Company X should be able DRM all they want, as there will always be Company Y that will not use it. Let the people decide who survives.
this is a fallacious argument because it's not DRM alone, it's two products being inseparably bundled, which under all other circumstances would be prosecuted under the sherman anti-trust act.
the media contained within is an exclusive monopoly, and anyone who wants to publish it is required to agree to any terms no matter how onerous, including the inclusion of DRM.
Thus, there will be seldom if any cases of a "company Y that will not use it", because company Y is directly beholden to originator z, which is a paranoid, anti-consumer luddite.
case and point: apple putting the same "black screen" crap that vista has into their new mac lineups as a requirement to accept and play some unnamed company z's media.
Repealing the proibition on manufacture and trafficking would decide who survives.
Nothing should be different with DRM. DRM is a method by which the companies try to infringe on the CONSUMER'S right to fair-use activities like space-shifting, nothing more. DRM itself should be illegal.
On the contrary, the laws "protecting" drm from commercial circumvention should be repealed.
Many proponents of DRM claim "the free market" will sort out whether people want DRM, carefully masking the fallacy that the DMCA makes it illegal for firms to provide remedies for this cancer.
DRM did exist before the DMCA, for a very long time. The difference is companies could manufacture circumvention tools, so anybody who didn't want it could get rid of it.
I'm by no means a free market fundamentalist, but in this case the free market really does work, provided it really IS free.
Legislators... they measure their output by quantity. They seem to think that the job of a good congressman is to pass a lot of bills, or better yet introduce a lot of bills that get passed. It's a miracle that anything gets voted down *at all*.
It's not entirely their fault though. IMO, the ideal congressman sits on his ass all day because nothing needs changing. How many voters really feel the same way.
Repealing acts also require bills, and republicans could win virtually the entire 12-35 demographic if they promise to repeal this one. They seem to like repealing many other laws, so I don't see why this one should raise objections.
. If you want more, like being able to buy a program to decode DVDs for fair use or the ability to unlock your TIVO or mod your Xbox to run Linux, then you need to lobby congress to change the laws (treaties forbid getting rid of it). That won't be too difficult if you have a good enough reason and don't stray into calling Disney or the RIAA evil and such.
yeah, this moderate approach has worked over the past decade, with a preponderance of evidence which makes the MAFIAA's side of the argument look like the funniest segment of "world's dumbest criminals".
The corruption is rife.
there are 3 ways to get around this:
-move your operation out of us jurisdiction -deliberately disobey the law and go underground -lock and load
1 and 2 are much more reasonable and less ethically/legally risky than the third, but i'm sure if they enforce things strictly enough or get too invasive someone somewhere will eventually choose option 3 and become the first domestic "copyright terrorist"
Now I understand your frustration, because it really is unfortunate that this is where we're at. But we don't succeed by ignoring the laws. We succeed by working with them, compromising, and then, hopefully, overcoming them with logic, common sense, and hopefully the backing of the American populace.
because we overcame prohibition by not drinking right?
we overcame harsh labor conditions by not picketing and sometimes rioting right?
we overcame racial prejudice by staying OUT of the white soup kitchens and bathrooms and saying "yes massa" when they told us to stop marching in protest on major cities, right?
we overcame onerous british invasion of several generations of de-facto independence by NOT rising up in 1776, right?
They're rhetorical questions, not strawmen. The idea is that you answer an emphatic "no" to the both questions (obviously), and then the last ties it back copyright infringement. He's not misrepresenting someone else's argument, he's merely creating his own.
The fact it's rhetorical doesn't change the fact it's a straw man. Its a fallacy so obviously misrepresentative as to be absurd.
Being paid for your work is not the same as being paid in perpetuity for work you once did.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
Sure it's technically fallacious, but he's most of the way there to a decent argument. What he missed was the premise that if you want to be paid for your work, then you want the same for everyone else. It's true that you may well be an asshole, and want just yourself to be paid, and you could give a flying Foxtrot if anyone else gets paid for their work.
The disconnect in the fallacy is not the implied idea that everyone should be paid for their work, it's the equation of (not) paying someone for their work with paying someone forever for work they did.
