Perhaps not. But how many films really need $185 million budgets? My goal is not to come up with an alternate way to fund exactly the same pieces of content we see today, but to come up with an alternate way to fund content that (1) works in a world where private copying is cheap and unpreventable and (2) doesn't depend on restricting everyone's freedoms or technology for its survival.
Saying "exactly the same pieces" that we see today trivializes greatly the difference we would see under your system. To take my (in my opinion overly-generous) estimate of a high-budget under your system - $10m - adjusting for inflation the only film in the IMDb top ten that would have been made is "12 Angry Men". It's not only Dark Knight that we'd have missed out on - no Star Wars, no Godfather, no Pulp Fiction. No One flew over the cuckoo's nest. Saying goodbye to capitalist financing and moving back to the system it replaced - patronage - means taking an absolutely enormous step back.
["For every Dark Knight, there are a handful of Battlefield Earths that cost just as much to make but never recoup their costs."] [...]
I'm saying the films people don't want to see probably shouldn't have been made in the first place: copyright encourages speculative overproduction. If filmmakers focus on projects that audiences are actually willing to pay for, that's a good thing for both filmmakers and audiences.
I would actually predict the opposite. Battlefield Earth was originally rejected, and only came to production because a rich star had such strong ties to the author - through his religion - that he didn't mind losing millions of dollars on it. Compare that to a normal film, which while popular doesn't have ties to a cult, and unfortunately I suspect the cult will manage to get the money while the "good" films won't.
This is a false dichotomy: the works that would become more difficult to fund are a small fraction of all works. You wouldn't have "nothing to distribute"; you'd have fewer of some works and more of others.
I think you're living in a bit of a fantasy here. Let me put it this way: I loved the film Dark Knight - I've seen it multiple times, I own the DVD, and if a sequel comes out I'll almost certainly go to see it. But if I got a letter from the studio asking for $20 to fund production of that sequel? I wouldn't pay. For one thing, I would be skeptical paying for a film before I knew if it would be any good. For another, I don't much like the idea that I pay but everyone gets what I pay for, it doesn't seem fair. Thirdly, I don't really like the idea of sending money away on the possibility that something might happen. And I think this attitude is going to be more common than you think. A quick check around my flat revealed 9 out of 9 people said they wouldn't pay. And I think Sellaband, your example of how this model will work, is perhaps the ultimate point against it: at almost 3 years old, despite a partnership with Amazon, the possibility for people to make money and leadership by industry veterans, Sellaband has managed to produce a grand total of 21 albums. In contrast, Amazon shows 8,953 new releases in the last 30 days. In an industry suffering more from piracy than the movie industry, the capitalist model is still vastly more successful than communal funding.
I'm not arguing that freedom of speech is absolute, only that every limitation must be carefully weighed and the benefit must exceed the cost. I don't believe it does, and for decades the costs have been ignored entirely by those who set policy.
So you feel you never had the right to say common English words in a certain order that we recognize as the script of Fight Club? Interesting.
What gives you the right to say anything at all? It's a serious question. What would constitute a violation of your speech rights? How about if you were forbidden to use adverbs, or to start more t
That's an interesting hypothesis, but things just don't work that way in the real world. Political campaigns raise $millions from small contributions, even though everyone knows "the chance of the [ad being produced, or whatever] doesn't actually change by any meaningful amount, my action has no real consequence, so I'm just wasting my money." Sellaband has produced 21 albums at $50,000 apiece using a similar model.
I think that these examples are more telling of the weaknesses of the model than anything else. First let's take the example of Presidential candidates; these are huge campaigns affecting millions of people's lives, drawing huge crowds to rallies and commanding an army of millions of staunch supporters. You would therefore expect them to draw substantially more donations than a film crew. Looking at the statistics, though, the overwhelming majority of candidates only just manage to draw in enough individual contributions to make one single Hollywood film. If McCain struggles to make it to $200m is it realistic to expect to raise $185 for a film? If 55 million Republicans can barely raise the money to try to secure the most powerful office in the world, I think it's clear that budgets would have to shrink enormously. You might make it to $10m, but I doubt it.
Regarding Sellaband - while it's true that it takes payment upfront, it isn't actually using your model at all. The "believers" back the band and pay its production costs; no profit is guaranteed, and the backers take 50% of the bands profits. These come from selling the album after production. Sellaband has, in fact, produced 21 albums using the traditional model, just with a different way of finding investors.
Again, take a look at the real world. If things actually worked that way, no one would ever be able to break into any service industry. Why spend money on a dentist you've never heard of, or a barber, or a mechanic, or an accountant, or a CEO? And yet somehow we get new dentists, barbers, mechanics, accountants, and CEOs all the time. Without a proven track record, you might have to lower your asking price, but you aren't shut out forever.
I think what you're referring to is the gambling effect: copyright lets you roll the dice and maybe make a runaway hit that brings in a huge windfall. On the other hand, it also lets you invest a lot of money into a film that no one really wants to see, and lose it all.
Collecting payment up front certainly does not remove the incentive to make a good film. That's because good filmmakers can command a higher price for their work than bad ones. What it does is change the dynamics of that situation: you can't rely on word of mouth, you have to actually convince buyers that you're a good filmmaker, which means you probably have to have more than a single good film in you.
