretty much gone now. If I find your picture and I want to use it in some way, I can and there is very, very little you can do about it. You might try suing - but if an international border is crossed you will find it very, very expensive to do so. You will find many countries take the attitude that Americans have no business involving themselves in their country - go away and take your silly attitudes with you. Americans are there to be abused in any way possible.
So of you leave yourself open to being abused, you will not be disappointed.
Sometimes people just assume that if it is on the Internet, it is free to be used. They are pretty much right. It's like music - it used to have to be paid for. Today, it is just there.
Rule 1 is pretty clear. Don't put stuff on the Internet that you weren't intending others to have. And by "others" we really mean the entire planet.
Rule 2 is if you were thinking your digital information has value, you were wrong. At least after someone posted it on the Internet. And once it is there, it is there forever.
I can design my own credit card at Capital One's CardLab. OK, so I want to be able to design my own driver's license, one that is uniquely me. Why shouldn't I be able to do this? Some states are still using licenses that are easily duplicated are freely available for people to fake. Which was the whole point of Real ID in the first place - to bring those states into line because without the Real ID law there was no federal power to say what a driver's license was.
So now I want my own and one that has a picture of me when I was 16 on it.
The biggest single problem with the PCjr was that it was late. In 1984 it was supposed to be on the shelf in the fall - October is the usual month when things are supposed to be shipped so they are stocked and on the shelf in November.
Didn't happen. Macy's had received $50,000 to hold shelf space for the PCjr and they left them empty.
The PCjr came out in February. A little late for Christmas. Everyone had created products for Christmas 84 specifically for the PCjr, but there wasn't anything to run them on. January 1985 CES was pretty dead - lots of PCJr games that nobody cared about. Parker Brothers closed down their electronic games division, as did lots of other companies right about then. It was a year or so later that the Nintendo finally started making inroads into the home game market but between the PCjr and Nintendo things were very, very dead.
You can say all you want about a poor design of the keyboard and limitations of the hardware. But it is even more difficult to use when it doesn't exist and cannot be purchased. Not having it in time killed it, not any stupid design decisions.
I can't see the RIAA walking away from this. The defense motions were clearly grasping at straws. Why even try to bring in a open wireless issue when there was no wireless router? They tried to argue that communication between two computers was "wiretapping" of some sort. They tried to trot out the idea that one computer recording information from a two-computer conversation was somehow wrong.
I'll be very surprised if there is anything meaningful to come from the defense other than whining. Meaningless whining.
What this case is about is not downloading files, it is uploading files to others.
The astonishing concept that most fail to understand is the idea that anything digital can be charged for it a fleeting thing, like a bird flying towards an open window. The bird is just about at he window now, and once it leaves it isn't coming back, no matter how safe and well-fed it might have been in the cage.
What this means is that anything that be reduced to digital form will have zero cost. Microsoft Windows. All music, regardless of the intent of its creator. All books, again regardless of what Google or Amazon thinks. Movies, TV shows, everything. This comes about because a valiant few, of which Jammie may or may not belong, are willing to buy, rent, borrow or steal to obtain something in digital form and then share it with the rest of the planet for free.
The end result is that if you are interested in the content of, say, a book or movie, you can have it for free. If you are more interested in a physical manifestation of the book or movie you can buy it. Today. For a very, very short time remaining. You see, most people just aren't interested in the wrapper, they want the candy. The package their book comes in isn't important - the words are. So the very few that are more interested in the pretty package are going to be disappointed when it no longer makes economic sense to make the pretty packages when everyone is downloading the content for free.
How do you compete with free? About the only way would be to decide that you would have made $1,000,000 off the sale of a CD pre-Internet so therefore since you are only going to sell one it has to cost $1,000,000. This isn't going to work out very well either.
I don't see any death of content either. There are plenty of people that will produce books, movies, software, music and all manner of things like that because they are compelled to do so. They will know that people will adore and worship them for their creations and their egos require this adoration and worship. Of course 99% of these people are capable of producing only utter crap, but many people believe we are there already as far as quality is concerned.
