Can we please stop making reference to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in this discussion? The case in point concerns trademark infringement. The DMCA does not apply to this.
And for all those who say, "oh, but what if I get a phony notice," how hard is it to verify that someone is a licensed Louis Vuitton distributor? I'd agree that simply looking at the site may not be sufficient to determine whether the hosting client is engaged in trademark infringement, but the site's owner should at least be able to demonstrate that he or she is a licensed distributor.
I take it you've never actually run a business yourself? Believe me, in the modern world you can make the best product but if you can't grab "mind-share" it won't sell. Marketing is always a large proportion of the cost of a product whether it's a videogame, a movie, or a dishwashing liquid.
Drew was charged with unauthorized access to a computer system because she violated the Terms of Service of the web site, which nearly everyone would agree should not be illegal
Not everyone, and in particular, not Judge Wu. From his decision:
....this Court concludes that an intentional breach of the [MySpace Terms of Service] can potentially constitute accessing the MySpace computer/server without authorization and/or in excess of authorization under the statute.
That says to me that if the TOS are written properly, behaviors contrary to the TOS could constitute a criminal act. While I'm generally in agreement with Wu's decision, this ruling may be much more significant in the long run than his finding that the MySpace TOS were too vague.
First, Judge Wu's decision has nothing to do with whether Drew's actions constituted "cyberbullying" or whether she deserved to be prosecuted for her ill-treatment of Megan. All of that was decided long ago, first in Missouri, where the AG said Drew had violated no existing statute, nor in the Federal prosecution where the jury refused to treat Drew's actions as felonious.
What was left to determine was whether Drew's act of creating a fictitious identity at MySpace, in contravention of its Terms of Service, constituted a misdemeanor under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). When Congress passed this law its intent was to criminalize activities like hacking into computers at banks or military contractors. After public outcry at the fact Drew was not convicted of anything for her actions, Justice Department attorneys in California (where the MySpace computers were housed) prosecuted Drew for violating the CFAA.
Judge Wu's decision is extremely cautious and proscribed in many ways. First, he specifically states that an "intentional" breach of a website's Terms of Service may come under the purview of the CFAA:
....this Court concludes that an intentional breach of the [MySpace Terms of Service] can potentially constitute accessing the MySpace computer/server without authorization and/or in excess of authorization under the statute.
What's really at issue is whether someone can be prosecuted for violating the TOS, or whether MySpace's specific TOS were too vague to provide reasonable grounds for criminal prosecution. "Vagueness" in this case means whether "individuals of 'common intelligence' are on notice that a breach of the terms of service contract can become a crime under the CFAA." His ruling rejects the Justice Department's case on the grounds that the MySpace TOS are simply too vague to provide a basis for prosecution. In particular, he ruled that the TOS were so expansive that a wide variety of behaviors would become criminalized (lying about one's age or weight, for instance):
In sum, if any conscious breach of a website's terms of service is held to be sufficient by itself to constitute intentionally accessing a computer without authorization or in excess of authorization, the result will be that section 1030(a)(2)(C) becomes a law "that affords too much discretion to the police and too little notice to citizens who wish to use the [Internet]."
My guess is that attorneys for popular websites, particularly social networking sites, will be revising their TOS to comply with Wu's decision.
I'd guess another reason is that there is no "there" there when it comes to open source. Business writers cover companies and industries in large part because investors are concerned about events that might affect their portfolios. Hardly anyone has a financial interest in the GIMP, but many investors and financial analysts care about Adobe's performance.
Take, for instance, a typical story about a new software release. You'll see a rewrite of the press release, with perhaps some comments from competitors. What you probably won't see is a comment from a developer of an open-sourced competitor because they "don't count." It's just the journalistic equivalent of the "if it's free, it can't be good" refrain that many of us have heard from business people when trying to convince them to adopt open technologies.
If business writers made a systematic attempt to include representatives of open source products whenever they write about commercial competitors, it would go a long way toward legitimizing open technologies.
Banning cell phones is pretty common at other events, especially golf tournaments. When I attended the Ryder Cup in Brookline some years back, there was a pile of cell phones that had been confiscated at the gate. I don't know how people sorted out ownership after the event was over. If you took out a phone during the event, a marshal would confiscate it.
Banning mobile devices in the stadiums is pretty much the only way to enforce this rule, so I wouldn't be surprised to see that become the norm for SEC events.