Good point. However, I think there are a few fundamental differences. For one thing, these professionals all have to provide a good service because they rely on repeat business; if a film maker manages to get $50m in donations to make a film, they don't need any repeat business. Given a 10% profit margin they're already millionaires, and can make the most dreadful film in history. How many such films does it take to totally shatter peoples' confidence in the system?
Furthermore, is it really realistic to expect the millions of backers you require to sift through film proposals finding the good ones?
It lets you know ahead of time whether or not your work will be profitable. For every Dark Knight, there are a handful of Battlefield Earths that cost just as much to make but never recoup their costs.
I don't see how this is a good thing. Are you saying that every film has a right to be profitable, regardless of whether people actually want to see it?
Even in your car metaphor the same problem exists. Someone needs to pay the car designers; but if you're relying on sufficient people banding together and paying upfront for him to start designing, you're going to be disappointed. Look at it from a logical point of view.
If I pay my money: either enough other people pay and I get my car/mp3 for the money I paid or Not enough other people pay, nothing gets made, and at the very least I'm out on the interest I could have earned.
If I don't pay: either enough other people pay and I get my car/mp3 for free or Not enough other people pay, nothing gets made, and I lose nothing.
The difference I make in this model by paying/not paying is negligible - The Dark Knight cost $185 million dollars to make, so my $25 represents 0.000014% of the money needed. The chance of the film appearing doesn't actually change by any meaningful amount, my action has no real consequence, so I'm just wasting my money. No matter how much you may want the film, it's illogical to pay for it under this model.
Not to mention that paying for a film you haven't seen yet isn't exactly going to stimulate the industry. At best it will kill off all but the most well established production teams - after all, who's going to back someone they've never heard of? At worst it removes the incentive to produce a good film, since you can't make any extra money that way.
Basically what I'm saying is that copyright works as a way of splitting the payment between all the interested parties without having to know who they are in advance. Your system doesn't, and that's a lot to give up for no real advantage.
Yes - and if the allegations are true, he will definitely win. No-fault terminations are generally not possible under French law, which gives a much stronger position to the employee than does American or British law. The power of French unions is also far greater than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, which provides further protection against unfair dismissal.
Which causes its own problems; the ad revenue, for example, is much lower for online ads as opposed to print ads. When you remove so much revenue you have to lose something from the reporting.
That's not actually quite true. Depending on where you are, you might be able to use it in certain circumstances.
For example, in British English, you would use an apostrophe for plurals of single letters (there were 10 C's). You can also use it to create plurals of abbreviations, especially where there would be ambiguity (Four IOU's), as a slightly old-fashioned plural of figures (in the 1930's, but 1930s is becoming predominant) and where short words would be odd if you simply added an 's' - for example, the Oxford English Dictionary gives both "yesses" and "yes's" as plurals of "yes".
Whether he was right or not in this case is debatable, but I can certainly see the logic in writing "T1's" rather than "T1s", to avoid the appearance of it being a different abbreviation - and it isn't without precedent.
I suppose it does have legitimate uses. But to compare it to a telephone company is a tad disingenuous. The primary use of a telephone company is legal - and what's more, if you choose to mis-use it, they will help the authorities to find you. If I had to make your analogy work, it would be a telephone company called "death threats anonymous". They would provide selections of hand-picked people you could phone death threats to, and when the police tried to investigate they would refuse to give up your details and laugh at how fantastic it is that you've made a death threat and no one can stop you. This company can be used for legitimate purposes - but barely is, because it deliberately sets out to position itself as an illegitimate network for people wanting to break the law.
It's not a perfect analogy (but then I didn't pick it) but I hope it gets my point across. In general I agree with you - if people choose to misuse a service that is their fault, not the fault of the service. If we were talking about Youtube, that would be perfectly reasonable. But people are responsible for their own actions, and that goes just as much for the creators of The Pirate Bay as for anyone else.
You want to shut down a resource I consider extremely useful for the benefit of established companies.
I think you've missed the point a little. The Pirate Bay isn't a useful resource to you - I've been almost exactly where you are, and I can promise you it's not. Why? Because The Pirate Bay is a search engine oriented entirely toward getting what you want without paying for it. If your series is free, The Pirate Bay isn't going to get you any traffic - that's just not its demographic. It's why, when there's a wide variety of open-source software distributed legitimately by Bittorrent, searching for "open source" finds cracked copies of Microsoft Office. There are lots of other Bittorrent search engines that are used by people who will have an interest in what you produce - but this one isn't it.
Secondly, the fact that there are legitimate uses for The Pirate Bay doesn't change the fact that their "business model" is to help people find copyrighted, paid material and avoid paying for it. I don't know whether they are breaking the law or not - that's what the court will decide. But whatever the outcome, they aren't a legitimate service being unfairly attacked. Everything they do is designed to help people circumvent the law, and they do it knowingly and deliberately. I see nothing wrong with the court shutting down a resource whose only point is to help people bypass the laws of the country.
That's why I put illegal in quotation marks (and tried to avoid it with some hideous circumlocutions elsewhere!) - legality, as I said elsewhere, is location dependent.