The question I'd suggest to ask GGP is:
"So, when I spend a day flipping burgers, I should then, until 70 years after I die, be paid whenever someone eats a burger from that establishment?"
OK, fair enough. What about the other 99% of artists, who do spend more than a week in the recording studio (or on location at a film, or in their studio painting, etc), or who some consider to be talented, or who can't get anywhere near the equivalent income from selling their art as any other skilled person? Do you have sympathy for them? Or do you lump all artists into that extremely tiny subcategory just to make yourself feel better when you rip them off?
Show me one of those who buys laws every few years to deprive the public of more and more rights Show me one of those who abuses the DMCA like a cudgel against everything that moves Show me one of those who houses an army of lawyers in his basement with which to launch horribly asymmetric attacks against defenseless individuals often on the edge of poverty.
The problem with this logic is that without copyright protection in some form, it would be much harder to be a self-sufficient producer of original work whether that be writing, movies, etc.
your utterly specious argument is debunked by: programmers web developers architects graphic designers garage, small time local, cult, and underground bands every "new sound" that's ever arisen (how long before rap was "acceptable" to established labels?)
Without copyright, you could spend years working on a novel, and only sell a few copies, since someone could legally reproduce your novel, distribute it, and not give you a dime.
restrict copyright only to commercial production and that ceases to be an issue. This is done quite nicely with the print media example, as it's expensive for both the reproduction and enforcement sides. With audio-visual it's much more lopsided.
But, once again, if not getting paid stops you from writing a book (in your spare time if necessary) then I question whether it's a book worth reading.
If the hundreds of security holes just this year including some incredibly idiotic ones are the result of well designed security from the ground up I think we all better just unplug our machines. Mac OS.X has perhaps the WORST security record of any OS on the market BAR NONE. by that I mean, amount of vulnerabilities, time taken to patch those vulnerabilities and incompetence during patching those vulnerabilities, Apple loses on all fronts. In many ways I wish people would attack it more, it is swiss cheese. Many of the virus's written for windows I could modify and have working on a Mac in under an hour, sadly though I have some ethics.
Ok, so you measure your number of vulnerabilities by patches rather than actual time open in the wild? If I were you i'd re-examine that outlook. I personally feel more assured when I see patches. It means someone is on the ball and responding quickly. With the average number of virii and malware on work machines I'd say windows is behind on several hundred of those patches, and may never release them at all.
The amount of time widely known and in the wild should be the metric you should use, and the only problem i've heard that has persisted for any significant amount of time on osx has been an old mozilla exploit to snoop people's history.
Then, there's also the fact that the unix system provides truly compartmentalized permissions, meaning a compromise may not necessarily be systemic.
You do realize all those OSX definitions are from stupid proof of concept fud exploits like this.
I say that if a virusmust begiven a root password to infect and propagate that it can't be classified as a virus. It is, at best, malware, and, as a mac user since '03, I can state with certainty that a user would have to be incredibly stupid to allow it to run(osx does not badger with constant permission requests like vista, so you know it's serious when it asks)
Actually, people have been saying "One day, OS-X will have enough users that malware authors will target it the way they target Windows". That hasn't happened yet
Whoa...hold on there,son. The fact that they publish security updates proves them wrong.
Maybe there aren't many (or any) viruses, worms and whatnot targeting the platform today, but they will come, and when they arrive, it will be a good idea to have some protection installed beforehand....
If this were a headline, i would tag it "imminentdeathoftheinternet" because people have been claiming this on blogs for almost a decade now, and it's never happened.
Also, if a virus comes along, having antivirus "beforehand" wouldn't work because they require definitions for the new malady, and IF it were to come along, it would probably beat war coverage to the front lines of organizations worldwide.
In the mean time, you'll have anti-virus software eating resources and cash just like a key-logging worm watching you access online banking.
> This is especially cynical when you see and hear how the British press is always going on about the so-called non-elected bureaucrats in Brussels,
It always makes me laugh when I read this kind of stuff in the press: coming from a country with a non-elected 2nd house, and a non-elected *head of state* (who can dissolve parliament, declare war etc!!).
and of course, the biggest umbrella of irony over the whole situation is that unelected second house is doing a better job serving the british public right now than the elected one.