Ratings companies like Nielsen have been using "people meters" for years now. However the current technology relies on household members pressing a button to register their presence in the room. Nielsen experimented with infrared sensors over twenty years ago. Trust me, this is hardly new technology.
Of course, becoming a member of one of the Nielsen meter panels depends on your agreeing to participate. A system where one is automatically monitored by a set-top box with or without prior agreement raises enormous privacy issues. I'd assume if this takes off it'll just be another one of the 175 clauses contained in your "agreement" with the cable operator.
I take you live in Europe or, more likely, the UK? AFAIK, devices like the r3600 are still not for sale in the US. Anyone want to suggest reasons for this? It's pretty much impossible to find ION-based netbooks here as well. No major PC manufacturer that I can find ships anything other than Intel-only systems. Since the ION is an Atom-based system, you'd think Intel would be happier seeing these shipped than systems like the Neuros running ATI gear.
People say, "No one will ever pay for what they can get now, for free" but that same argument would have doomed cable television, and cable is alive and well.
I don't think cable television is a good comparison. True, people originally paid cable operators to view broadcast television channels in poor-reception areas. Since they couldn't see those channels at all, their being free didn't really matter. Then after the arrival of satellite channels like HBO and WTBS in the mid-1970's, operators began to offer distinctive programming that wasn't free to anyone. Nowadays people are largely paying to watch these additional services, not to watch something they could otherwise get for free.
Yea, because all the people who already pay a cable bill that's probably 50 bucks at least are going to refuse to pay some trivial fee to use foxnews.com, if they use it at all.
A more likely, and disturbing, possibility is that NewsCorp will make the same kind of deal with cable operators that ESPN did for espn360.com. Access to foxnews.com will only be available to people using ISPs that carry Fox News on their cable channels. I already pay enough (i.e., >0) for Fox News on cable; now I'll get to subsidize its viewers' use of the foxnews.com website through my cable subscription fees to FiOS. This could be the future for many Internet services that are part of a larger media conglomerate with cable television properties. I have no idea whether it will succeed as a business model, but it does hide the price of the web service in the cost of a cable subscription.
This doesn't exactly seem like an outrageous request.
Perhaps, but then why didn't NewsCorp make that a requirement of its original contract with Amazon? According to TFA, NewsCorp just renegotiated that contract. They could have made access to the subscriber list a requirement of those negotiations as well. Sounds more like NewsCorp asked for the names, Amazon wouldn't agree, and Murdoch now wants to bitch about it. In this matchup, my money's on Amazon. So what if Kindle owners can't read the Journal online? It's not like they can't get it delivered in print or online forms or buy it at the local news stand. I'm guessing it has as much to do with Murdoch's ego and an inflated view of the true value of NewsCorp's properties in a networked world.
I'm an Amazon Prime member, but I won't stay one for long if Amazon starts giving in to extortionate demands like this one.
The other problem with all this is that it assumes that the problem newspapers are having with revenue is caused by the cannibalisation of the print editions by the online editions. I understand, although I cannot provide evidence, that the real problem is that the classified market has gone away. The newspapers lunch got eaten by eBay and Craigslist, not cannibalised by their own online offerings. And if this is true, then raising prices for consumers might increase revenue, but it wont return it to where it was.
The importance of the decline in classified advertising is usually overlooked by people discussing how the Internet has affected newspaper economics. It's easy to see how putting stories on the Internet for free might cannabalize the print edition, but the collapse of classfied advertising has played an even bigger role.
In the 90's the dominant newspaper in a major market like the Boston Globe might earn 40% or more of its revenues from classifieds, and most of that revenue came from two sources, auto dealers and real estate agents. Nowadays if I want to buy a used car or a home, I'd start online at cars.com or one of the now-ubiquitous real estate agency sites linked to the Multiple Listing Service. A three-line classified ad for a home can hardly compare to a virtual "tour" of the house via the Internet. Moreover you can now get an enormous amount of information about a home in advance (property taxes, original purchase price, "comps") on the Internetn that was previously invisible when homes were sold in newspapers. Around the turn of the century, the Fox-owned Boston Herald took a run at the Globe's near monopoly on classifieds by trying to entice car dealers to make the Herald their primary classified outlet. Today that strategy would make no sense whatsoever.
I can only see subscription models working for the most prestigious papers like the WSJ or perhaps the Times. I think the future for most smaller-market papers is a bleak one.
he's modifying consoles for financial gain, how is this different from building a computer for financial gain?
