There may or may not be a copyright violation here (depending on specific similarities of the expressions), but there is certainly a disrespect of the moral rights of the artist.
Well, someone's "moral rights" are subjective, so I can't argue with you on this. Your sense of morality is offended by this. All I can say is that mine is not.
Let's say a google made a "tribute" to tiger woods by making the google words out of him, or paid a tribute to U2 by playing "one" when you went to the site. Do you think this would be ok?
How does this have anything to do with what Google did? They created a new artwork with similar style to Miro's work. They did not copy verbatim a song and play it. Lots of people create works in the style of other people all the time, and *even* indicate the style of the person that they are creating it in.
think should set up a porn site, perhaps www.oogle.com, and use the same fonts and colors as google (as a tribute to their fantastic business savy) and see if google gets pissed off.
And that would be trademark infringement and have nothing to do with copyright law, and I would support you being sued in this case.
I would argue that these jackasses have No Rights. I would argue that an artist has control over his work and images of his as long as he is alive. When he dies, his inheritors own the work, but they do not own the rights over images of the work, BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T MAKE THE STUFF, and they have fewer rights over the work for that reason.
Thanks to the Sony Bono copyright extension, they do have rights, and will for a long time to come.
You may feel that it is a bad idea for them to have these rights. I agree with you. I think that the day on which we gave up our original 14 years (plus 14 years more with renewal) of copyright protection was one of the worst days ever in terms of promoting creation of new content in the United States.
Now, their rights may not apply. It seems to me that they are pretty clearly complaining about creation of a work in the same *style*, which copyright certainly does not cover. But they do indeed retain rights.
Can't they at least come up with less transparent excuses?
The Bush Administration had to go through something like four different excuses for invading Iraq, all of which fell through, and *still* the primary reason for Bush losing popularity over Iraq is not that we invaded an innocent country, but that people feel that he's not doing a good job of handling the occupation.
Child pornography is illegal - and vile. Possession of child pornography is illegal - and vile.
And a Jamaican would tell you that homosexuality is illegal - and vile.
I think that laws making child pornography possession illegal are, at best, in line with laws making drug possession illegal to try to reduce the demand to squeeze out drug sellers. We want to step on sexual abuse of children, so we stomp on child pornography production. To stomp on that, we try stomping on child pornography consumers to reduce demand. You're talking about a pretty darn indirect benefit at a potentially steep privacy and civil rights cost.
Frankly, politicians are playing off the fears parents have for their kids when they invoke child pornography to squeeze something through. They're grabbing whatever generates the strongest emotional response. Right after 9/11, it was terrorism:
"Well...I don't know...that law seems to violate my civil rights."
"In this day and age of terror striking from the skies and from among us, we need to prevent a unified front. All Americans must work together. Vote in my law."
Terrorism may not be scaring enough people any more -- we may be back to "what about the children" in the form of child pornography.
Point is, if someone brings up child pornography while pushing a law, they're trying to make an emotional appeal as to why the law needs to pass. If they're stuck trying to make an emotional appeal, one has to ask why they just didn't make a good, reasoned argument. Is it because such an argument cannot stand on its own merits?
Pushing for increased government surveillance and control online particularly pisses me off, because in the past, government surveillance has been used to damage the mechanisms that are used to correct and limit the government -- free speech and the ability to promote political challenges to the government. There has to be an absolutely overwhelming benefit to granting a power that allows the administration to make life difficult for its detractors before I want to see it accepted.
I wish Slashdot had reddit-style voting and profiles, where you can train your profile to only show "recommended" articles that you like based on what you vote for.
You know, I always wondered why the handful of disgruntled WP people out there are so incredibly vocal.
Then I thought about their characteristics:
*) They probably are literate and write well, or they wouldn't be working on WP.
*) They probably have lots of free time, or they wouldn't be working on WP.
*) They probably like politics, or they'd do what I do and just contribute a little to the occasional article and have nothing to do with any of the politics in WP's running.
*) They are probably willing to go to a good deal of effort to support things that they feel strongly about (or they wouldn't have been trying to build policy on WP in the first place).
So you have a group of people with plenty of time to be bitter about WP, and proclaim that it is going to collapse, who are good about writing things about it.
