Lots of people seem to get up in arms about groups like the MPAA trying to control the way people view their content without remembering that it's their content and nobody has any right to it.
If it's theirs, why don't they keep it to themselves?
Their wishes go beyond just wanting to control what's theirs(*). They want to release it to the public and then tell YOU and ME, members of the public, what we can and can't do with the equipment we own.
It's like if the restaurant industry forced appliance manufacturers to cripple microwave ovens so they couldn't be used to reheat doggie bags (forcing people to go back to the restaurant if they want a hot meal). "It's their food, so let them control it," you might say, ignoring the fact that once that food left the restaurant's hands, they gave up control voluntarily.
(* Whether any information can really be "theirs", or anyone's, is debatable in itself, but for now let's say it can.)
Interesting. Are the long names separate from the short names, or is there only one name, and XM receivers just show the first few characters of it (where "few" is the receiver's guess at how long it might be)?
Sirius in my car is pretty good - but perhaps limited by the final FM leg.
You should definitely try to hook it up to your receiver's line-in (or tape deck) if you can. Mine sounds a lot better that way.
Sirius via Dish in the house is very close to CD quality. Don't know if it's the same compression scheme as through Sirius's satellites, but it sounds much better than 128-bit mp3
IIRC, Sirius on Dish uses less compression, and broadcasts a few seconds ahead of the "real" Sirius. But of course you can't take your dish with you on a road trip.;)
Does Dish give you all the Sirius streams, or just the music?
If both aren't wired into the line-in on the head unit then there's no basis for comparison. For all we know, we're comparing the quality of your FM-rebroadcasters in your anecdote.
They're both wired in. XM in my mom's Accord is built into her stereo (came with the car), and Sirius in my car is connected to my head unit's line-in.
It's only so-so when coupled through the FM radio.
Agreed. I can notice a big difference between FM modulation and a direct connection.
So long as the stream isn't skipping, fidelity should be fine--it's digital, you know.
Well, Sirius and XM use different codecs, a different number of channels, and IIRC one has slightly more total bandwidth than the other. It's reasonable to expect different sound quality.
Agreed. My mom has XM in her new Accord, and she noticed that Sirius in my Corolla sounded better. Sirius's artist and song title fields are at least 3 times longer than XM's, IIRC.
And for political talk fans, Sirius carries a full Air America feed (as well as their own TalkLeft stream, and two corresponding conservative streams) instead of the mangled Clear Channel version that XM has, which replaces some of Air America's shows with others like Ed Schultz and (*gag*) Alan Colmes.
Worked for me, and for the other AC who replied to you. Make sure you use the right search page.. it looks like you'll get an error if you try searching from the form that appears after a failed search.
What names are you searching for? Something the rest of us might've heard of, I hope.
Wow, that came out of nowhere. Does your knee always jerk this much?
The sound quality should be CD quality (since that's what they advertise) ALL the time.
No, that's not what they advertise. Close to CD quality, maybe (and it is much closer than FM), but I've never heard Sirius claim they actually provided CD quality sound. Do you have a link to an example of this claim?
NAT helps somewhat, but if you're using NAT your computer can't receive incoming connections. That's a problem for servers, for peer-to-peer networking, for games, and for VoIP. Home users can usually work around this with their firewall configuration, but businesses usually can't (one important reason being that only one computer behind the firewall can receive connections this way, not multiple).
Not true. You can forward ports from your NAT box to any computer behind it. You can have port 80 go to your web server, port 6667 to your IRC server, etc. You just can't forward the same port to more than one computer.
Also, UPnP (which the WRT54G supports) makes it easy for software to automatically set up forwarding rules as they're needed. I know Azureus supports UPnP, and I'm sure other P2P clients do as well.
Check out ItsOnSIRIUS for an up-to-the-minute list of what Sirius is currently playing, and a searchable log of what they've played in the past. Enter the name of a band you think doesn't suck, and I bet you'll find that Sirius plays them.
the awful and somewhat embarrassing sound quality will be VERY noticeable when it's played right beside actual CD quality audio. It's gotten so bad with both Sirius and XM that normal non-nerds are complaining about it.