General-purpose computers serve a wide variety of "non-infringing" uses; modding a console has no other obvious purpose except infringement. Read the Universal v Sony (the "Betamax" case) for an explanation of why this matters.
People on/. always act as if free markets and competition will drive prices down. Actually, they will drive prices to what the market will bear.
No, microeconomic theory shows that in a perfectly competitive market, price will equal marginal cost. Since it's pretty much obvious to most of us here that the marginal cost to transmit a text message is considerably less than $0.20, the carriers' pricing behavior is not indicative of a competitive market at work.
I can't tell after reading the ISC release and various other documents how this exploit takes place. I have a machine with UDP port 53 publicly visible, but TCP port 53 is firewalled off against all IPs except the machines under my control. Is this a UDP or a TCP exploit?
Someone above posted an iptables rule that applied to UDP port 53. Is that correct?
When I was an academic political scientist, no serious article that I can think of appeared first in a journal. There were always earlier versions, "working papers," and the like, the predated the published version. Obviously all these versions are copyrighted by default (in the US at least), and those copyrights are independent of the copyright in the specific version of the paper published in the journal.
So why is it so hard to find any of these earlier versions online? Here's a good test. Take an article that interests you that's available on a journal publisher's website. Do a Google search for the authors and try and find the earlier versions of the article online. I've not been very successful in my attempts to do this; perhaps you'll have better luck.
If I were still in academia, I can't imagine not releasing all of my work on the Web before it ever reached a published journal. And with the delays involved in journal publishing, it can be months or years before the findings actually reach the stage of journal publication. Do journals require that you remove all earlier versions of an article from public access before they'll agree to publish it?
That's an assumption. Right now, aggregators such as google news and slashdot are built on the backs of local newspapers, which are crmubling because they cannot compete with the news aggregators. Do you see the problem here?
Funny, I've never seen any stories from my local newspaper linked to on Slashdot. I might see wire service stories linked to by Google that also appear in my local newspaper, but the newspaper didn't create that content. They're just reprinting the same story that Google has.
Linking to a newspaper's story doesn't undercut the newspaper; if anything, it brings additional eyeballs to the story and the surrounding advertising. Not to mention that attempts to restrict links pose serious First Amendment problems.
You're ignoring the privacy issues involved. The company claimed all the messages it translated never left the EC. Now we learn that people in South Africa and the Philippines are listening to and transcribing these messages, which violates EC data privacy rules. Did you RTFA?
The problems discussed in TFA aren't being felt across the entire home entertainment industry. Overall sales of DVD, Blu-ray and digital content fell just 3.9% in the first half of 2009, though sales of physical media fell more. Rentals are up over eight percent in the same period.
High prices and the recent lack of diversity in titles have kept us out of the market for videogames. We own a PS3, but no PS3 games. We use it to play DVDs and Blu-rays, and to play our collection of PS2 games. Every so often we rent a new PS3 game to try it out, but none of them has yet made the case for spending $60.
I've browsed this whole thread and not once did I see any discussion of what the police might tell this random Australian citizen who has an open wifi router. "Gee, we think it would be a good idea if you protected that?" Well, okay, but how? Will they be carrying instructions for securing all major brands of routers? What about the wifi hardware on the client computers? Will they bring along a friendly geek to help the person fix their wifi? Most people with open wifi didn't choose to make it work that way, they just never bothered to secure it and probably didn't know how. Will a kindly visit by the Queensland police suddenly improve their network administrative skills?
Oh, and will they suggest using WPA over WEP? How about long, mixed alphameric pass phrases? How will they answer the citizen who says, "Thank you, officer, I never knew my wifi was vulnerable. What should I do to fix it? Can you help?"
The thing I don't understand is that films with rival budgets often retail at $20 bucks on dvd. What makes games so different?
Games don't have boxoffice revenues, or television revenues, or overseas television and DVD sales revenues, etc. Movies generate multiple revenue streams from a variety of sources; games generally speaking do not.
Gertner's ruling states that "[the Court] will, however, order the second set of documents, which implicate the business interests of third-party artist-owned companies, shielded from disclosure."
What are these documents, and who are these "third-party artist-owned companies?"
Hmm. I tried using the "cent" sign (the c with a line through it) instead of the dollar sign. Slashdot thought it was such a poor idea it deleted the cent signs from my posting!