This sort of gives some credit to dissent some regimes (labeled "evil" by the west) have offered toward representative democracy.
It could set a dangerous precedent for censoring things we all agree should not be censored, like pornography of consenting adults and unpopular (communist, marxist, etc) political views.
if it's unpopular, clearly we don't "all" agree on that.
I don't condone the censorship, but let's be logical in our analysis.
Also, religious reactionaries world-wide would love to see the internet devoid of consenting adult pornography.
The paper says that the filtering will be URL based (to start with, possibly moving to other methods later). With that in mind, I present my (patented..?) two step method to bypassing the filter:
Step 1: Get IP address of blocked site
Step 2: Enter that IP address
easier, one time version:
go to internet settings under DNS enter non-aussie or independent DNS
Well here is my opinion about the three strikes law. France is very steeped in taking their time, they take long lunches and dinners, have more conversations in person over dinner I bet than in an online forum.
Repeated illegal file sharing is not a good thing IMHO. I guess they are just trying to weed out the people online that keep it up after being warned.
Maybe their thought process is, well people spend a lot of time online, why not treat it in the same way that you would in a real life situation.
Also, the French are not enforcers, their dogs poop everywhere, they don't have dog parks like we do, and people smoke everywhere there, even if it is prohibited, and not too much happens.
The three strikes deal sounds like a panacea or a band aid to me.
I see, so if somebody speeds they should be banned from all public roads (through ANY means, including taxies) and not be able to get to work?
The internet is not "TV-2.0", and most companies now require resume submission online.
To deny someone access to the internet through blacklisting is to deny them fundamental liberties, such as the liberty of obtaining a job.
LSD? You're on your own there. It's not popular enough for refusal to obey the ban to cause social harm to society in general, and it never will be. People in general don't want it, legal or not.
you're kidding right?
Research the history on this one. the tabs were sold in major catalogues with the same listing glut as obama memorabilia has now.
It's certainly not an everyday kind of thing, but then again most people don't set off fireworks or fire their weapons every day either.
of course, thanks to their litigation campaigns, many true "collectors" have shied away from the internet as well. There are several rare pieces on my hard drive which date back far enough to have a 96kbps data rate.
I'm sure had those people stayed around they would have been updated.
Thanks to these record companies not only are they out of print, theyre not online either.
Have you listened to the clipping on a modern audio CD?
That's a bit of a red herring. Properly mastered CD tracks which are mixed for listening in a quiet environment sound better than tape or vinyl. 16-bit linear PCM @ 44.1kHz is to all intents and purposes 'perfect'.
except they don't master them worth a crap. Ever since they "went digital" there is this prevailing mentality that the machines should do it all for them. Most of the people i know who did sound engineering are now in another profession.
One of the poorest demographics of America creates something that takes over the world and that's all you have to say about it?
Your ignorance is probably only matched by you complete inability to move your body in a fashion that somewhat resembling dancing.
If you're referring to hip-hop, hip-hop itself was excellent, and gave rise to everything from modern trance (hip-hop and new wave had a baby:D ) to bleeding edge, chaotic industrial, but don't equate grating, shitty rap with hip-hop.
hip-hop was all about taking the best of other songs, extending them, having fun with them, and being real. Rap is about adopting a fake persona and shocking your elders with as much bombastic swearing as you can.
hip-hop is to rap what fine, amish built dressers are to those particle board "things" they sell at wal-mart.
A fair deal that we've had since time dancing around a campfire was a political gesture is that songs and stories and legends and art become apart of the commons after a period of time. We've made a deal with the artists and their representatives that they can have exclusive use of their works for a limited time in order to encourage them to make more. That's "the deal".
With their exploitive contracts, exclusive play deals, abusive lawsuits and lobbying to get the "limited time" extended to "essentially forever", they undermine every possible benefit in an attempt to "improve their deal". They just don't get - and they won't ever get - that the deal they're breaking is the one that allows them to profit at all.
