The title refers to the x86 version of the OLPC, clearly.
That was not at all clear to me.
I also believe that these ARM SoCs are faster than any x86 system constrained to the same power budget.
I completely disagree. If you allow both CPUs 20W, there is not an ARM microarchitecture available today that will outperform a Core i3 in the 18W TDP, and I doubt that the Cortex-A9 (coming soon) would either. An A-15 is in the ballpark but that's a couple years away right now.
If you allow both systems 500mW, there isn't an x86 available to do a comparison. Designing a CPU for 500mW power budget with the expected (relatively) low performance is an entirely different game than designing a CPU for 20W power budget and the expected (relatively) high performance.
The original XO-1 uses an AMD Geode LX 800, which was released in 2002/2003 or thereabouts. This latest XO-1.75 uses a Marvell Armada 610, and the marketing material I'm looking at from Marvell has a copyright of 2010 on it. The CPU in there is a Marvell Sheeva which the earliest reference I can find is from 2008, but that's not even a fair date because that's when they announced it, not shipped it.
So yes, this processor is faster than an 8-year-old AMD Geode. I would like to see power/performance tradeoffs vs. today's Atom and AMD Fusion stuff before everyone goes nuts about how ARM is faster than x86 for half the power.
Well, except that parking spots are not the end-item that the city is trying to sell. What the parking spot provides is convenient access to nearby restaurants, shops, music halls, etc., where people spend real money. The parking spot is worthless without those things, so it should be priced only so high as to allow most people to get to those things without feeling ripped off and avoiding the area in the future. Jack up parking spot rates in an urban shopping district, and suddenly maybe a trip to the 'burbs and the gigantic shopping mall with a gigantic, free parking lot may look more attractive, and then the city loses probably much more revenue. The free market works both ways.
So only big banks are supposed to taking these risks and making huge returns, while Joe Taxpayer is not supposed to do that and just "live within his means"? Why should Joe Taxpayer be locked out of potentially big returns in a hot housing market? And why shouldn't Joe Taxpayer get a bailout when things inevitably go south? Banks take risks all the time to maximize their profits, and they were making huge profits (which turned into huge bonuses for executives) during the housing bubble. Joe Taxpayer was just trying to get in on the action.
But, let’s say I’m a guy who makes $15,000 a year. I realize, wow, I can get a $400,000 mortgage and I can live in this house for a few years, and if housing prices go up, I can flip it and I can actually make a couple hundred thousand dollars. And let’s say I’m really clever, and I say, if housing prices go down, I’ll just walk away and I will have gotten to live in a really nice house for three years at no cost to myself. I mean, that’s the worst, most cynical spin you can put on it, right? But this is exactly what people on Wall Street do. The person who is criticizing the janitor for doing this is the same person who thinks that businesses should exploit every legal opportunity to make profits. So even if you attribute the worst possible state of mind to the guy making $15,000, he’s still just doing what any businessman should do under the circumstances. But our national ideology somehow doesn’t allow us to think about it in those terms.
The pragmatic argument in favor of open-source software on your CPU - you run lots of stuff on your CPU, and buggy non-open software can interact badly with it in ways that are hard to diagnose and impossible to fix - doesn't apply to firmware running in isolation on a separate microcontroller in a hardware device.
It sounds like you're making an idealogical argument for open hardware[1], rather than a pragmatic argument for open software. Maybe that's what Debian is doing too, and that's what I'm missing. That's fine, but I doubt it will ever happen - because like I said, it's equivalent to requiring the actual hardware itself (the RTL) to be open too.
[1] Firmware running on an external device is hardware. In fact all the bad things you mentioned about non-open firmware - bugs and restrictions - those apply to hardware too. At some point, you buy the hardware because it allows you to do enough of what you want.
Non-free, closed-source binary blobs running on the CPU in the kernel are bad, I fully agree. They can corrupt system memory in terrible, subtle ways, and without the source code it's nearly impossible to diagnose problems. Non-free, closed-source binary blobs running on an external device with completely separate microcontroller, RAM, etc? What's wrong with that?
The whole point of having firmware in an external device is to separate/wall-off the functionality of that device from the general-purpose CPU and memory. In fact I can't think of a single device in a modern computer system that doesn't have some sort of firmware. Not all devices have loadable firmware like the ones Debian is targeting, but who gives a crap if it's loadable or not? In fact I would rather that every device have loadable (or at least flashable) firmware so that I can upgrade it or get bugfixes from the vendor.
