The basic problem with arguing that we could just revert to art as a service industry is that it removes a convenient economic mechanism for many people to contribute a small amount and all receive a work, when the cost of producing that work is significantly more than any one individual consumer would consider it worth. You're back to only rich patrons being able to afford to commission new works
No, not really.
Consider a political campaign: it costs millions of dollars to produce and place ads on TV, radio, newspapers, etc. No one person could afford to fund all of that by himself (well, a few people could, but they rarely do). But the ads still get made and shown, because lots of little contributions add up, even when the contributors can't see what they're paying for because it hasn't been made yet.
The math works out the same whether the artist gets paid before or after he records an album. If there are 100,000 people each willing to spend $10 to hear your voice, that adds up to a million bucks no matter how you slice it.
An artist could run his business much like a political campaign. Put a thermometer graph on his web site indicating how close he is to the amount he needs to fund his next album. When he reaches his goal, he starts work, and when it's done, it becomes free for everyone to enjoy. If he doesn't reach the goal within X months, everyone gets a refund.
In fact, that would address another problem with the current model, which is that an artist receives an advance on his royalty payment, and may end up owing it back to the company if those royalties don't materialize. If his album isn't as popular as he expects it to be, all the time he put into making it is wasted. On the other hand, if he looks for payment first, he can judge the demand ahead of time, and if there's no money to be made from that album he has in mind, he can decide to spend his time on something else.
But there's also a strong case that it wouldn't be anything like as many as we have now: the vast, vast majority of useful software that gets written was not written purely because someone was kind enough to spend many hours producing a useful or enjoyable work for the benefit of society, and the same goes for books, movies, and so on.
That is what makes the incentive reasonable: you can't share and celebrate art that no-one has.
Of course, you must also realize that copyright isn't the only possible incentive. It's a bizarre fluke of history that people tend to think of art as a product, packaged and sold in discrete units, rather than a service provided by artists. Even without copyright, artists would still be able to charge for the time they spend working, just like mechanics or barbers, and thus they'd still have an incentive to work.
The problem with our current "war" is it has no defined condition for winning. We won WWII when Germany and Japan were defeated, but our current military escapades have no potential end in sight.
How will we know when the War On Terror is over? George W. Bush said, on 9/20/2001, that it "will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated". How the hell are we going to determine that? Who can possibly predict how long that'll take?
Similar problems present themselves in Iraq. "Major combat operations" officially ended over three years ago, when that banner was unfurled on the aircraft carrier. But we're still there. We've been hearing phrases like "as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down" and "the next six months will be critical" for years now, with no end in sight.
We have no definition of victory. You can't compare this current erosion of rights, done in the name of perpetual war, with any erosion of rights that might've occurred during the well-defined WWII, because no one has any idea when we'll even know that it's time to expect our rights back.
Since you are impaired in interpreting plain language English, by "unauthorized access," they are referring to getting content you have not licensed (paid for), NOT media shifting content which you have paid for.
You're mistaken. CSS and other DRM schemes are considered access controls under the DMCA. The "authorized" way to gain access to a CSS-protected work is to play it in a licensed DVD player which can enforce things like Macrovision, region coding, and P-UOPs as required by the CSS license. If you circumvent CSS to access it another way, you're gaining unauthorized access. See MGM v. 321 Studios, for example:
Section1201(b)(1) defines such circumvention, as "avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or otherwise impairing a technological measure," and 321 states that its software does not avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or otherwise impair a technological measure, but that it simply uses the authorized key to unlock the encryption. However, while 321's software does use the authorized key to access the DVD, it does not have authority to use this key, as licensed DVD players do, and it therefore avoids and bypasses CSS.
Finally, from the text of the law itself:
(A) to 'circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure 'effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
You don't have access to the copyrighted movie stored on a DVD until you decrypt it; decrypting it without the authority of the copyright holder is circumvention; and if you aren't licensed by the DVD CCA to use a CSS key, you don't have that authority.
But that's exactly why we need the protections offered by copyright. If the Foo Fighters have a great song that everyone wants, they should have the right to make the money from the song. Assuming that they are a great band, and make great music, lots of people will want the music.
You're thinking about it backwards.