I don't really have any sympathy for them. WP is entirely free content. If your ideas are correct, you are capable of expressing them, and you want to produce something rather than garner attention by complaining and spearing people, great. You can just fork WP to "myWP" *today*, and most folks will come with you, and the problem will be resolved. If you're just engaging in groundless whining, then the folks won't come with you. Linus Torvalds has said this about himself many times -- that he doesn't have any authority but that which the contributors give him. They choose to work with him. If everyone decides that they want different decisions made, then they'll go with someone else, on a different fork. Nobody is forcing you to work on the Torvalds tree, except for the fact that he does a good job, and people are happy with the situation.
Heck, a couple of forks might even be a good thing. They'd let some alternate ideas be tried out.
As far as I can tell, Jimbo Wales got fed up with all the organizational problems the Pepper article was causing -- far out of proportion to the value of the article. This is not JFK assassination theory. Rather, it's a particularly ugly picture that will probably float around the Internet for a month and then vanish. There are *hordes* of Web fads like this, and while someone writing a book on Web fads might still find this useful in a couple of years, I personally doubt that most people will ever think about it again after two years. So you have a not-particularly-valuable article that is causing problems for people trying to get work done. Solution? Just put a block on it for long enough for everyone to cool down, and possibly for the fad to go away. Is that the best fix? No, but any kind of administrative action is going to piss someone off. And people can Google for it, or put up webpages about it, or if it turns out that the Peppers article really matters in a couple of years, someone can re-add it.
I think that Jimbo Wales was less interested in making a judgement about whether something was valuable or not and more interested in keeping WP functioning. So he made the call that he felt resolved the WP organizational issue and caused the least damage. I can't personally think of a better solution to the problem. If someone does come up with a better solution that hasn't been proposed yet, doubtless it can be adopted instead.
Bittorrent has legitimate use. It is often used for linux distros, and many places are using it for demos of software and nasa even uses it to give access to large images. Try explaining the throttling to customers using it for "legitimate" reasons. Customer: Why is my download so slow? ISP: Well sir, we detected that you're using bittorrent, that must mean you're downloading pirated software or movies. C: I'm an academic and I'm downloading some images from nasa I need for a class tommorrow. I: uh..uhm.. have you tried turning it off and on?
Your ISP doesn't give a damn whether you're downloading a free copy of emacs over and over, pirated cell phone games, kiddie porn, simultaneous Internet radio feeds, or whatever. (Unless your ISP happens to be your university, in which case "but it's for research" does buy you some slack.) They just care about the fact that you're sucking down enough bandwidth that they are going to be paying more for your bandwidth than you are to them.
Frankly, the whole argument has been done to death:
There is absolutely zero, none, zilch, nada way that ISPs are going to be happy giving people bandwidth below cost. People that expect this are kind of jerks. They know that the ISP is going to lose money. It's like walking into a store with an obviously incorrect coupon and demanding that the store honor it.
I agree that ISPs should correct their advertisements -- they are indeed misleading. But people need to realize that, while they may get ISPs to do this, they aren't going to get below-cost bandwidth out of ISPs by griping about the advertisements. You will not get true unlimited usage without ISPs working on a way to take it away unless you are actually paying for your bandwidth.
Also, at one point, the ISP had quite a bit of lock-in ability due to the fact that you become attached to your email address. However, these days, I don't think I know anyone that uses their ISP's email services. I use an inexpensive commercial provider (mailsnare.net, which I wholeheartedly recommend, for $20/year -- they provide a spam filtering system that is almost identical to what I set up on my own computer), and most of the people I know use free third-party webmail. Even given that your ISP "tricked" you into signing up, they don't gain much. If there's a legitimate alternative, you can switch. If there isn't, you didn't lose anything. So I don't have a lot of sympathy for people that complain about false advertising, because my take is that they're looking for some reason why they can claim that they should actually get subsidized bandwidth.
The fix is to figure out more efficient ways to use the network. For example, I really wish (and have *no* idea why they don't do this) that ISPs would provide higher speed access within their network. I should be able to send a file to my buddy Bob, a block over, who also uses Comcast, with greatly relaxed upload/download restrictions. This encourages people to keep their network traffic off the Internet (and thus reduces the ISP's costs) and encourages people to join networks that their friends are on. Think of something like how cell providers do free in-network calling to get more and more people to join the network.
Engineers at ISPs really, really need to do per-user traffic shaping *before* trying to do application-specific shaping.
You do sort of do this, but this is a very brute-force way to do it, since there are only two classes -- "Abusive" and "Not Abusive", and it sounds like Abusives lose application-specific prioritization on your network.