That said, a few things come to mind. First of all, while what you describe might be fair, it is in fact illegal in many - if not most - jurisdictions. Secondly, even if it's legal, I can't believe uses like that represent more than a minuscule proportion of TPB's users. And finally, this use is illegal in Sweden, where TPB is based. Most things are legal somewhere - but that's not hugely relevant.
On something of a tangent, can we please stop with these contrived examples? I'm sure you can think of lots of situations that would "force" you to download music - stranded in Antarctica perhaps, or your house being surrounded by 27 armed anti-CD ninjas. But at the end of the day they are just contrived examples. I find it difficult to believe, for example, that anyone has ever gone out to buy a CD that they wanted to play on their computer, then got home, smacked their forehead and shouted "D'oh! I don't have a CD drive! Whatever shall I do?!?". The whole thing reminds me of what my self-defense instructor called "27 ninja questions" - questions designed to create a situation in which the instructor is forced to say that extreme violence would be acceptable, so that the student can then justify his own, un-acceptable violence later.
Legality isn't about demonizing - it isn't about morality at all, although morals undoubtedly play a part in the creation of laws. The law is about having an agreed minimum standard that people must adhere to. While there are stupid laws on the books, the basic idea is pure: there are certain behavious that we must prohibit in order to maintain the sort of society we want to live in.
The downloads are illegal (and I put that in quotation marks the first time because legality obviously depends on your location) because the law supports a system of copyrights and makes it a crime to bypass them. It has nothing to do with "atrocities committed by dictators", and to be perfectly honest I don't really follow your train of thought on that one. "Illegal downloads" are illegal because of a recognition that if someone has created a work of art and put it up for sale, making yourself a free copy because you don't want to pay for it is unjust.
And to be perfectly honest, the whole question of defining illegality is really a distraction from the question at hand. Whatever your objection is to my use of the word "illegal" (and I would be interested, by the way, in knowing what it is), the fact remains that the downloads are illegal in most countries, including Sweden, where TPB is based. Your combative challenge is, at best, one of lexicon, since at the end of the day the downloads are illegal, whether you like it or not.
To claim, like the grand-grandparent did, that the name suggests intent requires an unambiguous name
I disagree. It would certainly be foolish to claim that the name proves intent, but I would argue that it's one of the many signs that show that, whether or not what they're doing is legal, they certainly aren't the victim of a defamatory conspiracy; they have made it amply clear that they support - if not encourage - illegal downloading of copyrighted materials. They make money based on a service to help people break the law. Whether that is illegal or not is a matter for the court, but I don't understand why so many people support them.
Whatever you think of the attitudes of copyright holders or the morality of copyright itself, it's clear that TPB are not innocent here. We aren't talking about some general-purpose site that happens to link to some questionable material. I would hazard a guess that 90% of traffic to TPB is people wanting to avoid paying for what they want. They don't just host a few links, they celebrate the idea of "illegal" downloads. They mock law enforcement. They're called "The Pirate Bay". They link - on the front page - to hand-picked lists of copyrighted material for you to download. Go and look at their music pages; they have compiled lists of hundreds of artists - whose material is not free - to facilitate the illegal downloading! They have categories like "Wii" that hold nothing but non-free material.
I've actually left that job now - I'll go change my signature.:)
I have looked for myself - I looked through the top 100 of every category, and searched for "Linux" (which finds little of interest as I mentioned previously), "ubuntu" (which finds Ubuntu - with very few seeders or downloaders), and "open source", which ironically mostly turns up illegal copies of Microsoft software.
I don't think I made any legal pronouncements to be honest - I certainly wouldn't credit anything I said with any legal merit, since my knowledge of Swedish law is as bad as it could possibly be. I just get sick of seeing the same arguments trotted out over and over again and seen as "correct" when they're normally little more than attempts to justify getting what you want without paying.
it's not meant for breaking the law, it's meant for sharing information
The overwhelming majority of their content consists of links whose only use is downloading non-free software for free. If you don't like my "linux test" try some other tests. Look at the "top 100". Every single download is a copyright violation. Look at their top 100 applications - every single one is a copyright violation. Look at their top 100 UNIX applications - a category in which plenty of free software is legitimitely distributed by bittorrent - and still over 50% of it is links to free downloads of paid software.
Whatever you think of the attitudes of copyright holders or the morality of copyright itself, it's clear that TPB are not innocent here. We aren't talking about some general-purpose site that happens to link to some questionable material. I would hazard a guess that 90% of traffic to TPB is people wanting to avoid paying for what they want. They don't just host a few links, they celebrate the idea of "illegal" downloads. They mock law enforcement. They're called "The Pirate Bay". They link - on the front page - to hand-picked lists of copyrighted material for you to download. Go and look at their music pages; they have compiled lists of hundreds of artists - whose material is not free - to facilitate the illegal downloading! They have categories like "Wii" that hold nothing but non-free material. You wrote
"It doesn't matter how much illegal content there is, the fact that you even found one "legal download" [...] shows that it's not meant for breaking the law"
It doesn't. There is virtually nothing of note there that is free to download. Maybe they aren't actually breaking the law, because they don't host the material, but to laud them as an innocent victim, to try to claim that they have any intention other than helping people to avoid paying for what they want is laughable.