A growing share of people consider the deal broken and its terms no longer binding and they are enforcing their view of things by technical force. This may not yet be legal, but it certainly is ethical and eventually the law tends to come around to the common point of view. At first there were only a few remix geeks and DJ's. Now the amount of storage media sold in a day outstrips a year's published sales of content. I suppose it's the vast majority of people now and demographically more often the young. The young are responsible for the most enduring social changes so this change looks fairly permanent. As the years go on peer pressure will kill the rest of their market - "Kalen bought encrypted music again? He didn't learn the last six times! (tee hee)."
Copyright as applies to media content is a dead letter. It should be abolished. Maybe after a generation it can be started again with strict limits to ensure it doesn't follow the same hateful course.
While I share your sentiment, I don't share your rather rosy point of view.
Case and point: marijuana and LSD
I think the age in which the government served the people and was willing to admit its mistakes ended when the cold war began, and the last major mistake they rectified was the volstead act.
This is the achilles heel of democracy: while it's hard to enact laws, it's hundreds of times harder to repeal them.
this definitely needs a mod up. summarizes it well.
There's a reason the US started out as a republic.
Please note that prior to Jackson, individual voters did not even elect the president, it was state legislatrues. The founding fathers knew how awful mob rule could be. The last thing we need is for the internet to be destroyed by the "tyranny of the majority"
when you say participate, you mean steal copyrighted content right? If not, what is the problem?
rifftrax can't be watched if DRM exists, neither can AMV's or mashup projects like fsFs
99% of the material on the internet is infringing. The only reason copyright hasn't been used to shut down the ENTIRE world wide web is lax enforcement. your typical myspace page carries hundreds of infringing images, infringing quotes, infringing music, etc. etc.
Of course, this is the reason practically everything that becomes popular gets shut down. People notice "their" material on the site, whether it be images, videos, print quotes, whatever, and kill it dead "as an example".
I refer you to this writeup on the reason why copyright is out of control, and in direct opposition to modern cultural norms.
To sum up, please be more vigilant about all the material around you which is copyrighted, and avoid swallowing propaganda whole.
Slashdot Mirror
Company X should be able DRM all they want, as there will always be Company Y that will not use it. Let the people decide who survives.
this is a fallacious argument because it's not DRM alone, it's two products being inseparably bundled, which under all other circumstances would be prosecuted under the sherman anti-trust act.
the media contained within is an exclusive monopoly, and anyone who wants to publish it is required to agree to any terms no matter how onerous, including the inclusion of DRM.
Thus, there will be seldom if any cases of a "company Y that will not use it", because company Y is directly beholden to originator z, which is a paranoid, anti-consumer luddite.
case and point: apple putting the same "black screen" crap that vista has into their new mac lineups as a requirement to accept and play some unnamed company z's media.
Repealing the proibition on manufacture and trafficking would decide who survives.
Nothing should be different with DRM. DRM is a method by which the companies try to infringe on the CONSUMER'S right to fair-use activities like space-shifting, nothing more. DRM itself should be illegal.
On the contrary, the laws "protecting" drm from commercial circumvention should be repealed.
Many proponents of DRM claim "the free market" will sort out whether people want DRM, carefully masking the fallacy that the DMCA makes it illegal for firms to provide remedies for this cancer.
DRM did exist before the DMCA, for a very long time. The difference is companies could manufacture circumvention tools, so anybody who didn't want it could get rid of it.
I'm by no means a free market fundamentalist, but in this case the free market really does work, provided it really IS free.
Legislators... they measure their output by quantity. They seem to think that the job of a good congressman is to pass a lot of bills, or better yet introduce a lot of bills that get passed. It's a miracle that anything gets voted down *at all*.
It's not entirely their fault though. IMO, the ideal congressman sits on his ass all day because nothing needs changing. How many voters really feel the same way.
Repealing acts also require bills, and republicans could win virtually the entire 12-35 demographic if they promise to repeal this one.
They seem to like repealing many other laws, so I don't see why this one should raise objections.
. If you want more, like being able to buy a program to decode DVDs for fair use or the ability to unlock your TIVO or mod your Xbox to run Linux, then you need to lobby congress to change the laws (treaties forbid getting rid of it). That won't be too difficult if you have a good enough reason and don't stray into calling Disney or the RIAA evil and such.
yeah, this moderate approach has worked over the past decade, with a preponderance of evidence which makes the MAFIAA's side of the argument look like the funniest segment of "world's dumbest criminals".