If the Foo Fighters are known for writing great music, then lots of people will want them to write more music. Even without copyright, they can still say "Hey fans, we have some great ideas for our next album. We need $100,000 to write and record it. Click here to send us some money. We'll start work once we hit $50,000, and when we reach our goal, everyone will get to hear the album."
Copyright treats music (as well as software, movies, and other information) as a good to be mass-produced and sold in discrete little packages, but that's not really what it is. The value in a song comes from the talent and effort that went into making it, and you can sell that talent and effort just like any other service. Musicians can make a living by following the very same business model as barbers or mechanics: doing work in exchange for money.
Re:The contrast on your morality is set too high.
on
Napster On the Block
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· Score: 1
Putting small busineses and independent singer/songwriter and artists isn't physical harm? Must be nice to live in your world.
Yes, it is. Why don't you come join the other 6 billion of us?
That's only true for poorly written apps, like Napster. If you follow the guidelines that have been in place since Windows XP came out (or before), your app will run fine as a normal user.
Excellent theory! Please post your address, since I now know that if I can ever get into your house and take any of your stuff then you deserve it!
Man, talk about a stupid analogy. If you take my stuff, I don't have it anymore. If you copy information, I still have it, and so does everyone else.
Physical theft is both detectable and preventable. It's reasonable to expect that I can keep someone from stealing my stuff, and that even if that fails, I'll know it happened and I'll have some chance of finding it again. It's unreasonable to expect the same from information, because none of the methods for preventing copying actually work, and it's impossible in most cases to find people who make copies, or even to know that it has happened.
However, if you can steal my stuff without depriving me of it, in a way that's neither detectable nor preventable, then go right ahead. Let me know how you plan to do that, and I'll give you all the information you need.
It reminds me of a conversation with a friend. He was going on and on about how he wished the government would tax him more so that the government could do good and give his money to those in need. Sadly, it never crossed his mind to give to private cherity. He, like you, worships government.
What a strange thing for you to say. Surely you didn't think he only wanted the government to tax him more, passing over everyone else, did you?
Let's suppose your friend can only spend, oh, one dollar a year on charity. One dollar a year is going to do approximately nothing at all for anyone who needs help; he might as well burn that dollar bill to keep a homeless person warm for two minutes in the winter. But one dollar a year times 150 million taxpayers is 150 million dollars: that will go a long way, and it can be raised without putting a large burden on anyone.
See, by having the freedom to choose which charities to give money to you can give to causes that you support. You are not forced to give to causes that the government forces you to give to under threat of imprisonment.
That's exactly why government can solve some problems more effectively.
It would be the same as if the dealer in blackjack only dealt himself one card, face up, and then waited for the rest of the table to play through (either busting or holding) before dealing himself the second. Technically, the odds are the same but, from the player's perspective, the possibility of cheating or underhanded play is greatly increased.
Actually, it does make a difference. That rule is called "no-peek" and it's common in European casinos. Since you don't know whether the dealer has a blackjack until after you've already had a chance to double or split your own cards, you risk losing more when the dealer's second card gives him 21.
And yes, politicians always lie, but when you say "Iraq has WMD", and you genuinely believe it (especially since the collective intelligence communities of the Western world believed it, the UN "believed" [un.int] it (but wasn't ready to commit to military action for a wide variety of reasons), and Saddam himself believed it), and then it later turns out to not be true, is that a "lie"?
If you believe it based on a gut feeling rather than evidence, it's incompetence. We legitimately expect our leaders to do their best to find out in good faith whether what they're saying is true. For that purpose, it doesn't matter how many other people believe it; an opinion poll is only evidence of those opinions, not the underlying facts.
Now, if you do have evidence, but it comes from a group you set up specifically to find evidence that supports your position, while ignoring evidence to the contrary--and especially if you force the inspectors on the ground out before they can reach a conclusion that might contradict you--then you may as well be lying. In that case, what you're doing is setting yourself up so you can believe something that isn't true. The difference between that and a more blatant lie is just philosophical nitpicking: you're lying to yourself by relying on cherry-picked intelligence, so the things you say based on that are either lies, or as close to lies as you can possibly get.