There's a pretty big difference between Google and thepiratebay though. While they both link to both illicit and legal content, TPB's business is providing links to illegal downloads. I mean, it's called The Pirate Bay! As proof I submit the "Linux test". Linux is often touted as a legal use of Bittorrent. So go to http://thepiratebay.org/ and search for "Linux". At the time of writing, the top 10 results contain one legal download (Mono), and eight illegal ones! I would suggest that the fact that even searching for what is often claimed as the most important legal use of BT turns up an overwhelming majority of illegal downloads shows fairly clearly what the intended purpose of TPB really is.
When it was showing everything as harmful the "why is this harmful" page gave a server error - I'm assuming the server with the checker on has died and they've now changed the default to "safe" not "unsafe" (a rather more sensible default in this case, IMO).
Did I beat the OCR problem w/o introducing any fatal new ones?
Afraid not. There are a couple of problems. Firstly, the fact that you have huge numbers of possible combinations of images is insignificant - all the attacker needs to do is identify each image once, not once for each position it can appear. Secondly, your questions list isn't "nearly endless", it's a finite list of questions being built in a finite number of ways.
Breaking it would require you to build up a database of a decent proportion of the images, and a decent proportion of the questions, and then save the answers to those questions for those images. Since the permutations are done algorithmically - and therefore predictably - I can just regurgitate answers, and ask for a new question when I don't know the answer.
The problem with a finite database database of questions - even really really hard questions that AI won't be able to solve for a million years - is that I only have to solve it once.
Using your system as an example, imagine that you have 200 different styles of question (even if these are being joined in many different ways I can still separate them automatically) and 1000 images. Each time, I see 6 images and one question. If I do 1000 questions I am likely to see very nearly all of the images (I can't be bothered differentiating to get the exact figure, but it's going to be close). I'm also likely to see almost all of the questions. And so, while your questions are possibly impossible for a computer to answer alone, I can now build a database that will give me a 90% success rate in future - much better than the current success rate against text CAPTCHAs.
The massive problem, though, isn't simply that it's possible to build this database, it's that I can build a database of answers without significant overhead compared to paying someone to break captchas normally. A traditional captcha isn't perhaps as machine proof, but by combining it with other techniques - limited tries,ip blocking, proof-of-work, "greylisting" (fail the first correct captcha if the content is spammy) - you end up with a nearly bot-proof system. The spammers therefore turn to third-world labour - attacking a traditional captcha now costs $2 per thousand, while attacking your system costs $2 per thousand for the first thousand, and then perhaps $2 for ten thousand, when the human labour is only needed when the database fails. The next lot probably only cost $2 for a million - unless you keep changing your database, and that's only going to work if it costs you less to build a new one than it costs me to break it. For an average system admin, that means being able to write the new questions, find new images and upload them all in about 2 minutes.
The solution to automated spamming has to have an automated component - if not, it's always going to have massively increasing returns on human labour. For now, I just stick to the techniques that work against email spam: content-based filtering,proof-of-work (where possible), throttling the speed of spammy comments, IP blocking. To those I can add captchas as an extra defence where necessary, but I generally prefer to avoid it.
Unless, of course, you haven't paid the microsoft tax.
Then you're simply excluded from "the most open inauguration in history".
I really think it's a stretch to say you're excluded. If you want to watch the inauguration, you can: -Go there and watch it in person -Watch it on TV. It'll be on a fair few channels. -If you don't have a TV, watch it on someone else's; many small businesses, churches etc are showing it for free. -Watch it on the internet at the official site using Streamlight -Watch it on the internet at one of the other sites using a different plugin.
You aren't "excluded" from this event based on the fact that your computer is incapable of understanding one of the formats being broadcast. Firstly, because it's available in so many ways, if you want to you can still see it. Secondly, you choose to use an operating system built by hobbyists with little mainstream commercial support. The fact that you choose not to have the system they're broadcasting to doesn't make it unfair. I don't have a TV, but I'm not upset because I can't watch it on etch-a-sketch.
Don't worry. Linguists have been putting oestrogen in the water supply for years now - soon all men will be women, and the gender-neutral pronoun "he" will be restored to its rightful position! Bwahahaha!
Courts are very leery of making judgments on the value of the consideration (the price you pay) preferring to let contracting parties work out how much of what is worth the service or good contracted for, so I'm pretty confident that a judge would find that exposure to advertizing or data-mining would constitute sufficient consideration.
I'm not sure that I agree with you there. While you're absolutely right that consideration "need not be adequate" - ie it can be worth very little - it must be "sufficient". This normally means, among other things, that there must be some quantifiable advantage to the party in receipt of the consideration - however small that advantage may be. This seems to leave any consideration based on the idea of looking at adverts on shaky ground; what is the value of a user looking at adverts? Does this promise in fact change anything - if the adverts are already in the product, the user is possibly promising nothing at all, since a promise to "allow the service provider to put ads on their product" is feeble at best!
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Perhaps not. But how many films really need $185 million budgets? My goal is not to come up with an alternate way to fund exactly the same pieces of content we see today, but to come up with an alternate way to fund content that (1) works in a world where private copying is cheap and unpreventable and (2) doesn't depend on restricting everyone's freedoms or technology for its survival.