Are they? I'm pretty nerdy, and I haven't noticed any SQ problems with Sirius. Of course, since Sirius dynamically reallocates bitrate to the channels that need it most at any given moment (S-PLEX), the sound quality can vary from time to time. Sounds like you either have a problem with your audio setup, or you tuned in at just the wrong time.
The first idea that comes to mind is the ability to have Sirius capabilities in your car using an iPod to tape adapter, Sirius at work, gym, home, fishing, everywhere.
You can already do this with a plug'n'play Sirius tuner. Pop the tuner out of your car dock and into your home dock, then into your boom box dock for camping, and into the car dock on your boat for fishing.
What form do satellite radio antennae take? If it fits into a wire like an FM antenna, could it be wired into the headphones?
The nondirectional Sirius antenna in my car is a small box about 2" square that mounts on the roof. My directional home antenna is a slightly bigger box that mounts on a window sill and tilts up to face the satellite.
I don't think a satellite radio antenna could be wired into headphones (without making them too bulky to wear). The portable satellite radio receivers I've seen don't look all that portable, really. It'll be interesting to see how they fit an antenna into the iPod.
The problem with mouse + keyboards on consoles is that they usually limit you to the maximum movement speed of what you could move by pushing your analog stick as far over as possible.
True, but in Halo 2 (at least) you can change your controller sensitivity. Crank the sensitivity all the way up to "insane", and it'll be way too fast for anyone using a standard controller, but just right for a mouse/keyboard with the adapter.
Until I can treat a console like a PC (ie: hook it up to an extremely high resolution monitor and have the option to use a keyboard and mouse), for me, it's going to be my second choice system.
Get the SmartJoy FRAG from Lik Sang. It'll let you hook up a PS/2 mouse and keyboard to the Xbox or PS2, and control any FPS game with them (it translates relative mouse movement to joystick position). Works pretty well for Halo 2, although it's a little sluggish for controlling turrets and vehicles.
First, they can stop thinking of it as "their" content. You can't own an idea. You can't own a sequence of notes in a recording or words on a page, or an arrangement of colors on a canvas, any more than you can own a size or a shape or a color.
The only difference is that their [AT&T's] service is only a three digit number and you don't need to pay out of the nose for it.
AT&T's more expensive, not less. The service in TFA is $0.99 for the first 5 uses (~20 cents each), then $0.99 per use afterward (same price as AT&T's).
[You can go to the library and read books for free.] Your taxes pay for that.
Sure, my local libraries. But only those.
Is it wrong for me to read books for free at an out-of-state library while I'm on vacation? No, of course not. Paying taxes isn't what makes it ethical to read a book in a library. The fact that it's accessible makes it ethical by default.
[You can turn on the radio and hear music for free.] Advertising pays for that.
Again, that's different from *me* paying for it. I'm still getting something for nothing, especially if I don't patronize any of the advertisers. I'm sure you wouldn't say it's unethical for me to listen to the radio without buying any of the advertised products, would you?
Besides which, you're (willfully?) missing the point - in none of those situations other than the last one do you actually possess a copy of the copyrighted work.
That's beside the point. Possession and creation of copies may be important for interpreting copyright law, but it has no impact on the ethics or morals of "getting something for nothing".
Libraries, radio, TV, and loud concerts all allow anyone to get something for nothing. We agree that doing so in those situations is OK. Therefore, getting something for nothing is not inherently wrong.
And therefore, back to the earlier post, "in one case you're getting something for nothing, and in the other you aren't" is not a valid counterargument to my point about movie reviewers.
People get something for nothing all the time. If you want to argue that it's wrong to do so in a specific instance, you have to show how someone is harmed by it. In this particular case (downloading a movie vs. reading a bad review), no one is harmed any more in either case: the theater and studio miss out on exactly the same amount of profit when you decide not to buy a ticket, no matter what led you to make that decision.