Gah. Horrible. This is *exactly* what a gentleman higher in the story was describing how to exploit
Allocate bandwidth on a per-customer basis first, *then* break it down based on whatever application-specific stuff you want (application layer analysis, ToS flags, or even, God forbid, port number). Otherwise you just have eight zillion people tweaking their apps to look like VoIP or SSH traffic.
I thoroughly agree. Granted, Comcast probably doesn't bother to set up an NNTP server near everyone they service. However, NNTP *does*, at least in theory, provide a feasible way to drastically reduce the bandwidth that an ISP uses. It's not cheap to run a full NNTP feed, but it has to be a lot better than pulling down the same amount of data many times over.
Another alternative -- there doesn't seem to be any reason that you couldn't have just a "master" NNTP server with a bunch of "slave" NNTP servers that only synchronize headers (or even just overview information). Bodies would go from the master to the slave server only when a user requests an article from the slave server, then remain on the slave server until it expires.
That way, the ISP has one master server, a number of slave servers, and it seems like they can only win on bandwidth usage, by caching articles near a user that uses them.
HTTP caching proxies, which are comparable in approach seem to be popular. Maybe not enough people use NNTP to make this worthwhile, but it seems like the risk of doing something like this is pretty low.
BitTorrent actually uses ToS flags specifically to make it easier to prioritize bandwidth and differentiate it from interactive (ssh, Quake) or semi-interactive traffic (www). Same as mldonkey.
The reason why? Your ISP is not stupid. They can limit available bandwidth specifically to you, and they will happily do so. They don't need to (nor would they want to, for the reason you mentioned, among other things) limit it based only on port and ignore the user. Otherwise, yes, everyone would tunnel their traffic through the port that got "highest priority".
If you *do* manage to make your web traffic and BitTorrent traffic indistinguishable, then your ISP is just going to deprioritize both.
What your ISP (or the NAT/router box that you run at the edge of your network) *can* do is to prioritize your own bandwidth based on the urgency with which any packet needs to get somewhere. You want to be able to run BitTorrent and Quake 4 simultaneously, but BitTorrent eats up all your available bandwidth, so you can't play Quake 4 with a P2P client running. If you provide enough information to be able to figure out which of the two should take precedence over the other, then you can run P2P without impacting your other network usage. Much more intelligent.
Read this for a more detailed description of what I'm talking about.
The point is, what you're trying to do is make your usage indistinguishable from that of other users. You can't do that, at least from the standpoint of your local ISP, because your local ISP *knows* where the traffic is going. What your approach here will do is make your different applications indistingushable from each other -- but then you are just throwing away information that can keep multiple applications running well together. Granted, maybe an ISP won't take advantage of it -- "He wants us to prioritize these packets of his above these other ones of his? Hell, we don't care!" -- but it isn't going to improve things relative to other users.
The irritating thing is that if the USG uses the boogeymen of terrorism and and child porn, they get to invade multiple countries, roll back civil liberties, obtain new police powers, seal documents against even FOIA requests and squash complaints.
Both of these affect a vanishingly small number of people compared to, say, car accidents or smoking deaths. And even child porn involving sexual abuse doesn't kill people.
America really needs to put things in perspective.
I work in Information Security for a Fortune 5 company, and we have banned the use of all removable media for just this reason, it has a tendency to travel.
So now nobody copies your data, but nobody wants to either, because you've driven away all the talented workers?
Japan and North America are two different markets. Japan is a very interesting testing ground for new concepts and ideas. North America relies on a more tried-and-tested methodology. In the end this leaves North American and even European gamers is a stagnant rut of the same-old concepts continually rehashed and re-released.
If your tastes run to more experimental stuff, try poking around on the PC rather than the console. The barrier to entry in the PC market is much, much lower.
Re:What an original title for Japanese Gaming Topi
on
Land of the Rising Fun
·
· Score: 1
Not *only* was this a bad pun, but *two* people couldn't resist making it?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, cool. Someone using the word "capitalist" correctly -- i.e. not as a synonym for "free market". Nifty.
There may or may not be a copyright violation here (depending on specific similarities of the expressions), but there is certainly a disrespect of the moral rights of the artist.
Well, someone's "moral rights" are subjective, so I can't argue with you on this. Your sense of morality is offended by this. All I can say is that mine is not.
Let's say a google made a "tribute" to tiger woods by making the google words out of him, or paid a tribute to U2 by playing "one" when you went to the site. Do you think this would be ok?