Saying "exactly the same pieces" that we see today trivializes greatly the difference we would see under your system. To take my (in my opinion overly-generous) estimate of a high-budget under your system - $10m - adjusting for inflation the only film in the IMDb top ten that would have been made is "12 Angry Men". It's not only Dark Knight that we'd have missed out on - no Star Wars, no Godfather, no Pulp Fiction. No One flew over the cuckoo's nest. Saying goodbye to capitalist financing and moving back to the system it replaced - patronage - means taking an absolutely enormous step back.
["For every Dark Knight, there are a handful of Battlefield Earths that cost just as much to make but never recoup their costs."] [...]
I'm saying the films people don't want to see probably shouldn't have been made in the first place: copyright encourages speculative overproduction. If filmmakers focus on projects that audiences are actually willing to pay for, that's a good thing for both filmmakers and audiences.
I would actually predict the opposite. Battlefield Earth was originally rejected, and only came to production because a rich star had such strong ties to the author - through his religion - that he didn't mind losing millions of dollars on it. Compare that to a normal film, which while popular doesn't have ties to a cult, and unfortunately I suspect the cult will manage to get the money while the "good" films won't.
This is a false dichotomy: the works that would become more difficult to fund are a small fraction of all works. You wouldn't have "nothing to distribute"; you'd have fewer of some works and more of others.
I think you're living in a bit of a fantasy here. Let me put it this way: I loved the film Dark Knight - I've seen it multiple times, I own the DVD, and if a sequel comes out I'll almost certainly go to see it. But if I got a letter from the studio asking for $20 to fund production of that sequel? I wouldn't pay. For one thing, I would be skeptical paying for a film before I knew if it would be any good. For another, I don't much like the idea that I pay but everyone gets what I pay for, it doesn't seem fair. Thirdly, I don't really like the idea of sending money away on the possibility that something might happen. And I think this attitude is going to be more common than you think. A quick check around my flat revealed 9 out of 9 people said they wouldn't pay. And I think Sellaband, your example of how this model will work, is perhaps the ultimate point against it: at almost 3 years old, despite a partnership with Amazon, the possibility for people to make money and leadership by industry veterans, Sellaband has managed to produce a grand total of 21 albums. In contrast, Amazon shows 8,953 new releases in the last 30 days. In an industry suffering more from piracy than the movie industry, the capitalist model is still vastly more successful than communal funding.
I'm not arguing that freedom of speech is absolute, only that every limitation must be carefully weighed and the benefit must exceed the cost. I don't believe it does, and for decades the costs have been ignored entirely by those who set policy.
So you feel you never had the right to say common English words in a certain order that we recognize as the script of Fight Club? Interesting.
What gives you the right to say anything at all? It's a serious question. What would constitute a violation of your speech rights? How about if you were forbidden to use adverbs, or to start more t
That's an interesting hypothesis, but things just don't work that way in the real world. Political campaigns raise $millions from small contributions, even though everyone knows "the chance of the [ad being produced, or whatever] doesn't actually change by any meaningful amount, my action has no real consequence, so I'm just wasting my money." Sellaband has produced 21 albums at $50,000 apiece using a similar model.
I think that these examples are more telling of the weaknesses of the model than anything else. First let's take the example of Presidential candidates; these are huge campaigns affecting millions of people's lives, drawing huge crowds to rallies and commanding an army of millions of staunch supporters. You would therefore expect them to draw substantially more donations than a film crew. Looking at the statistics, though, the overwhelming majority of candidates only just manage to draw in enough individual contributions to make one single Hollywood film. If McCain struggles to make it to $200m is it realistic to expect to raise $185 for a film? If 55 million Republicans can barely raise the money to try to secure the most powerful office in the world, I think it's clear that budgets would have to shrink enormously. You might make it to $10m, but I doubt it.
Regarding Sellaband - while it's true that it takes payment upfront, it isn't actually using your model at all. The "believers" back the band and pay its production costs; no profit is guaranteed, and the backers take 50% of the bands profits. These come from selling the album after production. Sellaband has, in fact, produced 21 albums using the traditional model, just with a different way of finding investors.
Again, take a look at the real world. If things actually worked that way, no one would ever be able to break into any service industry. Why spend money on a dentist you've never heard of, or a barber, or a mechanic, or an accountant, or a CEO? And yet somehow we get new dentists, barbers, mechanics, accountants, and CEOs all the time. Without a proven track record, you might have to lower your asking price, but you aren't shut out forever.
I think what you're referring to is the gambling effect: copyright lets you roll the dice and maybe make a runaway hit that brings in a huge windfall. On the other hand, it also lets you invest a lot of money into a film that no one really wants to see, and lose it all.
Collecting payment up front certainly does not remove the incentive to make a good film. That's because good filmmakers can command a higher price for their work than bad ones. What it does is change the dynamics of that situation: you can't rely on word of mouth, you have to actually convince buyers that you're a good filmmaker, which means you probably have to have more than a single good film in you.
Good point. However, I think there are a few fundamental differences. For one thing, these professionals all have to provide a good service because they rely on repeat business; if a film maker manages to get $50m in donations to make a film, they don't need any repeat business. Given a 10% profit margin they're already millionaires, and can make the most dreadful film in history. How many such films does it take to totally shatter peoples' confidence in the system?