Re:Hardware acceleration
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
mplayer has complete support for VDPAU as well as support for things like SSA/ASS subtitles. While the current repository versions tend to run a bit behind the development versions (bzip2 archive) at mplayerhq.hu, rvm's builds as part of his smplayer project are quite up-to-date. smplayer is a fine GUI front-end to mplayer as well, and it runs on both Linux and Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we please stop making reference to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in this discussion? The case in point concerns trademark infringement. The DMCA does not apply to this.
And for all those who say, "oh, but what if I get a phony notice," how hard is it to verify that someone is a licensed Louis Vuitton distributor? I'd agree that simply looking at the site may not be sufficient to determine whether the hosting client is engaged in trademark infringement, but the site's owner should at least be able to demonstrate that he or she is a licensed distributor.
I'm on Vuitton's side in this one.
I take it you've never actually run a business yourself? Believe me, in the modern world you can make the best product but if you can't grab "mind-share" it won't sell. Marketing is always a large proportion of the cost of a product whether it's a videogame, a movie, or a dishwashing liquid.
Drew was charged with unauthorized access to a computer system because she violated the Terms of Service of the web site, which nearly everyone would agree should not be illegal
Not everyone, and in particular, not Judge Wu. From his decision:
That says to me that if the TOS are written properly, behaviors contrary to the TOS could constitute a criminal act. While I'm generally in agreement with Wu's decision, this ruling may be much more significant in the long run than his finding that the MySpace TOS were too vague.
First, Judge Wu's decision has nothing to do with whether Drew's actions constituted "cyberbullying" or whether she deserved to be prosecuted for her ill-treatment of Megan. All of that was decided long ago, first in Missouri, where the AG said Drew had violated no existing statute, nor in the Federal prosecution where the jury refused to treat Drew's actions as felonious.
What was left to determine was whether Drew's act of creating a fictitious identity at MySpace, in contravention of its Terms of Service, constituted a misdemeanor under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). When Congress passed this law its intent was to criminalize activities like hacking into computers at banks or military contractors. After public outcry at the fact Drew was not convicted of anything for her actions, Justice Department attorneys in California (where the MySpace computers were housed) prosecuted Drew for violating the CFAA.
Judge Wu's decision is extremely cautious and proscribed in many ways. First, he specifically states that an "intentional" breach of a website's Terms of Service may come under the purview of the CFAA:
What's really at issue is whether someone can be prosecuted for violating the TOS, or whether MySpace's specific TOS were too vague to provide reasonable grounds for criminal prosecution. "Vagueness" in this case means whether "individuals of 'common intelligence' are on notice that a breach of the terms of service contract can become a crime under the CFAA." His ruling rejects the Justice Department's case on the grounds that the MySpace TOS are simply too vague to provide a basis for prosecution. In particular, he ruled that the TOS were so expansive that a wide variety of behaviors would become criminalized (lying about one's age or weight, for instance):
My guess is that attorneys for popular websites, particularly social networking sites, will be revising their TOS to comply with Wu's decision.
I'd guess another reason is that there is no "there" there when it comes to open source. Business writers cover companies and industries in large part because investors are concerned about events that might affect their portfolios. Hardly anyone has a financial interest in the GIMP, but many investors and financial analysts care about Adobe's performance.
Take, for instance, a typical story about a new software release. You'll see a rewrite of the press release, with perhaps some comments from competitors. What you probably won't see is a comment from a developer of an open-sourced competitor because they "don't count." It's just the journalistic equivalent of the "if it's free, it can't be good" refrain that many of us have heard from business people when trying to convince them to adopt open technologies.
If business writers made a systematic attempt to include representatives of open source products whenever they write about commercial competitors, it would go a long way toward legitimizing open technologies.
Banning cell phones is pretty common at other events, especially golf tournaments. When I attended the Ryder Cup in Brookline some years back, there was a pile of cell phones that had been confiscated at the gate. I don't know how people sorted out ownership after the event was over. If you took out a phone during the event, a marshal would confiscate it.
Banning mobile devices in the stadiums is pretty much the only way to enforce this rule, so I wouldn't be surprised to see that become the norm for SEC events.
Ratings companies like Nielsen have been using "people meters" for years now. However the current technology relies on household members pressing a button to register their presence in the room. Nielsen experimented with infrared sensors over twenty years ago. Trust me, this is hardly new technology.