There is a vast difference between discouraging people from using a product by sharing your personal opinion of it, and undercutting the legitimate sales by providing cheaper (or free) illegal bootlegs.
Hmm... nope, you're gonna have to explain this alleged vast difference, chief.
If I give you a copy of The Incredible Hulk, you might say "god, this sucks" and decide not to buy a ticket or a DVD. OTOH, if *I* watch The Incredible Hulk, I might tell you "god, this sucks", and you might decide not to buy a ticket or DVD because you respect my opinion so much. In either case, the movie theater and the studio aren't getting your money.
The only difference is that in one case, you get to see the movie anyway, which harms no one at all (except yourself, if the movie really is that bad).
There is no slippery slope here. It's a question of getting something for nothing, or getting nothing for nothing. The latter is perfectly acceptable.
As is the former. You can walk past a club where a loud concert is going on, and hear the music for free. You can even stop for a few minutes to listen in. You can go to a friend's house and watch his DVDs for free. You can go to the library and read books for free. You can turn on the radio and hear music for free. You can turn on TiVo and watch TV shows for free, without even watching the commercials.
People seem to have gotten the idea that it's somehow illegitimate to enjoy any bit of content unless you've paid for the privilege. Not so.
You can't steal profits that weren't already earned. You can't steal "projected" profits.
And even if, as the content industries would like us to do, we considered it "stealing projected profits" when someone discourages others from buying copies of a CD or movie (which is the only way illegal copying can affect profits at all), what would that do to the First Amendment?
When Roger Ebert or any other reviewer publishes a negative write-up of a movie, that must have more effect on ticket sales than any single person sharing the movie through P2P. Imagine if RottenTomatoes got hit as hard as these tracker sites have been lately because of all the potential profits they stole.
Right, because you have to submit your fingerprint to use the internet. Oh, no, wait, you're just throwing in a little classic Slashdot hyperbole to try to prop up your incredibly weak analogy.
Oh, sorry.. I guess that's a little too much traceability for you. Interesting. If I were running for office against you, I might suggest that you had something to hide - after all, I'd say, who but a criminal would be opposed to a simple database check on people who want to use the internet, to make sure that known sex offenders and terrorists aren't using our information infrastructure to commit their foul acts?
Do you have something to hide? Or are you, like many of us, just concerned about having too much information about you recorded "just in case"?
Here's the problem with your terrible analogy - driving a car around leaves a huge wake of evidence: From the fact that it left your drive-way (or that you rented it if it was a rental), to ever meter maid that punches it in the logging app to parking stubs (you know that many automated parking garages record your license now, right?) to toll highways to surveillance cameras.
I don't know what kind of town you live in, but around here there are no toll highways or public surveillance cameras, and I rarely have a need to anywhere that my license plate is logged. There are no cameras pointing at my driveway to record when I leave or arrive.
When I drive around, I don't leave a trail of evidence, unless someone is keeping an eye out for me in particular. Apparently, in your world, this is a bug and must be corrected so that I can be tracked down when necessary.
I expect this sort of absurd analogy on here though.
I agree with the GP.. Natalie Portman is good looking, but in all honesty she's no better than half the girls you can meet any day at the airport, mall, or movie theater. The only difference is they aren't wearing costumes and reading lines. "Retardo hot?" Please, dude, calm down.
You see, no one is banning the internet - all people are asking for is some sort of traceability for your actions, only derivable (or SHOULD be only derivable) through a warrant (and thus in the investigation of a crime).
All right, then. Let's apply a little traceability to cars, since 99.5%* of children who are kidnapped to make porn are transported via car. Everyone who buys a car must submit their fingerprints to the government, and every car must have a GPS unit installed to record the car's position every time the doors are opened and transmit it to a central database. When a kiddie porn ring is busted, the FBI opens the database and rounds up everyone who has been to that address in the preceding few months.
It's not a ban, so you'd be okay with that, right?
