> its jewish tradition to not 'spell out' the letters of god's name.
Yeah, but the actual tradition only applies to Hebrew writing, and to only very particular forms of God's name which were considered to be more or less "proper" names.
Thanks for reminding us of this amusing debacle. I fould it even more amusing (since this is the second time around for me) that the write-up of this historic event is about 25% of all of the content of Tuttle's article in Wikipedia.
Whether or not you believe in this "singularity" stuff, it's obvious that the progress of technology in general constantly makes building improvised weapons like this (and weapons in general) easier. It also makes defending against such threats easier, but it'll always be more expensive to defend than attack (especially if we want to protect things which we currently feel are basic rights like freedom of expression and privacy).
I hope we don't get to the point where random people in NZ (link copied from another post) can build WMDs from parts ordered over the Internet quicker than humanity manages to prove that intelligence is useful for long-term species survival.
> Why is porting the VM software easier than other software?
Well, I agree with you that this is not obvious, but the advantage is that once you have managed to port the VM, you have automatically ported all of the software you preserve running under it. So, if that is many different pieces of software, you have almost certainly saved work. If it is only one or two pieces of software, it might be the opposite.
My opinion is that VMs are some of the more likely pieces of open-source software to be maintained for a long period of time, because as hardware becomes cheaper and cheaper it becomes more and more attractive to use VMs to improve maintainability of systems in general.
I do agree that is it likely that changes in the VM software might well require you to periodically convert your old virtual machine images to be compatible with the new software, but believe that no serious VM software project would require you to do that without giving you easy-to-use tools to do the job.
A lot of your complaints would be solved by saving the rendering software in binary form which runs under an open-source virtual machine like VirtualBox. Then no matter how many formats you want to preserve, you only need to deal with constantly porting the VM to current technological standards.
This idea also helps if, for some reason, you prefer to use a proprietary OS and proprietary formats --- however, in that case you are still more likely to run into some bug (a la Y2K38) which you will be much less able to fix compared to the open-source renderer/format case.
I suppose for something like Y2K38 you could just patch the VM to lie about the date, but that isn't going to help if your use scenario requires current date support.
It is possible that in Australia something analogous to the first-sale doctrine would enable the people who legally bought the MP3 files to resell or give them to other people? It's even likely that Universal Australia sold some of those MP3 files to Americans, who certainly have that right.
This still doesn't rule out blanket lawsuits using the claim that the number of legally sold MP3 files was extremely small (if this is even true).
When seen in the context of an administration which is stuffing the Department of Justice with lawyers with strong ties to the entertainment industries, your post is even bleaker....
And as far as I can see, the Federal lawsuit which was threatened by the rights owners isn't going to finish in the near future, even as the big D continues to rake it in, year after year.
Looks to me like its $200 for the board only, you need to shell out another $50 if you want it in a nice case....
Anyway, this is quite interesting, since probably within 10 years everyone will be able to have something like this running 24/7 and this will mean that all kind of darknets will become practical and everyday, making Big Content's attempts at preventing free distribution of its content much more difficult.
If I had a big bankroll, I'd try coating with diamond using CVD, instead. Anyone know how thick a coating of diamond is necessary to get the appropriate level of chemical intertness?
Let me guess where that is from... am I getting varm?
(I'm not even sure whether even you understand this reply, never mind the average Slashdotter. Anyway: Brunner more or less used that storyline twice, or even maybe three times with slight variations. In a different version, the color was called "varm", instead.)
One possibility which remains, if Big Media manages to shut down Internet liberty somehow, is merely the sharing of physical media (perhaps via some kind of social networking site which does an automatic "N steps to...").
Considering that in the not so far off future people will probably be able to carry around enormous content libraries on tiny memory cards, it doesn't look all that rosy for trying to stop distribution.
Hell, maybe the laws will get so draconian (e.g., you're guilty of infringement if you can't prove you bought or were legally given all the works under copyright in your possession) that even Joe Sixpack will figure out what's going down, and Creative Commons licensed works will reign supreme.
You're obviously being deprived of the liberty to use the Internet. And the use of the Internet gives people a lot more liberties than they had before, i.e., the soapbox can be really big (but is usually tiny).