Of course, becoming a member of one of the Nielsen meter panels depends on your agreeing to participate. A system where one is automatically monitored by a set-top box with or without prior agreement raises enormous privacy issues. I'd assume if this takes off it'll just be another one of the 175 clauses contained in your "agreement" with the cable operator.
I take you live in Europe or, more likely, the UK? AFAIK, devices like the r3600 are still not for sale in the US. Anyone want to suggest reasons for this? It's pretty much impossible to find ION-based netbooks here as well. No major PC manufacturer that I can find ships anything other than Intel-only systems. Since the ION is an Atom-based system, you'd think Intel would be happier seeing these shipped than systems like the Neuros running ATI gear.
People say, "No one will ever pay for what they can get now, for free" but that same argument would have doomed cable television, and cable is alive and well.
I don't think cable television is a good comparison. True, people originally paid cable operators to view broadcast television channels in poor-reception areas. Since they couldn't see those channels at all, their being free didn't really matter. Then after the arrival of satellite channels like HBO and WTBS in the mid-1970's, operators began to offer distinctive programming that wasn't free to anyone. Nowadays people are largely paying to watch these additional services, not to watch something they could otherwise get for free.
Yea, because all the people who already pay a cable bill that's probably 50 bucks at least are going to refuse to pay some trivial fee to use foxnews.com, if they use it at all.
A more likely, and disturbing, possibility is that NewsCorp will make the same kind of deal with cable operators that ESPN did for espn360.com. Access to foxnews.com will only be available to people using ISPs that carry Fox News on their cable channels. I already pay enough (i.e., >0) for Fox News on cable; now I'll get to subsidize its viewers' use of the foxnews.com website through my cable subscription fees to FiOS. This could be the future for many Internet services that are part of a larger media conglomerate with cable television properties. I have no idea whether it will succeed as a business model, but it does hide the price of the web service in the cost of a cable subscription.
This doesn't exactly seem like an outrageous request.
Perhaps, but then why didn't NewsCorp make that a requirement of its original contract with Amazon? According to TFA, NewsCorp just renegotiated that contract. They could have made access to the subscriber list a requirement of those negotiations as well. Sounds more like NewsCorp asked for the names, Amazon wouldn't agree, and Murdoch now wants to bitch about it. In this matchup, my money's on Amazon. So what if Kindle owners can't read the Journal online? It's not like they can't get it delivered in print or online forms or buy it at the local news stand. I'm guessing it has as much to do with Murdoch's ego and an inflated view of the true value of NewsCorp's properties in a networked world.
I'm an Amazon Prime member, but I won't stay one for long if Amazon starts giving in to extortionate demands like this one.
The other problem with all this is that it assumes that the problem newspapers are having with revenue is caused by the cannibalisation of the print editions by the online editions. I understand, although I cannot provide evidence, that the real problem is that the classified market has gone away. The newspapers lunch got eaten by eBay and Craigslist, not cannibalised by their own online offerings. And if this is true, then raising prices for consumers might increase revenue, but it wont return it to where it was.
The importance of the decline in classified advertising is usually overlooked by people discussing how the Internet has affected newspaper economics. It's easy to see how putting stories on the Internet for free might cannabalize the print edition, but the collapse of classfied advertising has played an even bigger role.
In the 90's the dominant newspaper in a major market like the Boston Globe might earn 40% or more of its revenues from classifieds, and most of that revenue came from two sources, auto dealers and real estate agents. Nowadays if I want to buy a used car or a home, I'd start online at cars.com or one of the now-ubiquitous real estate agency sites linked to the Multiple Listing Service. A three-line classified ad for a home can hardly compare to a virtual "tour" of the house via the Internet. Moreover you can now get an enormous amount of information about a home in advance (property taxes, original purchase price, "comps") on the Internetn that was previously invisible when homes were sold in newspapers. Around the turn of the century, the Fox-owned Boston Herald took a run at the Globe's near monopoly on classifieds by trying to entice car dealers to make the Herald their primary classified outlet. Today that strategy would make no sense whatsoever.
I can only see subscription models working for the most prestigious papers like the WSJ or perhaps the Times. I think the future for most smaller-market papers is a bleak one.
he's modifying consoles for financial gain, how is this different from building a computer for financial gain?
General-purpose computers serve a wide variety of "non-infringing" uses; modding a console has no other obvious purpose except infringement. Read the Universal v Sony (the "Betamax" case) for an explanation of why this matters.
People on /. always act as if free markets and competition will drive prices down. Actually, they will drive prices to what the market will bear.