How does this have anything to do with what Google did? They created a new artwork with similar style to Miro's work. They did not copy verbatim a song and play it. Lots of people create works in the style of other people all the time, and *even* indicate the style of the person that they are creating it in.
think should set up a porn site, perhaps www.oogle.com, and use the same fonts and colors as google (as a tribute to their fantastic business savy) and see if google gets pissed off.
And that would be trademark infringement and have nothing to do with copyright law, and I would support you being sued in this case.
I would argue that these jackasses have No Rights. I would argue that an artist has control over his work and images of his as long as he is alive. When he dies, his inheritors own the work, but they do not own the rights over images of the work, BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T MAKE THE STUFF, and they have fewer rights over the work for that reason.
Thanks to the Sony Bono copyright extension, they do have rights, and will for a long time to come.
You may feel that it is a bad idea for them to have these rights. I agree with you. I think that the day on which we gave up our original 14 years (plus 14 years more with renewal) of copyright protection was one of the worst days ever in terms of promoting creation of new content in the United States.
Now, their rights may not apply. It seems to me that they are pretty clearly complaining about creation of a work in the same *style*, which copyright certainly does not cover. But they do indeed retain rights.
No -- it's just that Jamaica was recently in the news related to the fact that homosexuality is illegal there.
Can't they at least come up with less transparent excuses?
The Bush Administration had to go through something like four different excuses for invading Iraq, all of which fell through, and *still* the primary reason for Bush losing popularity over Iraq is not that we invaded an innocent country, but that people feel that he's not doing a good job of handling the occupation.
Child pornography is illegal - and vile. Possession of child pornography is illegal - and vile.
And a Jamaican would tell you that homosexuality is illegal - and vile.
I think that laws making child pornography possession illegal are, at best, in line with laws making drug possession illegal to try to reduce the demand to squeeze out drug sellers. We want to step on sexual abuse of children, so we stomp on child pornography production. To stomp on that, we try stomping on child pornography consumers to reduce demand. You're talking about a pretty darn indirect benefit at a potentially steep privacy and civil rights cost.
Frankly, politicians are playing off the fears parents have for their kids when they invoke child pornography to squeeze something through. They're grabbing whatever generates the strongest emotional response. Right after 9/11, it was terrorism:
"Well...I don't know...that law seems to violate my civil rights."
"In this day and age of terror striking from the skies and from among us, we need to prevent a unified front. All Americans must work together. Vote in my law."
Terrorism may not be scaring enough people any more -- we may be back to "what about the children" in the form of child pornography.
Point is, if someone brings up child pornography while pushing a law, they're trying to make an emotional appeal as to why the law needs to pass. If they're stuck trying to make an emotional appeal, one has to ask why they just didn't make a good, reasoned argument. Is it because such an argument cannot stand on its own merits?
Pushing for increased government surveillance and control online particularly pisses me off, because in the past, government surveillance has been used to damage the mechanisms that are used to correct and limit the government -- free speech and the ability to promote political challenges to the government. There has to be an absolutely overwhelming benefit to granting a power that allows the administration to make life difficult for its detractors before I want to see it accepted.
The trick is to just realize that people are capable of revolts. So when oil hits a stable 9 dollars a gallon you'll start seeing heads role.
And I'll be glued to CNN to see every moment of it.
Maybe
Now, why is it that nobody pointed out that this is exactly what Gore was saying WRT the Information Superhighway?
By having them crash into other people?
Thank you. That needed to be said.
Hm, the original quote about the spike wasn't from a driving instructor... instead it was Lawerance of Arabia instead ;)
Hmm. Lawrence of Arabia died in a motorcycle crash.
It would be easy.
:-)
For that matter, plenty of other websites already use wikipedia's content and slap an ad on it, so we have good proof-of-concept.
They didn't fail to manage it. It got managed in a way that kept WP functioning and caused a fairly minimal amount of harm.
I wish Slashdot had reddit-style voting and profiles, where you can train your profile to only show "recommended" articles that you like based on what you vote for.
You know, I always wondered why the handful of disgruntled WP people out there are so incredibly vocal.
Then I thought about their characteristics:
*) They probably are literate and write well, or they wouldn't be working on WP.
*) They probably have lots of free time, or they wouldn't be working on WP.
*) They probably like politics, or they'd do what I do and just contribute a little to the occasional article and have nothing to do with any of the politics in WP's running.