> But has it really changed that much in the last 30-40 years?
Geez, you're so enmeshed in the Internet you don't even think about its existence!
Or maybe you just live in the present. If you had a really good memory, you'd understand that just 10 years ago encyclopedias were (only) books and Wikipedia didn't exist. Actually, about 20 years ago the Internet as we know it currently didn't exist (yeah, geeks used it for email, listserves, FTP, maybe gopher).
In the last 20 years, easy lossless copyability of audio/video/text content, and easy global dissemination have had far-reaching consequences for the content industries (or so they're ceaselessly claiming). Something those industries don't talk about, but is starting to be significant, is that people are more and more exposed to not-for-profit content generated by low-budget independent artists, we might even call them their peers (e.g., YouTube).
> But someone who's used a touchtone (DMTF) phone in the '60s would be perfectly > at home with a mobile (if they just wanted to dial, and not have to deal with most > of the suck-ass address book UIs).
You even get this wrong. The first thing he's going to ask is "How do I get a dial tone?".
It looks to me like we just were struck by different things. My interpretation of the text you quote, in light of the text I quote above, was that some of the images were public domain (silent movie stars, etc.), but enough of the sales were from shirts with images under copyright that the business wouldn't be viable only on the other sales.
I concede that neither of us has enough information to know which of us is correct....
Digitizing your own LPs ("space shifting") is almost certainly legal in the US but probably not in the UK or other foreign countries more closely following UK copyright law.
OTOH that's not what I meant, what I meant was "obtaining a compressed version of the CD quality music".
> But if it is valued, then why can't those that value it give something back in return?
It is rather unfortunate that the copyright holders dictate the terms to society with no questions asked here. Frankly I get the impression that they'd earn more (in many cases) from lowering their prices and finding ways to offer alternative use models, like pay-per-play with micropayments, or even the street-performer protocol.
For example, I personally would be happy to pay something like $0.15 / track for the privilege of upgrading the audio on my aging LPs to compressed digital quality --- but there is no way for me to actually do that, legally. (Yes, yes, my brain knows that compression artifacts and bandwidth limit filtration could be considered a downgrade, but my aging non-musician ears don't know that...)
Oh, yeah! Some of them even circumvent the DRM on Sony DVD's so they can transcode them and view them on their PSPs, therefore stealing the extra PSP-enabled copy that Sony will never sell them! What criminals!
Your comment makes various assumptions which you have not shown to be true:
people who download Sony content without paying for it sometimes actually buy other Sony merchandise (otherwise, they wouldn't be "customers")
they think this is "stealing" rather than "copyright infringement" or "trying before you buy" or "making an end run around an abuse of monopoly/corporate power" or something else
they think this "stealing" is normal rather than feeling bad about it even though they do it anyway
Frankly, I think that the idea is rather ingenious. I already sense a horde of lawyers sniffing the judicial currents, wondering if this could be prosecuted as encouraging copyright infringement. That should be an interesting case.
Offhand, I'd guess it hinges on whatever public statements have been made by Danger Mouse on this topic.
Another legal issue I'd be interested to come to court would be if the mashup as provided on the net didn't actually include any material under copyright, i.e., it was just a bunch of editing instructions which could be used by a computer program to which the user provides The White Album as input. It might be hard to prove that that is still clearly a derivative work of The White Album if the program would produce output (even gibberish output) given other music as inputs.
This is independent of whether Jammie is guilty of the heinous tort of copyright infringement of 24 songs, for which RIAA was happy to have her fined $222,000. (And yes, I added that tidbit just to bait you.)
Slashdot Mirror
> its jewish tradition to not 'spell out' the letters of god's name.
Yeah, but the actual tradition only applies to Hebrew writing, and to only very particular forms of God's name which were considered to be more or less "proper" names.
It's, er, "quaint" to do it in other languages.
Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment....
Thanks for reminding us of this amusing debacle. I fould it even more amusing (since this is the second time around for me) that the write-up of this historic event is about 25% of all of the content of Tuttle's article in Wikipedia.