Also, do not forget that the only reason Britian let the colonies go was it was too expensive to keep them. They couldn't muster up enough motivation to use British troops for the most part - a large part of what the colonials were fighting were hired mercenaries.
If Britian had wanted to keep the colonies, they could have done so. The American revolution was about out of gas when the British decided to call it quits.
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Yes, part of the discovery process is the judge orders the defendent to turn over the computer (and probably lots of media, thumb drives and anything else nearby that might be relevent) to be examined. Usually in the cases we have heard about, the examiner is contracted to the plaintiff. The defense gets to hire their own examiner to review all the evidence as well. It is certainly a battle of the experts, and in this case Jammie seems to have a really bad expert. They tried dragging all sorts of irrelvent crap into the process which pretty much clearly says to anyone with experience in these things that there was no real refutation of the evidence.
She's guilty, they had her and everyone on the defense knew it and was trying to throw as much noice into the mix as possible to confuse things. Might have worked, but probably wouldn't. Add in purjury and swapping hard drives and all this is going to do is piss off the judge.
That is what MediaSentry collected - external records. Based on that, they were able to get a court order to examine her hard drive, which she apparently hid from them. So she has more problems with spoilation of evidence. And perjury. She might actually end up in jail because of this, you know.
The problem is, there is the additional multiplier - the number of downloaders that got copies of those 24 songs. In a lot of ways, this is the real problem. It is unknown how many downloaders there were and there are no logs.
To minimize this activity would be wrong, and assuming there were zero downloaders would likely be inaccurate as well as just plain wrong.
Assuming everyone on the planet downloaded the songs and multipling the penalty by 6 billion would be a bit extreme.
So, for copyright cases there is this little thing the legal system in the US agreed upon a long time ago called "statutory damages" which more or less stands for we have no clue what the real damage was but the legal system wants to discourage this and compensate the rightsholder. So the figure was arrived at a long time ago.
Now you can argue that statutory damages should not apply because there isn't any proof of redistribution. I think that is the real outcome of this trial - can you assign statutory damages for simply making the material available whether or not anyone actually takes it.
It is mostly a problem with scale. True, most people wouldn't have a problem with your giving a CD to your mother. But just about everyone can see the problem with giving the same CD to everyone on the planet. Which is exactly what P2P file sharing is all about.
They can't sell digital copies for the same amount as hard copies because their customers know that it costs them significantly less money to produce.
Where do people keep getting this idea? I can produce a 100-page book for about $2. If I were going to print 100,000 of them it would be more like $0.50 each. The shipping costs per book are extremely low. You might be able to convince me that the total cost for printing and shipping any mass-market book is $1. Maybe.
No way is it much more than that, because if it was I would be in the book business. When I can independently produce a book for $2 in small quantities I have to think that either I am the greatest genius ever to walk the face of the Earth, or maybe the book publishers know what they are doing and it is really, really cheap to print books.
What you are paying for in a book is the content, not the book. I assure you my book that sells fo $50 didn't cost $10 to print. Or even $5. Or likely even $2 even though they made only around 2500 of them. The Kindle edition is a little less than $40. The $10 discount has nothing whatsoever to do with the cost of printing and shipping the book.
Digital content has no intrinsic cost, so it's not much of a subsidy on their behalf.
As long as you are willing to cut the creator out. What, do you think creating books is simple and easy, so easy anyone can do it? Well, I guess anyone could if they wanted - but the result of 99% of the population is unreadable drivel. Read many blogs lately?
Either the creativity and effort is worth something or it isn't. If it isn't, then everything digital should be free and we are stuck with whatever slime oozes forth. Because nobody is going to put forth the effort to produce quality books. Books, yes. Quality books, no.
Iran is pretty much committed to wiping out Israel. Israel is offensive to their religion. Some people in the US might not like Israel being wiped out and would take great offense to a government in the US that stood by and let it happen.