The corruption is rife.
there are 3 ways to get around this:
-move your operation out of us jurisdiction
-deliberately disobey the law and go underground
-lock and load
1 and 2 are much more reasonable and less ethically/legally risky than the third, but i'm sure if they enforce things strictly enough or get too invasive someone somewhere will eventually choose option 3 and become the first domestic "copyright terrorist"
Now I understand your frustration, because it really is unfortunate that this is where we're at. But we don't succeed by ignoring the laws. We succeed by working with them, compromising, and then, hopefully, overcoming them with logic, common sense, and hopefully the backing of the American populace.
because we overcame prohibition by not drinking right?
we overcame harsh labor conditions by not picketing and sometimes rioting right?
we overcame racial prejudice by staying OUT of the white soup kitchens and bathrooms and saying "yes massa" when they told us to stop marching in protest on major cities, right?
we overcame onerous british invasion of several generations of de-facto independence by NOT rising up in 1776, right?
They're rhetorical questions, not strawmen. The idea is that you answer an emphatic "no" to the both questions (obviously), and then the last ties it back copyright infringement. He's not misrepresenting someone else's argument, he's merely creating his own.
The fact it's rhetorical doesn't change the fact it's a straw man. Its a fallacy so obviously misrepresentative as to be absurd.
Being paid for your work is not the same as being paid in perpetuity for work you once did.
Sure it's technically fallacious, but he's most of the way there to a decent argument. What he missed was the premise that if you want to be paid for your work, then you want the same for everyone else. It's true that you may well be an asshole, and want just yourself to be paid, and you could give a flying Foxtrot if anyone else gets paid for their work.
The disconnect in the fallacy is not the implied idea that everyone should be paid for their work, it's the equation of (not) paying someone for their work with paying someone forever for work they did.
The question I'd suggest to ask GGP is:
"So, when I spend a day flipping burgers, I should then, until 70 years after I die, be paid whenever someone eats a burger from that establishment?"
OK, fair enough. What about the other 99% of artists, who do spend more than a week in the recording studio (or on location at a film, or in their studio painting, etc), or who some consider to be talented, or who can't get anywhere near the equivalent income from selling their art as any other skilled person? Do you have sympathy for them? Or do you lump all artists into that extremely tiny subcategory just to make yourself feel better when you rip them off?
Show me one of those who buys laws every few years to deprive the public of more and more rights
Show me one of those who abuses the DMCA like a cudgel against everything that moves
Show me one of those who houses an army of lawyers in his basement with which to launch horribly asymmetric attacks against defenseless individuals often on the edge of poverty.
The problem with this logic is that without copyright protection in some form, it would be much harder to be a self-sufficient producer of original work whether that be writing, movies, etc.
your utterly specious argument is debunked by:
programmers
web developers
architects
graphic designers
garage, small time local, cult, and underground bands
every "new sound" that's ever arisen (how long before rap was "acceptable" to established labels?)
Without copyright, you could spend years working on a novel, and only sell a few copies, since someone could legally reproduce your novel, distribute it, and not give you a dime.
restrict copyright only to commercial production and that ceases to be an issue. This is done quite nicely with the print media example, as it's expensive for both the reproduction and enforcement sides. With audio-visual it's much more lopsided.
But, once again, if not getting paid stops you from writing a book (in your spare time if necessary) then I question whether it's a book worth reading.
If the hundreds of security holes just this year including some incredibly idiotic ones are the result of well designed security from the ground up I think we all better just unplug our machines. Mac OS.X has perhaps the WORST security record of any OS on the market BAR NONE. by that I mean, amount of vulnerabilities, time taken to patch those vulnerabilities and incompetence during patching those vulnerabilities, Apple loses on all fronts. In many ways I wish people would attack it more, it is swiss cheese. Many of the virus's written for windows I could modify and have working on a Mac in under an hour, sadly though I have some ethics.
Ok, so you measure your number of vulnerabilities by patches rather than actual time open in the wild?
If I were you i'd re-examine that outlook. I personally feel more assured when I see patches. It means someone is on the ball and responding quickly. With the average number of virii and malware on work machines I'd say windows is behind on several hundred of those patches, and may never release them at all.