... this is a highly sophisticated story involving the specific nature of ancient inks, the problems of 12th century economics which reduced many cultures to reprocessing books (the results of which are called palimpsets)
I'll probably get modded down for this spelling nitpick, but I think you mean "palimpsests". I misspelled that word before a national audience in 1992, don't want you to make the same mistake in this international forum.;)
Personally I wouldn't want to come in to work one day and have my boss tell me, "Sorry Scott, we can't pay you for your work today. Somebody up and stole our sales department, so we can't sell anything today, and won't make any money"
Not that this would technically be possible, but that's what musicians and the like often face.
Oh, do they? Really?
"Sorry, Britney, we can't pay you for your work today. Somebody up and stole all the master tapes, so we can't sell any more CDs."
I don't think so. Try an analogy like this:
"Sorry, Comcast, we can't pay you for internet service anymore. Somebody set up a free WiFi zone that covers this whole neighborhood, so we don't need to pay you for access."
Nothing is stolen. The copyright holder still has everything he ever had, but now there's a better way for his customers to get it from someone else.
In every other business, that's accepted as a fact of life. If you sell mousetraps for $1 each, and someone else starts selling identical mousetraps for less, you better come up with a way to make your product more attractive (or lower your price) if you want to stay in business. Whining that your competitors are using your blueprints won't get you very far in the long run.
The problem with music, movies, and other piratable content is that the producers insist on treating them as goods, when they are in fact providing a service.
Consider programming: anyone can duplicate CD-ROMs and manuals, put them in boxes, and sell them. Hell, anyone can compile a program from source code. The valuable part of programming is knowing what code to write, just like the valuable part of making music is the particular way you play your instrument/sing/write songs, not duplicating the recordings once they're made. You can replace CDs with tapes, DVD audio, or MP3 files without affecting the value of the service that the musicians provided in writing and performing the songs in the first place. In any other business, piracy wouldn't be a problem, because the people with talent would already have been paid when they actually used it.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of people seem to get up in arms about groups like the MPAA trying to control the way people view their content without remembering that it's their content and nobody has any right to it.
If it's theirs, why don't they keep it to themselves?
Their wishes go beyond just wanting to control what's theirs(*). They want to release it to the public and then tell YOU and ME, members of the public, what we can and can't do with the equipment we own.
It's like if the restaurant industry forced appliance manufacturers to cripple microwave ovens so they couldn't be used to reheat doggie bags (forcing people to go back to the restaurant if they want a hot meal). "It's their food, so let them control it," you might say, ignoring the fact that once that food left the restaurant's hands, they gave up control voluntarily.
(* Whether any information can really be "theirs", or anyone's, is debatable in itself, but for now let's say it can.)
Interesting. Are the long names separate from the short names, or is there only one name, and XM receivers just show the first few characters of it (where "few" is the receiver's guess at how long it might be)?
Sirius in my car is pretty good - but perhaps limited by the final FM leg.
;)
You should definitely try to hook it up to your receiver's line-in (or tape deck) if you can. Mine sounds a lot better that way.
Sirius via Dish in the house is very close to CD quality. Don't know if it's the same compression scheme as through Sirius's satellites, but it sounds much better than 128-bit mp3
IIRC, Sirius on Dish uses less compression, and broadcasts a few seconds ahead of the "real" Sirius. But of course you can't take your dish with you on a road trip.
Does Dish give you all the Sirius streams, or just the music?
If both aren't wired into the line-in on the head unit then there's no basis for comparison. For all we know, we're comparing the quality of your FM-rebroadcasters in your anecdote.
They're both wired in. XM in my mom's Accord is built into her stereo (came with the car), and Sirius in my car is connected to my head unit's line-in.
It's only so-so when coupled through the FM radio.
Agreed. I can notice a big difference between FM modulation and a direct connection.
So long as the stream isn't skipping, fidelity should be fine--it's digital, you know.
Well, Sirius and XM use different codecs, a different number of channels, and IIRC one has slightly more total bandwidth than the other. It's reasonable to expect different sound quality.