To prevent Israel from being wiped out, Israel will certainly prevent Iran from really having nuclear weapons. An Israeli attack on Iran would likely cause a response. The US can either stand behind Israel or join in. Not supporting Israel in this case would cost Obama the Jewish vote and maybe quite a few others. While he can call Israelis "occupiers" and compare the plight of Palestinians to black slaves, when it comes down to a post-attack situation he really has no choice if he wants any chance at a 2nd term.
It might have something to do with the respect given to any country that actively uses stoning and beheading as a way to enforce laws. Different from the West? Heck yes!
Entertainment, that is what is wanted.
It will be plenty entertaining to watch and read about the people getting killed in Iran in response to their revolting against the government. They aren't going to win anything, but it will be entertaining to watch.
That is what the West is all about. Entertainment.
When an election is held in a country where the real power of the government is in the hands of the clerics rather than the so-called "president", it is pretty meaningless.
When the people go to vote and there can be an armed person standing there suggesting the right way to vote - and who is to say that didn't happen in some areas - the idea of a "free" election is rather confused.
When the votes are counted by the government - the government ruled not by the president but by the clerics, why would anyone suspect the counting would not result in the winner being exactly who the clerics want?
Some people in Iran may wish for a free election, but they didn't get one. They haven't had one since before 1979. I seriously doubt they are going to get one anytime soon.
Since in the 1970's I have been hearing about how both abortion and letting people "die with dignity" is just pushing things closer and closer to euthanaisa. Sometimes of the unwilling.
The problem is the whole "value of life" question. Quality of life is a measure of this as well. The idea is that if there isn't a real quality of life, then it no longer needs to be lived. Similarly, if your life isn't valuable, then maybe it would be better in someone else's hands. Of course this is all related to the concept of "useless mouths", where people without much value or quality of life are consuming resources that could be better utilized.
Obviously, Terry Schiavo didn't have much quality of life. There seemed to be little argument that she wasn't going to recover. So, obviously she would be better off dead. Certainly her husband and his new wife-to-be couldn't really move on with their lives without taking care of this little problem. So it seems perfectly justified to kill her so everone else could move on.
Except, the more we do this publicly with lots of attention the closer and closer we get to real precedents for the question of what to do with Grandpa? See, Grandpa doesn't seem to have much quality of life anymore and it is really inconvenient to have to consider Grandpa when we would rather be doing something else. And between feeding him and his medications there is a lot of money being spent there that would be better spent on other things. So why can't we just carefully dispose of Grandpa? After all, there isn't much quality of life left, especially since Grandma died.
The justifications just get easier and easier with each and every case. I've seen things progress quite a bit from the 1970's and the trend is disturbing. Clearly the idea of "partial birth abortion" wasn't even throught of in 1970 and the difference between that and just plain infanticide would have been clearly zero. So really, how far are we from Grandpa being more trouble than he's worth?
Terry Schiavo was absolutely not just some meaningless person that needed to be killed off. She was a symbol that most people in the US utterly failed to recognize.
I think the point of ISP's suspecting copyright infringing users is pretty simple, and one that has yet to be tried out.
Real simple. There is no safe harbor for what your customers are doing. If they are doing illegal things that the ISP can detect and block - something that is probably not far off - they have an obligation to do so. Failure to do so means they are an accomplice and liable for damages, at least contributory damages.
Today nobody has tried this approach because it is not clear that an ISP can detect copyright infringement in a clear and unambiguous way. Should this change, ISPs will certainly be viewed differently in the US.
I see the problem with this being something like:
The result of, say five people, doing this is the service has zero subscribers six months out and everything they are trying to block is pretty much impossible to block. This differs from the current situation not one tiny little bit.
The only way this is a success is to (a) prevent downloading, not just sharing and (b) make it universal so you can't download stuff on any ISP anywhere. (a) is technically challanging to do, perhaps so challanging as to be impossible. (b) is completely impractical on a worldwide basis.
Doomed from the beginning. It might have an effect, but not for long.
PDA? The FDA does not inspect restaurants. It is a matter for the public health department of the municipalty or county. They may be held accountable to some sort of FDA standard, but enforcement to the restaurant is not at the federal level.