The amount of time widely known and in the wild should be the metric you should use, and the only problem i've heard that has persisted for any significant amount of time on osx has been an old mozilla exploit to snoop people's history.
Then, there's also the fact that the unix system provides truly compartmentalized permissions, meaning a compromise may not necessarily be systemic.
You do realize all those OSX definitions are from stupid proof of concept fud exploits like this.
I say that if a virusmust begiven a root password to infect and propagate that it can't be classified as a virus. It is, at best, malware, and, as a mac user since '03, I can state with certainty that a user would have to be incredibly stupid to allow it to run(osx does not badger with constant permission requests like vista, so you know it's serious when it asks)
Every once in a while someone tries, and fails.
Actually, people have been saying "One day, OS-X will have enough users that malware authors will target it the way they target Windows". That hasn't happened yet
are you sure?
Whoa...hold on there,son. The fact that they publish security updates proves them wrong.
Maybe there aren't many (or any) viruses, worms and whatnot targeting the platform today, but they will come, and when they arrive, it will be a good idea to have some protection installed beforehand....
If this were a headline, i would tag it "imminentdeathoftheinternet" because people have been claiming this on blogs for almost a decade now, and it's never happened.
Also, if a virus comes along, having antivirus "beforehand" wouldn't work because they require definitions for the new malady, and IF it were to come along, it would probably beat war coverage to the front lines of organizations worldwide.
In the mean time, you'll have anti-virus software eating resources and cash just like a key-logging worm watching you access online banking.
> This is especially cynical when you see and hear how the British press is always going on about the so-called non-elected bureaucrats in Brussels,
It always makes me laugh when I read this kind of stuff in the press: coming from a country with a non-elected 2nd house, and a non-elected *head of state* (who can dissolve parliament, declare war etc!!).
and of course, the biggest umbrella of irony over the whole situation is that unelected second house is doing a better job serving the british public right now than the elected one.
This sort of gives some credit to dissent some regimes (labeled "evil" by the west) have offered toward representative democracy.
It could set a dangerous precedent for censoring things we all agree should not be censored, like pornography of consenting adults and unpopular (communist, marxist, etc) political views.
if it's unpopular, clearly we don't "all" agree on that.
I don't condone the censorship, but let's be logical in our analysis.
Also, religious reactionaries world-wide would love to see the internet devoid of consenting adult pornography.
The paper says that the filtering will be URL based (to start with, possibly moving to other methods later). With that in mind, I present my (patented..?) two step method to bypassing the filter:
Step 1: Get IP address of blocked site
Step 2: Enter that IP address
easier, one time version:
go to internet settings under DNS
enter non-aussie or independent DNS
Well here is my opinion about the three strikes law. France is very steeped in taking their time, they take long lunches and dinners, have more conversations in person over dinner I bet than in an online forum.
Repeated illegal file sharing is not a good thing IMHO. I guess they are just trying to weed out the people online that keep it up after being warned.
Maybe their thought process is, well people spend a lot of time online, why not treat it in the same way that you would in a real life situation.
Also, the French are not enforcers, their dogs poop everywhere, they don't have dog parks like we do, and people smoke everywhere there, even if it is prohibited, and not too much happens.
The three strikes deal sounds like a panacea or a band aid to me.
I see, so if somebody speeds they should be banned from all public roads (through ANY means, including taxies) and not be able to get to work?
The internet is not "TV-2.0", and most companies now require resume submission online.
To deny someone access to the internet through blacklisting is to deny them fundamental liberties, such as the liberty of obtaining a job.
LSD? You're on your own there. It's not popular enough for refusal to obey the ban to cause social harm to society in general, and it never will be. People in general don't want it, legal or not.
you're kidding right?
Research the history on this one. the tabs were sold in major catalogues with the same listing glut as obama memorabilia has now.
It's certainly not an everyday kind of thing, but then again most people don't set off fireworks or fire their weapons every day either.
of course, thanks to their litigation campaigns, many true "collectors" have shied away from the internet as well. There are several rare pieces on my hard drive which date back far enough to have a 96kbps data rate.
I'm sure had those people stayed around they would have been updated.
Thanks to these record companies not only are they out of print, theyre not online either.