Agreed. My mom has XM in her new Accord, and she noticed that Sirius in my Corolla sounded better. Sirius's artist and song title fields are at least 3 times longer than XM's, IIRC.
And for political talk fans, Sirius carries a full Air America feed (as well as their own TalkLeft stream, and two corresponding conservative streams) instead of the mangled Clear Channel version that XM has, which replaces some of Air America's shows with others like Ed Schultz and (*gag*) Alan Colmes.
Worked for me, and for the other AC who replied to you. Make sure you use the right search page.. it looks like you'll get an error if you try searching from the form that appears after a failed search.
What names are you searching for? Something the rest of us might've heard of, I hope.
I love this Microsoft-centric way of thinking.
Wow, that came out of nowhere. Does your knee always jerk this much?
The sound quality should be CD quality (since that's what they advertise) ALL the time.
No, that's not what they advertise. Close to CD quality, maybe (and it is much closer than FM), but I've never heard Sirius claim they actually provided CD quality sound. Do you have a link to an example of this claim?
NAT helps somewhat, but if you're using NAT your computer can't receive incoming connections. That's a problem for servers, for peer-to-peer networking, for games, and for VoIP. Home users can usually work around this with their firewall configuration, but businesses usually can't (one important reason being that only one computer behind the firewall can receive connections this way, not multiple).
Not true. You can forward ports from your NAT box to any computer behind it. You can have port 80 go to your web server, port 6667 to your IRC server, etc. You just can't forward the same port to more than one computer.
Also, UPnP (which the WRT54G supports) makes it easy for software to automatically set up forwarding rules as they're needed. I know Azureus supports UPnP, and I'm sure other P2P clients do as well.
Check out ItsOnSIRIUS for an up-to-the-minute list of what Sirius is currently playing, and a searchable log of what they've played in the past. Enter the name of a band you think doesn't suck, and I bet you'll find that Sirius plays them.
the awful and somewhat embarrassing sound quality will be VERY noticeable when it's played right beside actual CD quality audio. It's gotten so bad with both Sirius and XM that normal non-nerds are complaining about it.
Are they? I'm pretty nerdy, and I haven't noticed any SQ problems with Sirius. Of course, since Sirius dynamically reallocates bitrate to the channels that need it most at any given moment (S-PLEX), the sound quality can vary from time to time. Sounds like you either have a problem with your audio setup, or you tuned in at just the wrong time.
The first idea that comes to mind is the ability to have Sirius capabilities in your car using an iPod to tape adapter, Sirius at work, gym, home, fishing, everywhere.
You can already do this with a plug'n'play Sirius tuner. Pop the tuner out of your car dock and into your home dock, then into your boom box dock for camping, and into the car dock on your boat for fishing.
What form do satellite radio antennae take? If it fits into a wire like an FM antenna, could it be wired into the headphones?
The nondirectional Sirius antenna in my car is a small box about 2" square that mounts on the roof. My directional home antenna is a slightly bigger box that mounts on a window sill and tilts up to face the satellite.
I don't think a satellite radio antenna could be wired into headphones (without making them too bulky to wear). The portable satellite radio receivers I've seen don't look all that portable, really. It'll be interesting to see how they fit an antenna into the iPod.
The problem with mouse + keyboards on consoles is that they usually limit you to the maximum movement speed of what you could move by pushing your analog stick as far over as possible.
True, but in Halo 2 (at least) you can change your controller sensitivity. Crank the sensitivity all the way up to "insane", and it'll be way too fast for anyone using a standard controller, but just right for a mouse/keyboard with the adapter.
Until I can treat a console like a PC (ie: hook it up to an extremely high resolution monitor and have the option to use a keyboard and mouse), for me, it's going to be my second choice system.
Get the SmartJoy FRAG from Lik Sang. It'll let you hook up a PS/2 mouse and keyboard to the Xbox or PS2, and control any FPS game with them (it translates relative mouse movement to joystick position). Works pretty well for Halo 2, although it's a little sluggish for controlling turrets and vehicles.