Whether or not you believe in this "singularity" stuff, it's obvious that the progress of technology in general constantly makes building improvised weapons like this (and weapons in general) easier. It also makes defending against such threats easier, but it'll always be more expensive to defend than attack (especially if we want to protect things which we currently feel are basic rights like freedom of expression and privacy).
I hope we don't get to the point where random people in NZ (link copied from another post) can build WMDs from parts ordered over the Internet quicker than humanity manages to prove that intelligence is useful for long-term species survival.
> Why is porting the VM software easier than other software?
Well, I agree with you that this is not obvious, but the advantage is that once you have managed to port the VM, you have automatically ported all of the software you preserve running under it. So, if that is many different pieces of software, you have almost certainly saved work. If it is only one or two pieces of software, it might be the opposite.
My opinion is that VMs are some of the more likely pieces of open-source software to be maintained for a long period of time, because as hardware becomes cheaper and cheaper it becomes more and more attractive to use VMs to improve maintainability of systems in general.
I do agree that is it likely that changes in the VM software might well require you to periodically convert your old virtual machine images to be compatible with the new software, but believe that no serious VM software project would require you to do that without giving you easy-to-use tools to do the job.
A lot of your complaints would be solved by saving the rendering software in binary form which runs under an open-source virtual machine like VirtualBox. Then no matter how many formats you want to preserve, you only need to deal with constantly porting the VM to current technological standards.
This idea also helps if, for some reason, you prefer to use a proprietary OS and proprietary formats --- however, in that case you are still more likely to run into some bug (a la Y2K38) which you will be much less able to fix compared to the open-source renderer/format case.
I suppose for something like Y2K38 you could just patch the VM to lie about the date, but that isn't going to help if your use scenario requires current date support.
> Maybe I am missing something.
It is possible that in Australia something analogous to the first-sale doctrine would enable the people who legally bought the MP3 files to resell or give them to other people? It's even likely that Universal Australia sold some of those MP3 files to Americans, who certainly have that right.
This still doesn't rule out blanket lawsuits using the claim that the number of legally sold MP3 files was extremely small (if this is even true).
When seen in the context of an administration which is stuffing the Department of Justice with lawyers with strong ties to the entertainment industries, your post is even bleaker....
Walt Disney Co. has asked the Los Angeles Superior Court to dismiss a lawsuit raised almost 12 years ago by a family-owned firm that owns the rights to Winnie the Pooh which alleges that Disney owes it merchandising royalties of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Disney has been mainly losing but has managed to draw this out, as far as I can tell, to this very day (18 years). On Monday, June 26, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, thus sustaining the Appeals Court ruling. (cited reference)
Or maybe not. Disney managed to drag out the proceedings long enough that eventually they won the proceedings in the state of California, in the end. It seems that the other side had hired the wrong P.I. after starting to get crazy about Disney's creative accounting (there was a claim that Disney had been destroying evidence in this case, also).
And as far as I can see, the Federal lawsuit which was threatened by the rights owners isn't going to finish in the near future, even as the big D continues to rake it in, year after year.
Looks to me like its $200 for the board only, you need to shell out another $50 if you want it in a nice case....
Anyway, this is quite interesting, since probably within 10 years everyone will be able to have something like this running 24/7 and this will mean that all kind of darknets will become practical and everyday, making Big Content's attempts at preventing free distribution of its content much more difficult.
> In fact, I was secretly hoping they'll recreate that particular thread here, word for word.
Are you comparing us Slashdotters to monkeys?!
> Although 100gig is getting a bit out of control!
Exactly, it's both a lot of music and at the same time no more than two of the next-generation writeable disks (e.g., Blu-ray).
I did have a funny feeling something wasn't right, but I couldn't resist trying to make the absolutely most obscurely SF-geeky Slashdot comment, ever.
It's going to be hell for me now until
"Octavine"? [wanders off murmurring to himself]
If I had a big bankroll, I'd try coating with diamond using CVD, instead. Anyone know how thick a coating of diamond is necessary to get the appropriate level of chemical intertness?
Let me guess where that is from... am I getting varm?
(I'm not even sure whether even you understand this reply, never mind the average Slashdotter. Anyway: Brunner more or less used that storyline twice, or even maybe three times with slight variations. In a different version, the color was called "varm", instead.)