Have you listened to the clipping on a modern audio CD?
That's a bit of a red herring. Properly mastered CD tracks which are mixed for listening in a quiet environment sound better than tape or vinyl. 16-bit linear PCM @ 44.1kHz is to all intents and purposes 'perfect'.
except they don't master them worth a crap. Ever since they "went digital" there is this prevailing mentality that the machines should do it all for them. Most of the people i know who did sound engineering are now in another profession.
One of the poorest demographics of America creates something that takes over the world and that's all you have to say about it?
Your ignorance is probably only matched by you complete inability to move your body in a fashion that somewhat resembling dancing.
If you're referring to hip-hop, hip-hop itself was excellent, and gave rise to everything from modern trance (hip-hop and new wave had a baby :D ) to bleeding edge, chaotic industrial, but don't equate grating, shitty rap with hip-hop.
hip-hop was all about taking the best of other songs, extending them, having fun with them, and being real. Rap is about adopting a fake persona and shocking your elders with as much bombastic swearing as you can.
hip-hop is to rap what fine, amish built dressers are to those particle board "things" they sell at wal-mart.
A fair deal that we've had since time dancing around a campfire was a political gesture is that songs and stories and legends and art become apart of the commons after a period of time. We've made a deal with the artists and their representatives that they can have exclusive use of their works for a limited time in order to encourage them to make more. That's "the deal".
With their exploitive contracts, exclusive play deals, abusive lawsuits and lobbying to get the "limited time" extended to "essentially forever", they undermine every possible benefit in an attempt to "improve their deal". They just don't get - and they won't ever get - that the deal they're breaking is the one that allows them to profit at all.
A growing share of people consider the deal broken and its terms no longer binding and they are enforcing their view of things by technical force. This may not yet be legal, but it certainly is ethical and eventually the law tends to come around to the common point of view. At first there were only a few remix geeks and DJ's. Now the amount of storage media sold in a day outstrips a year's published sales of content. I suppose it's the vast majority of people now and demographically more often the young. The young are responsible for the most enduring social changes so this change looks fairly permanent. As the years go on peer pressure will kill the rest of their market - "Kalen bought encrypted music again? He didn't learn the last six times! (tee hee)."
Copyright as applies to media content is a dead letter. It should be abolished. Maybe after a generation it can be started again with strict limits to ensure it doesn't follow the same hateful course.
While I share your sentiment, I don't share your rather rosy point of view.
Case and point: marijuana and LSD
I think the age in which the government served the people and was willing to admit its mistakes ended when the cold war began, and the last major mistake they rectified was the volstead act.
This is the achilles heel of democracy: while it's hard to enact laws, it's hundreds of times harder to repeal them.
this definitely needs a mod up. summarizes it well.
There's a reason the US started out as a republic.
Please note that prior to Jackson, individual voters did not even elect the president, it was state legislatrues. The founding fathers knew how awful mob rule could be. The last thing we need is for the internet to be destroyed by the "tyranny of the majority"
when you say participate, you mean steal copyrighted content right?
If not, what is the problem?
rifftrax can't be watched if DRM exists, neither can AMV's or mashup projects like fsFs
99% of the material on the internet is infringing. The only reason copyright hasn't been used to shut down the ENTIRE world wide web is lax enforcement.
your typical myspace page carries hundreds of infringing images, infringing quotes, infringing music, etc. etc.
Of course, this is the reason practically everything that becomes popular gets shut down. People notice "their" material on the site, whether it be images, videos, print quotes, whatever, and kill it dead "as an example".
I refer you to this writeup on the reason why copyright is out of control, and in direct opposition to modern cultural norms.
To sum up, please be more vigilant about all the material around you which is copyrighted, and avoid swallowing propaganda whole.
What right does the government have to tell a company what to do with it's own property?
Most colleges now incorporate at least 30% of their study materials online.
Almost every major institution now charges substantial fees to
those who refuse to interact with them through their websites.
Finally, and most importantly, in my job search i've found most companies require you submit your material exclusively online.
Given that you must now have internet access to get any job over minimum wage, Internet service is a utility.
the property rights of private stakeholders are supposed to take a back seat to the public welfare in the case of utlities.