First, they can stop thinking of it as "their" content. You can't own an idea. You can't own a sequence of notes in a recording or words on a page, or an arrangement of colors on a canvas, any more than you can own a size or a shape or a color.
The only difference is that their [AT&T's] service is only a three digit number and you don't need to pay out of the nose for it.
AT&T's more expensive, not less. The service in TFA is $0.99 for the first 5 uses (~20 cents each), then $0.99 per use afterward (same price as AT&T's).
[You can go to the library and read books for free.] Your taxes pay for that.
Sure, my local libraries. But only those.
Is it wrong for me to read books for free at an out-of-state library while I'm on vacation? No, of course not. Paying taxes isn't what makes it ethical to read a book in a library. The fact that it's accessible makes it ethical by default.
[You can turn on the radio and hear music for free.] Advertising pays for that.
Again, that's different from *me* paying for it. I'm still getting something for nothing, especially if I don't patronize any of the advertisers. I'm sure you wouldn't say it's unethical for me to listen to the radio without buying any of the advertised products, would you?
Besides which, you're (willfully?) missing the point - in none of those situations other than the last one do you actually possess a copy of the copyrighted work.
That's beside the point. Possession and creation of copies may be important for interpreting copyright law, but it has no impact on the ethics or morals of "getting something for nothing".
Libraries, radio, TV, and loud concerts all allow anyone to get something for nothing. We agree that doing so in those situations is OK. Therefore, getting something for nothing is not inherently wrong.
And therefore, back to the earlier post, "in one case you're getting something for nothing, and in the other you aren't" is not a valid counterargument to my point about movie reviewers.
People get something for nothing all the time. If you want to argue that it's wrong to do so in a specific instance, you have to show how someone is harmed by it. In this particular case (downloading a movie vs. reading a bad review), no one is harmed any more in either case: the theater and studio miss out on exactly the same amount of profit when you decide not to buy a ticket, no matter what led you to make that decision.
There is a vast difference between discouraging people from using a product by sharing your personal opinion of it, and undercutting the legitimate sales by providing cheaper (or free) illegal bootlegs.
Hmm... nope, you're gonna have to explain this alleged vast difference, chief.
If I give you a copy of The Incredible Hulk, you might say "god, this sucks" and decide not to buy a ticket or a DVD. OTOH, if *I* watch The Incredible Hulk, I might tell you "god, this sucks", and you might decide not to buy a ticket or DVD because you respect my opinion so much. In either case, the movie theater and the studio aren't getting your money.
The only difference is that in one case, you get to see the movie anyway, which harms no one at all (except yourself, if the movie really is that bad).
There is no slippery slope here. It's a question of getting something for nothing, or getting nothing for nothing. The latter is perfectly acceptable.
As is the former. You can walk past a club where a loud concert is going on, and hear the music for free. You can even stop for a few minutes to listen in. You can go to a friend's house and watch his DVDs for free. You can go to the library and read books for free. You can turn on the radio and hear music for free. You can turn on TiVo and watch TV shows for free, without even watching the commercials.
People seem to have gotten the idea that it's somehow illegitimate to enjoy any bit of content unless you've paid for the privilege. Not so.
You can't steal profits that weren't already earned. You can't steal "projected" profits.
And even if, as the content industries would like us to do, we considered it "stealing projected profits" when someone discourages others from buying copies of a CD or movie (which is the only way illegal copying can affect profits at all), what would that do to the First Amendment?
When Roger Ebert or any other reviewer publishes a negative write-up of a movie, that must have more effect on ticket sales than any single person sharing the movie through P2P. Imagine if RottenTomatoes got hit as hard as these tracker sites have been lately because of all the potential profits they stole.
Right, because you have to submit your fingerprint to use the internet. Oh, no, wait, you're just throwing in a little classic Slashdot hyperbole to try to prop up your incredibly weak analogy.