*) They are probably willing to go to a good deal of effort to support things that they feel strongly about (or they wouldn't have been trying to build policy on WP in the first place).
So you have a group of people with plenty of time to be bitter about WP, and proclaim that it is going to collapse, who are good about writing things about it.
I don't really have any sympathy for them. WP is entirely free content. If your ideas are correct, you are capable of expressing them, and you want to produce something rather than garner attention by complaining and spearing people, great. You can just fork WP to "myWP" *today*, and most folks will come with you, and the problem will be resolved. If you're just engaging in groundless whining, then the folks won't come with you. Linus Torvalds has said this about himself many times -- that he doesn't have any authority but that which the contributors give him. They choose to work with him. If everyone decides that they want different decisions made, then they'll go with someone else, on a different fork. Nobody is forcing you to work on the Torvalds tree, except for the fact that he does a good job, and people are happy with the situation.
Heck, a couple of forks might even be a good thing. They'd let some alternate ideas be tried out.
As far as I can tell, Jimbo Wales got fed up with all the organizational problems the Pepper article was causing -- far out of proportion to the value of the article. This is not JFK assassination theory. Rather, it's a particularly ugly picture that will probably float around the Internet for a month and then vanish. There are *hordes* of Web fads like this, and while someone writing a book on Web fads might still find this useful in a couple of years, I personally doubt that most people will ever think about it again after two years. So you have a not-particularly-valuable article that is causing problems for people trying to get work done. Solution? Just put a block on it for long enough for everyone to cool down, and possibly for the fad to go away. Is that the best fix? No, but any kind of administrative action is going to piss someone off. And people can Google for it, or put up webpages about it, or if it turns out that the Peppers article really matters in a couple of years, someone can re-add it.
I think that Jimbo Wales was less interested in making a judgement about whether something was valuable or not and more interested in keeping WP functioning. So he made the call that he felt resolved the WP organizational issue and caused the least damage. I can't personally think of a better solution to the problem. If someone does come up with a better solution that hasn't been proposed yet, doubtless it can be adopted instead.
Bittorrent has legitimate use. It is often used for linux distros, and many places are using it for demos of software and nasa even uses it to give access to large images. Try explaining the throttling to customers using it for "legitimate" reasons.
Customer: Why is my download so slow?
ISP: Well sir, we detected that you're using bittorrent, that must mean you're downloading pirated software or movies.
C: I'm an academic and I'm downloading some images from nasa I need for a class tommorrow.
I: uh..uhm.. have you tried turning it off and on?
Your ISP doesn't give a damn whether you're downloading a free copy of emacs over and over, pirated cell phone games, kiddie porn, simultaneous Internet radio feeds, or whatever. (Unless your ISP happens to be your university, in which case "but it's for research" does buy you some slack.) They just care about the fact that you're sucking down enough bandwidth that they are going to be paying more for your bandwidth than you are to them.
Frankly, the whole argument has been done to death:
There is absolutely zero, none, zilch, nada way that ISPs are going to be happy giving people bandwidth below cost. People that expect this are kind of jerks. They know that the ISP is going to lose money. It's like walking into a store with an obviously incorrect coupon and demanding that the store honor it.
I agree that ISPs should correct their advertisements -- they are indeed misleading. But people need to realize that, while they may get ISPs to do this, they aren't going to get below-cost bandwidth out of ISPs by griping about the advertisements. You will not get true unlimited usage without ISPs working on a way to take it away unless you are actually paying for your bandwidth.
Also, at one point, the ISP had quite a bit of lock-in ability due to the fact that you become attached to your email address. However, these days, I don't think I know anyone that uses their ISP's email services. I use an inexpensive commercial provider (mailsnare.net, which I wholeheartedly recommend, for $20/year -- they provide a spam filtering system that is almost identical to what I set up on my own computer), and most of the people I know use free third-party webmail. Even given that your ISP "tricked" you into signing up, they don't gain much. If there's a legitimate alternative, you can switch. If there isn't, you didn't lose anything. So I don't have a lot of sympathy for people that complain about false advertising, because my take is that they're looking for some reason why they can claim that they should actually get subsidized bandwidth.
The fix is to figure out more efficient ways to use the network. For example, I really wish (and have *no* idea why they don't do this) that ISPs would provide higher speed access within their network. I should be able to send a file to my buddy Bob, a block over, who also uses Comcast, with greatly relaxed upload/download restrictions. This encourages people to keep their network traffic off the Internet (and thus reduces the ISP's costs) and encourages people to join networks that their friends are on. Think of something like how cell providers do free in-network calling to get more and more people to join the network.