Yes, open source yada yada but it's a different matter if something was created with resources and plans designed around free distribution compared to copying something that was created under a business model expecting a return on the investment. You can argue all you want about which model is better but that doesn't change the fact that if you copy something created by people expecting to get paid for it, you are stealing.
It's not our job to make their business model work. If they think they can make money by making a piece of information to the public and then charging for copies of it, knowing full well that (1) information can be copied at little to no cost, (2) methods to stop copying are fundamentally unsound and have been shown not to work in practice, and (3) copyright violations are usually undetectable, making copyright law largely unenforceable except for the largest scale violations... then they deserve whatever happens.
This is a pretty standard use of the word. "Consumers" are the complement of "producers", in economics as well as computer science (e.g. a lexer produces tokens which are consumed by a parser).
Producers make a product; distributors and retailers buy it in order to pass it on to someone else; consumers buy it for their own use. The article is saying the QS20 is the first thing people will be able to buy and use that contains a Cell processor.
I beg to differ, but Tivo seems to be considerably cheaper than Comcast. Your Comcast also charges you around $65/month for service... [...] Compare this to OTA which is free once you have the setup.
Er... if he only wanted to watch channels that broadcast over the air, he could put up some rabbit ears and stop paying Comcast today. People typically get $65/month cable because they like watching cable channels, you know? You can get "limited cable" for a lot less than that if you just want the basics, but even limited cable gives you more selection than OTA.
Your argument may hold for small projects but not large ones, and if large projects like the LOTR movies were taken away from us (because there was no profit incentive to create them), then that would be a loss for society in general.
But not necessarily a net loss. We'd be able to freely share, remix, splice, and create our own derivative works without having to beg for the copyright holder's permission, which means there'd be more works available and more ways to enjoy them. I think that'd balance out the loss of the few particularly expensive works that couldn't be produced without copyright.
(And of course, eliminating copyright doesn't have to mean eliminating profit - it just means you have to make your profit up front, by charging for your labor instead of charging for copies.)
If you own the music on the CD what is the economic incentive for the artist to share it in the first place?
He can find someone (or a group of people) who'll pay him for writing and recording it in the first place, instead of trying to make money by selling copies after it's already been written and recorded.
Copyright isn't necessary in order for artists to make a living in general - only for them to make a living in one very specific way, that is, by treating information as a discrete, scarce physical product instead of as information.
1. Instantly believe this explanation, and eliminate this machine from their enquiries without a further word
Hmm... yes? What's the worst that could happen, someone might go unpunished for connecting to a child porn web site? Can't say I'd lose any sleep over that. Downloading doesn't hurt anyone; the images have already been made, and any abuse that might happen already has.
According to the Supreme Court in Dowling v. United States, the answer is "not". The court found that copyright infringement does not "easily equate" to theft, and copies made without authorization cannot be considered stolen goods under the law.
It is possible to install Linux on an xbox without a mod chip or even opening the box. It involves loading a "baited" savegame that triggers Intel's infamous buffer overrun and does some reworking of the device's startup files.
How do you get this save game onto your Xbox without opening it up to access the hard drive? Buy a memory card that someone has already preloaded with the save file?
"You wouldn't call them smart just because they're hot, would you?" Yes I would. You need to rethink this. It will come to you.
To her face, if you're the kind of guy who'll lie to get laid, sure. But to your friends when she wasn't around? You'd get mocked. Just like I'm mocking the guy who called this chick hot.
"Super-hot" is a comment on her physical appearance, not her intelligence or geek cred (as made obvious by the fact that "super-smart" was listed separately). She isn't all that hot. You can find better looking women in any mall, coffee shop, department store, or bar in America (not to mention the media). You wouldn't call them smart just because they're hot, would you? So why call this one hot just because she's smart?
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No, not really.
Consider a political campaign: it costs millions of dollars to produce and place ads on TV, radio, newspapers, etc. No one person could afford to fund all of that by himself (well, a few people could, but they rarely do). But the ads still get made and shown, because lots of little contributions add up, even when the contributors can't see what they're paying for because it hasn't been made yet.
The math works out the same whether the artist gets paid before or after he records an album. If there are 100,000 people each willing to spend $10 to hear your voice, that adds up to a million bucks no matter how you slice it.