Furthermore, is it really realistic to expect the millions of backers you require to sift through film proposals finding the good ones?
It lets you know ahead of time whether or not your work will be profitable. For every Dark Knight, there are a handful of Battlefield Earths that cost just as much to make but never recoup their costs.
I don't see how this is a good thing. Are you saying that every film has a right to be profitable, regardless of whether people actually want to see it?
It can't be undermined by new technology. We no
Even in your car metaphor the same problem exists. Someone needs to pay the car designers; but if you're relying on sufficient people banding together and paying upfront for him to start designing, you're going to be disappointed. Look at it from a logical point of view.
If I pay my money:
either enough other people pay and I get my car/mp3 for the money I paid
or
Not enough other people pay, nothing gets made, and at the very least I'm out on the interest I could have earned.
If I don't pay:
either enough other people pay and I get my car/mp3 for free
or
Not enough other people pay, nothing gets made, and I lose nothing.
The difference I make in this model by paying/not paying is negligible - The Dark Knight cost $185 million dollars to make, so my $25 represents 0.000014% of the money needed. The chance of the film appearing doesn't actually change by any meaningful amount, my action has no real consequence, so I'm just wasting my money. No matter how much you may want the film, it's illogical to pay for it under this model.
Not to mention that paying for a film you haven't seen yet isn't exactly going to stimulate the industry. At best it will kill off all but the most well established production teams - after all, who's going to back someone they've never heard of? At worst it removes the incentive to produce a good film, since you can't make any extra money that way.
Basically what I'm saying is that copyright works as a way of splitting the payment between all the interested parties without having to know who they are in advance. Your system doesn't, and that's a lot to give up for no real advantage.
Now the question is under French law can he sue?
Yes - and if the allegations are true, he will definitely win. No-fault terminations are generally not possible under French law, which gives a much stronger position to the employee than does American or British law. The power of French unions is also far greater than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, which provides further protection against unfair dismissal.
Just for the record, I'm living in Russia and I've never had any adverts on ATMs here.
You can also use spam.yourname@gmail.com, which isn't trivial to bypass because lots of gmail usernames already have dots in them.
Which causes its own problems; the ad revenue, for example, is much lower for online ads as opposed to print ads. When you remove so much revenue you have to lose something from the reporting.
That's not actually quite true. Depending on where you are, you might be able to use it in certain circumstances.
For example, in British English, you would use an apostrophe for plurals of single letters (there were 10 C's). You can also use it to create plurals of abbreviations, especially where there would be ambiguity (Four IOU's), as a slightly old-fashioned plural of figures (in the 1930's, but 1930s is becoming predominant) and where short words would be odd if you simply added an 's' - for example, the Oxford English Dictionary gives both "yesses" and "yes's" as plurals of "yes".
Whether he was right or not in this case is debatable, but I can certainly see the logic in writing "T1's" rather than "T1s", to avoid the appearance of it being a different abbreviation - and it isn't without precedent.
I suppose it does have legitimate uses. But to compare it to a telephone company is a tad disingenuous. The primary use of a telephone company is legal - and what's more, if you choose to mis-use it, they will help the authorities to find you. If I had to make your analogy work, it would be a telephone company called "death threats anonymous". They would provide selections of hand-picked people you could phone death threats to, and when the police tried to investigate they would refuse to give up your details and laugh at how fantastic it is that you've made a death threat and no one can stop you. This company can be used for legitimate purposes - but barely is, because it deliberately sets out to position itself as an illegitimate network for people wanting to break the law.
It's not a perfect analogy (but then I didn't pick it) but I hope it gets my point across. In general I agree with you - if people choose to misuse a service that is their fault, not the fault of the service. If we were talking about Youtube, that would be perfectly reasonable. But people are responsible for their own actions, and that goes just as much for the creators of The Pirate Bay as for anyone else.
Well, no. At no point did I say it was illegal. In fact, I said:
Maybe they aren't actually breaking the law [...]
Halloween? KKK costume?
That's a ghost.
You want to shut down a resource I consider extremely useful for the benefit of established companies.
I think you've missed the point a little. The Pirate Bay isn't a useful resource to you - I've been almost exactly where you are, and I can promise you it's not. Why? Because The Pirate Bay is a search engine oriented entirely toward getting what you want without paying for it. If your series is free, The Pirate Bay isn't going to get you any traffic - that's just not its demographic. It's why, when there's a wide variety of open-source software distributed legitimately by Bittorrent, searching for "open source" finds cracked copies of Microsoft Office. There are lots of other Bittorrent search engines that are used by people who will have an interest in what you produce - but this one isn't it.
Secondly, the fact that there are legitimate uses for The Pirate Bay doesn't change the fact that their "business model" is to help people find copyrighted, paid material and avoid paying for it. I don't know whether they are breaking the law or not - that's what the court will decide. But whatever the outcome, they aren't a legitimate service being unfairly attacked. Everything they do is designed to help people circumvent the law, and they do it knowingly and deliberately. I see nothing wrong with the court shutting down a resource whose only point is to help people bypass the laws of the country.
That's why I put illegal in quotation marks (and tried to avoid it with some hideous circumlocutions elsewhere!) - legality, as I said elsewhere, is location dependent.