No, microeconomic theory shows that in a perfectly competitive market, price will equal marginal cost. Since it's pretty much obvious to most of us here that the marginal cost to transmit a text message is considerably less than $0.20, the carriers' pricing behavior is not indicative of a competitive market at work.
I can't tell after reading the ISC release and various other documents how this exploit takes place. I have a machine with UDP port 53 publicly visible, but TCP port 53 is firewalled off against all IPs except the machines under my control. Is this a UDP or a TCP exploit?
Someone above posted an iptables rule that applied to UDP port 53. Is that correct?
When I was an academic political scientist, no serious article that I can think of appeared first in a journal. There were always earlier versions, "working papers," and the like, the predated the published version. Obviously all these versions are copyrighted by default (in the US at least), and those copyrights are independent of the copyright in the specific version of the paper published in the journal.
So why is it so hard to find any of these earlier versions online? Here's a good test. Take an article that interests you that's available on a journal publisher's website. Do a Google search for the authors and try and find the earlier versions of the article online. I've not been very successful in my attempts to do this; perhaps you'll have better luck.
If I were still in academia, I can't imagine not releasing all of my work on the Web before it ever reached a published journal. And with the delays involved in journal publishing, it can be months or years before the findings actually reach the stage of journal publication. Do journals require that you remove all earlier versions of an article from public access before they'll agree to publish it?
That's an assumption. Right now, aggregators such as google news and slashdot are built on the backs of local newspapers, which are crmubling because they cannot compete with the news aggregators. Do you see the problem here?
Funny, I've never seen any stories from my local newspaper linked to on Slashdot. I might see wire service stories linked to by Google that also appear in my local newspaper, but the newspaper didn't create that content. They're just reprinting the same story that Google has.
Linking to a newspaper's story doesn't undercut the newspaper; if anything, it brings additional eyeballs to the story and the surrounding advertising. Not to mention that attempts to restrict links pose serious First Amendment problems.
You're ignoring the privacy issues involved. The company claimed all the messages it translated never left the EC. Now we learn that people in South Africa and the Philippines are listening to and transcribing these messages, which violates EC data privacy rules. Did you RTFA?
The problems discussed in TFA aren't being felt across the entire home entertainment industry. Overall sales of DVD, Blu-ray and digital content fell just 3.9% in the first half of 2009, though sales of physical media fell more. Rentals are up over eight percent in the same period.
High prices and the recent lack of diversity in titles have kept us out of the market for videogames. We own a PS3, but no PS3 games. We use it to play DVDs and Blu-rays, and to play our collection of PS2 games. Every so often we rent a new PS3 game to try it out, but none of them has yet made the case for spending $60.
I've browsed this whole thread and not once did I see any discussion of what the police might tell this random Australian citizen who has an open wifi router. "Gee, we think it would be a good idea if you protected that?" Well, okay, but how? Will they be carrying instructions for securing all major brands of routers? What about the wifi hardware on the client computers? Will they bring along a friendly geek to help the person fix their wifi? Most people with open wifi didn't choose to make it work that way, they just never bothered to secure it and probably didn't know how. Will a kindly visit by the Queensland police suddenly improve their network administrative skills?
Oh, and will they suggest using WPA over WEP? How about long, mixed alphameric pass phrases? How will they answer the citizen who says, "Thank you, officer, I never knew my wifi was vulnerable. What should I do to fix it? Can you help?"
The thing I don't understand is that films with rival budgets often retail at $20 bucks on dvd. What makes games so different?
Games don't have boxoffice revenues, or television revenues, or overseas television and DVD sales revenues, etc. Movies generate multiple revenue streams from a variety of sources; games generally speaking do not.
Gertner's ruling states that "[the Court] will, however, order the second set of documents, which implicate the business interests of third-party artist-owned companies, shielded from disclosure."
What are these documents, and who are these "third-party artist-owned companies?"
Hmm. I tried using the "cent" sign (the c with a line through it) instead of the dollar sign. Slashdot thought it was such a poor idea it deleted the cent signs from my posting!
How about Ggle?
mplayer has complete support for VDPAU as well as support for things like SSA/ASS subtitles. While the current repository versions tend to run a bit behind the development versions (bzip2 archive) at mplayerhq.hu, rvm's builds as part of his smplayer project are quite up-to-date. smplayer is a fine GUI front-end to mplayer as well, and it runs on both Linux and Windows.