Oh, sorry.. I guess that's a little too much traceability for you. Interesting. If I were running for office against you, I might suggest that you had something to hide - after all, I'd say, who but a criminal would be opposed to a simple database check on people who want to use the internet, to make sure that known sex offenders and terrorists aren't using our information infrastructure to commit their foul acts?
Do you have something to hide? Or are you, like many of us, just concerned about having too much information about you recorded "just in case"?
Here's the problem with your terrible analogy - driving a car around leaves a huge wake of evidence: From the fact that it left your drive-way (or that you rented it if it was a rental), to ever meter maid that punches it in the logging app to parking stubs (you know that many automated parking garages record your license now, right?) to toll highways to surveillance cameras.
I don't know what kind of town you live in, but around here there are no toll highways or public surveillance cameras, and I rarely have a need to anywhere that my license plate is logged. There are no cameras pointing at my driveway to record when I leave or arrive.
When I drive around, I don't leave a trail of evidence, unless someone is keeping an eye out for me in particular. Apparently, in your world, this is a bug and must be corrected so that I can be tracked down when necessary.
I expect this sort of absurd analogy on here though.
And yet here you are.
I agree with the GP.. Natalie Portman is good looking, but in all honesty she's no better than half the girls you can meet any day at the airport, mall, or movie theater. The only difference is they aren't wearing costumes and reading lines. "Retardo hot?" Please, dude, calm down.
You see, no one is banning the internet - all people are asking for is some sort of traceability for your actions, only derivable (or SHOULD be only derivable) through a warrant (and thus in the investigation of a crime).
All right, then. Let's apply a little traceability to cars, since 99.5%* of children who are kidnapped to make porn are transported via car. Everyone who buys a car must submit their fingerprints to the government, and every car must have a GPS unit installed to record the car's position every time the doors are opened and transmit it to a central database. When a kiddie porn ring is busted, the FBI opens the database and rounds up everyone who has been to that address in the preceding few months.
It's not a ban, so you'd be okay with that, right?
(* figure is made up)
... this is a highly sophisticated story involving the specific nature of ancient inks, the problems of 12th century economics which reduced many cultures to reprocessing books (the results of which are called palimpsets)
;)
I'll probably get modded down for this spelling nitpick, but I think you mean "palimpsests". I misspelled that word before a national audience in 1992, don't want you to make the same mistake in this international forum.
Personally I wouldn't want to come in to work one day and have my boss tell me, "Sorry Scott, we can't pay you for your work today. Somebody up and stole our sales department, so we can't sell anything today, and won't make any money"
Not that this would technically be possible, but that's what musicians and the like often face.
Oh, do they? Really?
"Sorry, Britney, we can't pay you for your work today. Somebody up and stole all the master tapes, so we can't sell any more CDs."
I don't think so. Try an analogy like this:
"Sorry, Comcast, we can't pay you for internet service anymore. Somebody set up a free WiFi zone that covers this whole neighborhood, so we don't need to pay you for access."
Nothing is stolen. The copyright holder still has everything he ever had, but now there's a better way for his customers to get it from someone else.
In every other business, that's accepted as a fact of life. If you sell mousetraps for $1 each, and someone else starts selling identical mousetraps for less, you better come up with a way to make your product more attractive (or lower your price) if you want to stay in business. Whining that your competitors are using your blueprints won't get you very far in the long run.
The problem with music, movies, and other piratable content is that the producers insist on treating them as goods, when they are in fact providing a service.
Consider programming: anyone can duplicate CD-ROMs and manuals, put them in boxes, and sell them. Hell, anyone can compile a program from source code. The valuable part of programming is knowing what code to write, just like the valuable part of making music is the particular way you play your instrument/sing/write songs, not duplicating the recordings once they're made. You can replace CDs with tapes, DVD audio, or MP3 files without affecting the value of the service that the musicians provided in writing and performing the songs in the first place. In any other business, piracy wouldn't be a problem, because the people with talent would already have been paid when they actually used it.
Or this one...