And no, most restaurants do not post any sort of ranking by the FDA, public health department or anyone else. What does scare them here in Arizona is getting a low grade by the TV station that does their own "Dirty Dining" report, which is completely separate from anything else. And can be used as a club to beat restaurants into submission if they aren't friends of the TV station.
Nice try for big government. But it doesn't work that way.
The problem with corprate data is that it would likely become just as private as that of other persons.
The problem with transactions is today some of the cost and risk are mitigated through other means. So you get a cheaper price at the grocery store because the store is selling their scan data. Don't want to participate? Then pay higher prices.
Anonymous sale? Sure, you can buy a pack of gum anonymously. But just try to buy soemthing big. Today, we all benefit from the retailer offering financing to buyers. You might take the discount and the financing. Or, you are getting an overall lower price because some buyers (not you) are signing up for the financing which untimately makes the store more money. Preventing this sort of thing - which is exactly what limiting information transfers will do - and we all pay more everywhere.
I think the first step is to eliminate credit cards and financing at the retail level. If you don't have the cash to buy a car, then don't. The problem is that the economy has grown since 1890 by quite a bit because of retail financing, easy credit and the like. While stuffing the credit genii back in the bottle is certainly possible, the result is a contraction of the economy to 1890 (or thereabouts) levels.
I don't see "information privacy" and "easy credit" being easily combined. And probably one huge difference between USA and European countries is easy credit and the significant boost in retail buying power that provides.
Signature is an exclusively Western concept. It doesn't work in a global market.
Ever see what Japanese do for a "signature"? They buy stock rubber stamps from kiosks on the street.
The problem is the pizza store that does not collect information for marketing purposes loses out to the ones that do. They want your phone number so they can connect it with other purchases in person and by phone. They can then mail coupons to their customers specifically at much lower cost than doing a blanket mailing to everyone in the city.
So the pizza place that doesn't ask for your phone number is doomed to fail. Because they aren't as efficent in marketing their product as others are.
The problem is, we currently have laws in the US that clearly state that if you collect information or aggregate it in various ways, you own it. This allows the company that creates a list of companies that manufacture metal products to copyright that collection and sell it. And, further, to allow them to sue people that simply duplicate their list and try to sell that.
So what do you do about a company that collects scan data from supermarkets and markets various analyses of this data? Today, their product is an aggregation and analysis of what could be considered private information. Yes, this is a multimillion dollar business that produces information vital to retail companies.
Similarly, the growth of the "credit industry" started with local and regional credit bureaus. They still exist in some places - it isn't just Equifax and TransUnion. They would have to be closed as well. And most of the loan offices that offer secured loans to people. Because they couldn't get information they rely on to operate with a reasonable expectation of getting loans repaid.
I think all in all for something like what you propose we are talking about eliminating somewhere north of 10% of the economy of the US. Probably not a real popular idea when people figure out the whole picture.
So how do you do it so as to not impact the economy in this manner?
See, the problem is a lack of follow through. If a bomb went off on a train every day for three days you can assume the fourth day there would be no riders.
It does not take one Stinger missle to shut down air travel. It takes three.
Clearly what is needed is a better grade of terrorist commander. If they exhibit just slighly more dedication we would have no air travel, train travel or much of anything else.
Watch the movie Traitor. Should someone implement the plot described in that movie - 50 bombs on 50 buses - we would be living in a whole different world. So far, we are still waiting for something like that.
Today there are thousands of people that have been through various training camps and are supposedly ready for martyrdom. If they are serious about wanting to change the West, they better start blowing stuff up again.
The truth of the matter is that if you make something available on the Internet, it is there for the taking. If you make something in digital form and someone else makes it available on the Internet, again it is just there. Once it is out there, all control is lost.
There used to be these things like ethics, copyright and common decency. They are pretty much gone now. If I find your picture and I want to use it in some way, I can and there is very, very little you can do about it. You might try suing - but if an international border is crossed you will find it very, very expensive to do so. You will find many countries take the attitude that Americans have no business involving themselves in their country - go away and take your silly attitudes with you. Americans are there to be abused in any way possible.