An artist could run his business much like a political campaign. Put a thermometer graph on his web site indicating how close he is to the amount he needs to fund his next album. When he reaches his goal, he starts work, and when it's done, it becomes free for everyone to enjoy. If he doesn't reach the goal within X months, everyone gets a refund.
In fact, that would address another problem with the current model, which is that an artist receives an advance on his royalty payment, and may end up owing it back to the company if those royalties don't materialize. If his album isn't as popular as he expects it to be, all the time he put into making it is wasted. On the other hand, if he looks for payment first, he can judge the demand ahead of time, and if there's no money to be made from that album he has in mind, he can decide to spend his time on something else.
Of course, you must also realize that copyright isn't the only possible incentive. It's a bizarre fluke of history that people tend to think of art as a product, packaged and sold in discrete units, rather than a service provided by artists. Even without copyright, artists would still be able to charge for the time they spend working, just like mechanics or barbers, and thus they'd still have an incentive to work.
The problem with our current "war" is it has no defined condition for winning. We won WWII when Germany and Japan were defeated, but our current military escapades have no potential end in sight.
How will we know when the War On Terror is over? George W. Bush said, on 9/20/2001, that it "will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated". How the hell are we going to determine that? Who can possibly predict how long that'll take?
Similar problems present themselves in Iraq. "Major combat operations" officially ended over three years ago, when that banner was unfurled on the aircraft carrier. But we're still there. We've been hearing phrases like "as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down" and "the next six months will be critical" for years now, with no end in sight.
We have no definition of victory. You can't compare this current erosion of rights, done in the name of perpetual war, with any erosion of rights that might've occurred during the well-defined WWII, because no one has any idea when we'll even know that it's time to expect our rights back.
Likewise, just because an act is illegal doesn't make it wrong. Legislators don't get to decide questions of morality.
"Limited" accounts aren't allowed to install software at all, AFAIK. You need to upgrade your account to a "power user".
You're mistaken. CSS and other DRM schemes are considered access controls under the DMCA. The "authorized" way to gain access to a CSS-protected work is to play it in a licensed DVD player which can enforce things like Macrovision, region coding, and P-UOPs as required by the CSS license. If you circumvent CSS to access it another way, you're gaining unauthorized access. See MGM v. 321 Studios, for example:
Finally, from the text of the law itself:
You don't have access to the copyrighted movie stored on a DVD until you decrypt it; decrypting it without the authority of the copyright holder is circumvention; and if you aren't licensed by the DVD CCA to use a CSS key, you don't have that authority.
You're thinking about it backwards.
If the Foo Fighters are known for writing great music, then lots of people will want them to write more music. Even without copyright, they can still say "Hey fans, we have some great ideas for our next album. We need $100,000 to write and record it. Click here to send us some money. We'll start work once we hit $50,000, and when we reach our goal, everyone will get to hear the album."
Copyright treats music (as well as software, movies, and other information) as a good to be mass-produced and sold in discrete little packages, but that's not really what it is. The value in a song comes from the talent and effort that went into making it, and you can sell that talent and effort just like any other service. Musicians can make a living by following the very same business model as barbers or mechanics: doing work in exchange for money.
Yes, it is. Why don't you come join the other 6 billion of us?
That's only true for poorly written apps, like Napster. If you follow the guidelines that have been in place since Windows XP came out (or before), your app will run fine as a normal user.
Man, talk about a stupid analogy. If you take my stuff, I don't have it anymore. If you copy information, I still have it, and so does everyone else.
Physical theft is both detectable and preventable. It's reasonable to expect that I can keep someone from stealing my stuff, and that even if that fails, I'll know it happened and I'll have some chance of finding it again. It's unreasonable to expect the same from information, because none of the methods for preventing copying actually work, and it's impossible in most cases to find people who make copies, or even to know that it has happened.
However, if you can steal my stuff without depriving me of it, in a way that's neither detectable nor preventable, then go right ahead. Let me know how you plan to do that, and I'll give you all the information you need.
What a strange thing for you to say. Surely you didn't think he only wanted the government to tax him more, passing over everyone else, did you?