That said, a few things come to mind. First of all, while what you describe might be fair, it is in fact illegal in many - if not most - jurisdictions. Secondly, even if it's legal, I can't believe uses like that represent more than a minuscule proportion of TPB's users. And finally, this use is illegal in Sweden, where TPB is based. Most things are legal somewhere - but that's not hugely relevant.
On something of a tangent, can we please stop with these contrived examples? I'm sure you can think of lots of situations that would "force" you to download music - stranded in Antarctica perhaps, or your house being surrounded by 27 armed anti-CD ninjas. But at the end of the day they are just contrived examples. I find it difficult to believe, for example, that anyone has ever gone out to buy a CD that they wanted to play on their computer, then got home, smacked their forehead and shouted "D'oh! I don't have a CD drive! Whatever shall I do?!?". The whole thing reminds me of what my self-defense instructor called "27 ninja questions" - questions designed to create a situation in which the instructor is forced to say that extreme violence would be acceptable, so that the student can then justify his own, un-acceptable violence later.
Legality isn't about demonizing - it isn't about morality at all, although morals undoubtedly play a part in the creation of laws. The law is about having an agreed minimum standard that people must adhere to. While there are stupid laws on the books, the basic idea is pure: there are certain behavious that we must prohibit in order to maintain the sort of society we want to live in.
The downloads are illegal (and I put that in quotation marks the first time because legality obviously depends on your location) because the law supports a system of copyrights and makes it a crime to bypass them. It has nothing to do with "atrocities committed by dictators", and to be perfectly honest I don't really follow your train of thought on that one. "Illegal downloads" are illegal because of a recognition that if someone has created a work of art and put it up for sale, making yourself a free copy because you don't want to pay for it is unjust.
And to be perfectly honest, the whole question of defining illegality is really a distraction from the question at hand. Whatever your objection is to my use of the word "illegal" (and I would be interested, by the way, in knowing what it is), the fact remains that the downloads are illegal in most countries, including Sweden, where TPB is based. Your combative challenge is, at best, one of lexicon, since at the end of the day the downloads are illegal, whether you like it or not.
To claim, like the grand-grandparent did, that the name suggests intent requires an unambiguous name
I disagree. It would certainly be foolish to claim that the name proves intent, but I would argue that it's one of the many signs that show that, whether or not what they're doing is legal, they certainly aren't the victim of a defamatory conspiracy; they have made it amply clear that they support - if not encourage - illegal downloading of copyrighted materials. They make money based on a service to help people break the law. Whether that is illegal or not is a matter for the court, but I don't understand why so many people support them.
To quote my other post:
Whatever you think of the attitudes of copyright holders or the morality of copyright itself, it's clear that TPB are not innocent here. We aren't talking about some general-purpose site that happens to link to some questionable material. I would hazard a guess that 90% of traffic to TPB is people wanting to avoid paying for what they want. They don't just host a few links, they celebrate the idea of "illegal" downloads. They mock law enforcement. They're called "The Pirate Bay". They link - on the front page - to hand-picked lists of copyrighted material for you to download. Go and look at their music pages; they have compiled lists of hundreds of artists - whose material is not free - to facilitate the illegal downloading! They have categories like "Wii" that hold nothing but non-free material.
I've actually left that job now - I'll go change my signature. :)
I have looked for myself - I looked through the top 100 of every category, and searched for "Linux" (which finds little of interest as I mentioned previously), "ubuntu" (which finds Ubuntu - with very few seeders or downloaders), and "open source", which ironically mostly turns up illegal copies of Microsoft software.
I don't think I made any legal pronouncements to be honest - I certainly wouldn't credit anything I said with any legal merit, since my knowledge of Swedish law is as bad as it could possibly be. I just get sick of seeing the same arguments trotted out over and over again and seen as "correct" when they're normally little more than attempts to justify getting what you want without paying.
it's not meant for breaking the law, it's meant for sharing information
The overwhelming majority of their content consists of links whose only use is downloading non-free software for free. If you don't like my "linux test" try some other tests. Look at the "top 100". Every single download is a copyright violation. Look at their top 100 applications - every single one is a copyright violation. Look at their top 100 UNIX applications - a category in which plenty of free software is legitimitely distributed by bittorrent - and still over 50% of it is links to free downloads of paid software.
Whatever you think of the attitudes of copyright holders or the morality of copyright itself, it's clear that TPB are not innocent here. We aren't talking about some general-purpose site that happens to link to some questionable material. I would hazard a guess that 90% of traffic to TPB is people wanting to avoid paying for what they want. They don't just host a few links, they celebrate the idea of "illegal" downloads. They mock law enforcement. They're called "The Pirate Bay". They link - on the front page - to hand-picked lists of copyrighted material for you to download. Go and look at their music pages; they have compiled lists of hundreds of artists - whose material is not free - to facilitate the illegal downloading! They have categories like "Wii" that hold nothing but non-free material.
You wrote
"It doesn't matter how much illegal content there is, the fact that you even found one "legal download" [...] shows that it's not meant for breaking the law"
It doesn't. There is virtually nothing of note there that is free to download. Maybe they aren't actually breaking the law, because they don't host the material, but to laud them as an innocent victim, to try to claim that they have any intention other than helping people to avoid paying for what they want is laughable.