So of you leave yourself open to being abused, you will not be disappointed.
Sometimes people just assume that if it is on the Internet, it is free to be used. They are pretty much right. It's like music - it used to have to be paid for. Today, it is just there.
Rule 1 is pretty clear. Don't put stuff on the Internet that you weren't intending others to have. And by "others" we really mean the entire planet.
Rule 2 is if you were thinking your digital information has value, you were wrong. At least after someone posted it on the Internet. And once it is there, it is there forever.
I can design my own credit card at Capital One's CardLab. OK, so I want to be able to design my own driver's license, one that is uniquely me. Why shouldn't I be able to do this? Some states are still using licenses that are easily duplicated are freely available for people to fake. Which was the whole point of Real ID in the first place - to bring those states into line because without the Real ID law there was no federal power to say what a driver's license was.
So now I want my own and one that has a picture of me when I was 16 on it.
The biggest single problem with the PCjr was that it was late. In 1984 it was supposed to be on the shelf in the fall - October is the usual month when things are supposed to be shipped so they are stocked and on the shelf in November.
Didn't happen. Macy's had received $50,000 to hold shelf space for the PCjr and they left them empty.
The PCjr came out in February. A little late for Christmas. Everyone had created products for Christmas 84 specifically for the PCjr, but there wasn't anything to run them on. January 1985 CES was pretty dead - lots of PCJr games that nobody cared about. Parker Brothers closed down their electronic games division, as did lots of other companies right about then. It was a year or so later that the Nintendo finally started making inroads into the home game market but between the PCjr and Nintendo things were very, very dead.
You can say all you want about a poor design of the keyboard and limitations of the hardware. But it is even more difficult to use when it doesn't exist and cannot be purchased. Not having it in time killed it, not any stupid design decisions.
This isn't an appeal, it is a new trial.
I can't see the RIAA walking away from this. The defense motions were clearly grasping at straws. Why even try to bring in a open wireless issue when there was no wireless router? They tried to argue that communication between two computers was "wiretapping" of some sort. They tried to trot out the idea that one computer recording information from a two-computer conversation was somehow wrong.
I'll be very surprised if there is anything meaningful to come from the defense other than whining. Meaningless whining.
What this case is about is not downloading files, it is uploading files to others.
The astonishing concept that most fail to understand is the idea that anything digital can be charged for it a fleeting thing, like a bird flying towards an open window. The bird is just about at he window now, and once it leaves it isn't coming back, no matter how safe and well-fed it might have been in the cage.
What this means is that anything that be reduced to digital form will have zero cost. Microsoft Windows. All music, regardless of the intent of its creator. All books, again regardless of what Google or Amazon thinks. Movies, TV shows, everything. This comes about because a valiant few, of which Jammie may or may not belong, are willing to buy, rent, borrow or steal to obtain something in digital form and then share it with the rest of the planet for free.
The end result is that if you are interested in the content of, say, a book or movie, you can have it for free. If you are more interested in a physical manifestation of the book or movie you can buy it. Today. For a very, very short time remaining. You see, most people just aren't interested in the wrapper, they want the candy. The package their book comes in isn't important - the words are. So the very few that are more interested in the pretty package are going to be disappointed when it no longer makes economic sense to make the pretty packages when everyone is downloading the content for free.
How do you compete with free? About the only way would be to decide that you would have made $1,000,000 off the sale of a CD pre-Internet so therefore since you are only going to sell one it has to cost $1,000,000. This isn't going to work out very well either.
I don't see any death of content either. There are plenty of people that will produce books, movies, software, music and all manner of things like that because they are compelled to do so. They will know that people will adore and worship them for their creations and their egos require this adoration and worship. Of course 99% of these people are capable of producing only utter crap, but many people believe we are there already as far as quality is concerned.
Also, do not forget that the only reason Britian let the colonies go was it was too expensive to keep them. They couldn't muster up enough motivation to use British troops for the most part - a large part of what the colonials were fighting were hired mercenaries.
If Britian had wanted to keep the colonies, they could have done so. The American revolution was about out of gas when the British decided to call it quits.