Let's suppose your friend can only spend, oh, one dollar a year on charity. One dollar a year is going to do approximately nothing at all for anyone who needs help; he might as well burn that dollar bill to keep a homeless person warm for two minutes in the winter. But one dollar a year times 150 million taxpayers is 150 million dollars: that will go a long way, and it can be raised without putting a large burden on anyone.
That's exactly why government can solve some problems more effectively.
Actually, it does make a difference. That rule is called "no-peek" and it's common in European casinos. Since you don't know whether the dealer has a blackjack until after you've already had a chance to double or split your own cards, you risk losing more when the dealer's second card gives him 21.
If you believe it based on a gut feeling rather than evidence, it's incompetence. We legitimately expect our leaders to do their best to find out in good faith whether what they're saying is true. For that purpose, it doesn't matter how many other people believe it; an opinion poll is only evidence of those opinions, not the underlying facts.
Now, if you do have evidence, but it comes from a group you set up specifically to find evidence that supports your position, while ignoring evidence to the contrary--and especially if you force the inspectors on the ground out before they can reach a conclusion that might contradict you--then you may as well be lying. In that case, what you're doing is setting yourself up so you can believe something that isn't true. The difference between that and a more blatant lie is just philosophical nitpicking: you're lying to yourself by relying on cherry-picked intelligence, so the things you say based on that are either lies, or as close to lies as you can possibly get.
It's not our job to make their business model work. If they think they can make money by making a piece of information to the public and then charging for copies of it, knowing full well that (1) information can be copied at little to no cost, (2) methods to stop copying are fundamentally unsound and have been shown not to work in practice, and (3) copyright violations are usually undetectable, making copyright law largely unenforceable except for the largest scale violations... then they deserve whatever happens.
This is a pretty standard use of the word. "Consumers" are the complement of "producers", in economics as well as computer science (e.g. a lexer produces tokens which are consumed by a parser).
Producers make a product; distributors and retailers buy it in order to pass it on to someone else; consumers buy it for their own use. The article is saying the QS20 is the first thing people will be able to buy and use that contains a Cell processor.
Er... if he only wanted to watch channels that broadcast over the air, he could put up some rabbit ears and stop paying Comcast today. People typically get $65/month cable because they like watching cable channels, you know? You can get "limited cable" for a lot less than that if you just want the basics, but even limited cable gives you more selection than OTA.
But not necessarily a net loss. We'd be able to freely share, remix, splice, and create our own derivative works without having to beg for the copyright holder's permission, which means there'd be more works available and more ways to enjoy them. I think that'd balance out the loss of the few particularly expensive works that couldn't be produced without copyright.
(And of course, eliminating copyright doesn't have to mean eliminating profit - it just means you have to make your profit up front, by charging for your labor instead of charging for copies.)
He can find someone (or a group of people) who'll pay him for writing and recording it in the first place, instead of trying to make money by selling copies after it's already been written and recorded.
Copyright isn't necessary in order for artists to make a living in general - only for them to make a living in one very specific way, that is, by treating information as a discrete, scarce physical product instead of as information.
Hmm... yes? What's the worst that could happen, someone might go unpunished for connecting to a child porn web site? Can't say I'd lose any sleep over that. Downloading doesn't hurt anyone; the images have already been made, and any abuse that might happen already has.
According to the Supreme Court in Dowling v. United States, the answer is "not". The court found that copyright infringement does not "easily equate" to theft, and copies made without authorization cannot be considered stolen goods under the law.
That's kilobits, not kilobytes, right? 800 kbps is slow these days. Cable modems in my town run at 8 Mbps.
How do you get this save game onto your Xbox without opening it up to access the hard drive? Buy a memory card that someone has already preloaded with the save file?
To her face, if you're the kind of guy who'll lie to get laid, sure. But to your friends when she wasn't around? You'd get mocked. Just like I'm mocking the guy who called this chick hot.
"Super-hot" is a comment on her physical appearance, not her intelligence or geek cred (as made obvious by the fact that "super-smart" was listed separately). She isn't all that hot. You can find better looking women in any mall, coffee shop, department store, or bar in America (not to mention the media). You wouldn't call them smart just because they're hot, would you? So why call this one hot just because she's smart?
Er.. if you think she's "super-hot", you need to get out more.