There's a pretty big difference between Google and thepiratebay though. While they both link to both illicit and legal content, TPB's business is providing links to illegal downloads. I mean, it's called The Pirate Bay! As proof I submit the "Linux test". Linux is often touted as a legal use of Bittorrent. So go to http://thepiratebay.org/ and search for "Linux". At the time of writing, the top 10 results contain one legal download (Mono), and eight illegal ones! I would suggest that the fact that even searching for what is often claimed as the most important legal use of BT turns up an overwhelming majority of illegal downloads shows fairly clearly what the intended purpose of TPB really is.
When it was showing everything as harmful the "why is this harmful" page gave a server error - I'm assuming the server with the checker on has died and they've now changed the default to "safe" not "unsafe" (a rather more sensible default in this case, IMO).
Did I beat the OCR problem w/o introducing any fatal new ones?
Afraid not. There are a couple of problems. Firstly, the fact that you have huge numbers of possible combinations of images is insignificant - all the attacker needs to do is identify each image once, not once for each position it can appear. Secondly, your questions list isn't "nearly endless", it's a finite list of questions being built in a finite number of ways.
Breaking it would require you to build up a database of a decent proportion of the images, and a decent proportion of the questions, and then save the answers to those questions for those images. Since the permutations are done algorithmically - and therefore predictably - I can just regurgitate answers, and ask for a new question when I don't know the answer.
The problem with a finite database database of questions - even really really hard questions that AI won't be able to solve for a million years - is that I only have to solve it once.
Using your system as an example, imagine that you have 200 different styles of question (even if these are being joined in many different ways I can still separate them automatically) and 1000 images. Each time, I see 6 images and one question. If I do 1000 questions I am likely to see very nearly all of the images (I can't be bothered differentiating to get the exact figure, but it's going to be close). I'm also likely to see almost all of the questions. And so, while your questions are possibly impossible for a computer to answer alone, I can now build a database that will give me a 90% success rate in future - much better than the current success rate against text CAPTCHAs.
The massive problem, though, isn't simply that it's possible to build this database, it's that I can build a database of answers without significant overhead compared to paying someone to break captchas normally. A traditional captcha isn't perhaps as machine proof, but by combining it with other techniques - limited tries,ip blocking, proof-of-work, "greylisting" (fail the first correct captcha if the content is spammy) - you end up with a nearly bot-proof system. The spammers therefore turn to third-world labour - attacking a traditional captcha now costs $2 per thousand, while attacking your system costs $2 per thousand for the first thousand, and then perhaps $2 for ten thousand, when the human labour is only needed when the database fails. The next lot probably only cost $2 for a million - unless you keep changing your database, and that's only going to work if it costs you less to build a new one than it costs me to break it. For an average system admin, that means being able to write the new questions, find new images and upload them all in about 2 minutes.
The solution to automated spamming has to have an automated component - if not, it's always going to have massively increasing returns on human labour. For now, I just stick to the techniques that work against email spam: content-based filtering,proof-of-work (where possible), throttling the speed of spammy comments, IP blocking. To those I can add captchas as an extra defence where necessary, but I generally prefer to avoid it.
-Summer Glau
Unless, of course, you haven't paid the microsoft tax.
Then you're simply excluded from "the most open inauguration in history".
I really think it's a stretch to say you're excluded. If you want to watch the inauguration, you can:
-Go there and watch it in person
-Watch it on TV. It'll be on a fair few channels.
-If you don't have a TV, watch it on someone else's; many small businesses, churches etc are showing it for free.
-Watch it on the internet at the official site using Streamlight
-Watch it on the internet at one of the other sites using a different plugin.
You aren't "excluded" from this event based on the fact that your computer is incapable of understanding one of the formats being broadcast. Firstly, because it's available in so many ways, if you want to you can still see it. Secondly, you choose to use an operating system built by hobbyists with little mainstream commercial support. The fact that you choose not to have the system they're broadcasting to doesn't make it unfair. I don't have a TV, but I'm not upset because I can't watch it on etch-a-sketch.
Ah, but your sound of reason will fall on flat ears with the Slashdot crowd
Damn those Slashdotters with their ugly ears!
Don't worry. Linguists have been putting oestrogen in the water supply for years now - soon all men will be women, and the gender-neutral pronoun "he" will be restored to its rightful position! Bwahahaha!
Courts are very leery of making judgments on the value of the consideration (the price you pay) preferring to let contracting parties work out how much of what is worth the service or good contracted for, so I'm pretty confident that a judge would find that exposure to advertizing or data-mining would constitute sufficient consideration.
I'm not sure that I agree with you there. While you're absolutely right that consideration "need not be adequate" - ie it can be worth very little - it must be "sufficient". This normally means, among other things, that there must be some quantifiable advantage to the party in receipt of the consideration - however small that advantage may be. This seems to leave any consideration based on the idea of looking at adverts on shaky ground; what is the value of a user looking at adverts? Does this promise in fact change anything - if the adverts are already in the product, the user is possibly promising nothing at all, since a promise to "allow the service provider to put ads on their product" is feeble at best!
And the plural of "pedant" is Slashdot. :D