One possibility which remains, if Big Media manages to shut down Internet liberty somehow, is merely the sharing of physical media (perhaps via some kind of social networking site which does an automatic "N steps to ...").
Considering that in the not so far off future people will probably be able to carry around enormous content libraries on tiny memory cards, it doesn't look all that rosy for trying to stop distribution.
Hell, maybe the laws will get so draconian (e.g., you're guilty of infringement if you can't prove you bought or were legally given all the works under copyright in your possession) that even Joe Sixpack will figure out what's going down, and Creative Commons licensed works will reign supreme.
I can dream, no?
You're obviously being deprived of the liberty to use the Internet. And the use of the Internet gives people a lot more liberties than they had before, i.e., the soapbox can be really big (but is usually tiny).
> But has it really changed that much in the last 30-40 years?
Geez, you're so enmeshed in the Internet you don't even think about its existence!
Or maybe you just live in the present. If you had a really good memory, you'd understand that just 10 years ago encyclopedias were (only) books and Wikipedia didn't exist. Actually, about 20 years ago the Internet as we know it currently didn't exist (yeah, geeks used it for email, listserves, FTP, maybe gopher).
In the last 20 years, easy lossless copyability of audio/video/text content, and easy global dissemination have had far-reaching consequences for the content industries (or so they're ceaselessly claiming). Something those industries don't talk about, but is starting to be significant, is that people are more and more exposed to not-for-profit content generated by low-budget independent artists, we might even call them their peers (e.g., YouTube).
> But someone who's used a touchtone (DMTF) phone in the '60s would be perfectly
> at home with a mobile (if they just wanted to dial, and not have to deal with most
> of the suck-ass address book UIs).
You even get this wrong. The first thing he's going to ask is "How do I get a dial tone?".
I love it.
It makes me suspect that they made Ubuntu an "Honorable Mention" just to give it a little more publicity!
From a subsequent post:
It looks to me like we just were struck by different things. My interpretation of the text you quote, in light of the text I quote above, was that some of the images were public domain (silent movie stars, etc.), but enough of the sales were from shirts with images under copyright that the business wouldn't be viable only on the other sales.
I concede that neither of us has enough information to know which of us is correct....
> That has already been established as legal.
Digitizing your own LPs ("space shifting") is almost certainly legal in the US but probably not in the UK or other foreign countries more closely following UK copyright law.
OTOH that's not what I meant, what I meant was "obtaining a compressed version of the CD quality music".
> But if it is valued, then why can't those that value it give something back in return?
It is rather unfortunate that the copyright holders dictate the terms to society with no questions asked here. Frankly I get the impression that they'd earn more (in many cases) from lowering their prices and finding ways to offer alternative use models, like pay-per-play with micropayments, or even the street-performer protocol.
For example, I personally would be happy to pay something like $0.15 / track for the privilege of upgrading the audio on my aging LPs to compressed digital quality --- but there is no way for me to actually do that, legally. (Yes, yes, my brain knows that compression artifacts and bandwidth limit filtration could be considered a downgrade, but my aging non-musician ears don't know that...)
Oh, yeah! Some of them even circumvent the DRM on Sony DVD's so they can transcode them and view them on their PSPs, therefore stealing the extra PSP-enabled copy that Sony will never sell them! What criminals!
Your comment makes various assumptions which you have not shown to be true:
Frankly, I think that the idea is rather ingenious. I already sense a horde of lawyers sniffing the judicial currents, wondering if this could be prosecuted as encouraging copyright infringement. That should be an interesting case.
Offhand, I'd guess it hinges on whatever public statements have been made by Danger Mouse on this topic.
Another legal issue I'd be interested to come to court would be if the mashup as provided on the net didn't actually include any material under copyright, i.e., it was just a bunch of editing instructions which could be used by a computer program to which the user provides The White Album as input. It might be hard to prove that that is still clearly a derivative work of The White Album if the program would produce output (even gibberish output) given other music as inputs.
The lawyer wants to cut his losses at this point.
This is independent of whether Jammie is guilty of the heinous tort of copyright infringement of 24 songs, for which RIAA was happy to have her fined $222,000. (And yes, I added that tidbit just to bait you.)