That's an excellent .sig, shmlco.
Engineers at ISPs really, really need to do per-user traffic shaping *before* trying to do application-specific shaping.
You do sort of do this, but this is a very brute-force way to do it, since there are only two classes -- "Abusive" and "Not Abusive", and it sounds like Abusives lose application-specific prioritization on your network.
The ideal would be to use something like this.
Granted, your approach is worthwhile if the sole goal is to encourage Abusives to leave...
Gah. Horrible. This is *exactly* what a gentleman higher in the story was describing how to exploit
Allocate bandwidth on a per-customer basis first, *then* break it down based on whatever application-specific stuff you want (application layer analysis, ToS flags, or even, God forbid, port number). Otherwise you just have eight zillion people tweaking their apps to look like VoIP or SSH traffic.
I thoroughly agree. Granted, Comcast probably doesn't bother to set up an NNTP server near everyone they service. However, NNTP *does*, at least in theory, provide a feasible way to drastically reduce the bandwidth that an ISP uses. It's not cheap to run a full NNTP feed, but it has to be a lot better than pulling down the same amount of data many times over.
Another alternative -- there doesn't seem to be any reason that you couldn't have just a "master" NNTP server with a bunch of "slave" NNTP servers that only synchronize headers (or even just overview information). Bodies would go from the master to the slave server only when a user requests an article from the slave server, then remain on the slave server until it expires.
That way, the ISP has one master server, a number of slave servers, and it seems like they can only win on bandwidth usage, by caching articles near a user that uses them.
HTTP caching proxies, which are comparable in approach seem to be popular. Maybe not enough people use NNTP to make this worthwhile, but it seems like the risk of doing something like this is pretty low.
That's a really bad idea.
BitTorrent actually uses ToS flags specifically to make it easier to prioritize bandwidth and differentiate it from interactive (ssh, Quake) or semi-interactive traffic (www). Same as mldonkey.
The reason why? Your ISP is not stupid. They can limit available bandwidth specifically to you, and they will happily do so. They don't need to (nor would they want to, for the reason you mentioned, among other things) limit it based only on port and ignore the user. Otherwise, yes, everyone would tunnel their traffic through the port that got "highest priority".
If you *do* manage to make your web traffic and BitTorrent traffic indistinguishable, then your ISP is just going to deprioritize both.
What your ISP (or the NAT/router box that you run at the edge of your network) *can* do is to prioritize your own bandwidth based on the urgency with which any packet needs to get somewhere. You want to be able to run BitTorrent and Quake 4 simultaneously, but BitTorrent eats up all your available bandwidth, so you can't play Quake 4 with a P2P client running. If you provide enough information to be able to figure out which of the two should take precedence over the other, then you can run P2P without impacting your other network usage. Much more intelligent.
Read this for a more detailed description of what I'm talking about.
The point is, what you're trying to do is make your usage indistinguishable from that of other users. You can't do that, at least from the standpoint of your local ISP, because your local ISP *knows* where the traffic is going. What your approach here will do is make your different applications indistingushable from each other -- but then you are just throwing away information that can keep multiple applications running well together. Granted, maybe an ISP won't take advantage of it -- "He wants us to prioritize these packets of his above these other ones of his? Hell, we don't care!" -- but it isn't going to improve things relative to other users.
The irritating thing is that if the USG uses the boogeymen of terrorism and and child porn, they get to invade multiple countries, roll back civil liberties, obtain new police powers, seal documents against even FOIA requests and squash complaints.
Both of these affect a vanishingly small number of people compared to, say, car accidents or smoking deaths. And even child porn involving sexual abuse doesn't kill people.
America really needs to put things in perspective.
I work in Information Security for a Fortune 5 company, and we have banned the use of all removable media for just this reason, it has a tendency to travel.
So now nobody copies your data, but nobody wants to either, because you've driven away all the talented workers?
Japan and North America are two different markets. Japan is a very interesting testing ground for new concepts and ideas. North America relies on a more tried-and-tested methodology. In the end this leaves North American and even European gamers is a stagnant rut of the same-old concepts continually rehashed and re-released.
If your tastes run to more experimental stuff, try poking around on the PC rather than the console. The barrier to entry in the PC market is much, much lower.
Not *only* was this a bad pun, but *two* people couldn't resist making it?
[groans]