The usual argument against these firmwares goes something like, "IO devices have access to full system memory, and are thus unsafe unless we see their firmware." Well, any IO device has access to system memory whether or not it has firmware. A buggy piece of firmware-free hardware can just as easily scribble on anything in memory or generate a flood of interrupts or whatever as something with firmware. This requirement is tantamount to requiring all the RTL for every device attached to the computer, which is certainly not going to happen.
I'm a person, have free speech, and I'm giving you my opinion.
That's fair.
I'm just advocating for a market-economy-based thing here, factoring the cost of the privacy violation in to the total cost of the trip. I had a conversation yesterday with a friend of mine who is a much more frequent traveler than I, and he made a good point. Infrequent travelers such as myself (2-3 trips per year) will put up with just about anything because the value of seeing family, taking a vacation, whatever far outweighs the total trip cost (ticket price plus infrequent privacy violation.) But frequent travelers (10, 15, 20 trips per year) may be more offended by this, and as a consequence they may opt to not take some of those trips. Maybe they were business trips and instead they'll do video conference, for example. If that starts happening, the passenger volumes and profit margins of the airlines will go down, and the cost of my flights will go up, perhaps so much so that I will in fact consider a driving trip in lieu of a $800 plane ticket.
Any violation of your rights should be a deterrent for you.
Who are you to tell me what I should consider a deterrent or not? I (and lots of other people, apparently) would rather stand in a naked picture machine or be groped for 2 minutes, giving up my right to privacy, for the privilege of air travel to somewhere 1000 miles away, than refuse the naked picture machine or groping and lose the privilege of the fast travel. You are saying it shouldn't be necessary to give up the right to privacy for the privilege of air travel; that's fine too, but that's not the point I'm making.
How is a false sense of security worth the loss of privacy?
This is not trading a right to privacy for a false sense of security. This is trading a right to privacy for the privilege of fast travel to distant places.
I would also like to point out that plenty of people fly El Al Israel and subject themselves to invasive questioning for the privilege of secure air travel.
Locking down the interstate highway system would probably be too much of a deterrent for me, and I'd protest that. Making me stand in a nude-o-scope and a security line for 30 minutes? Not enough of a deterrent for me vs. the benefit of getting somewhere 1000 miles away in 2 hours.
My point is that the line hasn't been crossed for 99% of people.
But getting my body and penis felt up because I choose to exercise my right [yes, right -- see Shapiro vs. Thompson] to interstate travel, or even intrastate travel for California flights, because I decline the 'privilege' of stepping through a Rapiscan?
No one is infringing on your right to interstate travel. You are free to drive a car (your own car or a rented car) on the interstate highway system without any involvement of body scanners or security personnel.
You chose airline travel as your method of interstate travel, but that is your own choice. The overwhelming reason someone chooses airline travel is because he values the time he saves by flying higher than the cost of the plane ticket. Well, you are now free to include personal privacy in that equation. Is your privacy worth 1-3 days of driving to get to your destination? For 99% of us, for 99% of our air travel destinations, it is still not, and so we put up with the nude-o-scopes and TSA gropes. For you, it may be, and in that case you are free to use a car and the interstates.
Do you think that the first iPad that was sold covered the cost of Apple's R&D?
I hate to hijack this thread, but since you said that I feel compelled. I agree with you completely, yet all the pro-piracy "information wants to be free" Slashdotters [1] say that amortizing the R&D/design costs over the sale of multiple copies of a piece of IP - a song, a book, a piece of software, a movie - is not a good business model and that it needs to change. Other than medieval-style patronage by wealthy groups to do their bidding, I don't see how anyone expects to recoup millions or billions of R&D/creation cost of the first copy of the IP if they can't amortize that cost over multiple sales.
[1] I looked at some of your post history and you seem to favor a reasonable copyright term (15-20 years) so I don't think you fall into that category, so don't take this as any sort of attack.
How did this get a positive moderation? This is absolutely nothing more than anti-US flamebait - something that's becoming Slashdot groupthink du jour.
That's a complete and utter fallacy that's been disproved time and time again. Studies have shown the "pirates" spend more money on music than non-pirates.
I hate to do this, but you need to cite these studies and their funding/sources, because there are similar studies funded by the MAFIAA (that you will immediately discount due to their funding) which show the opposite.
The RIAA artists have radio and want the internet gone because their competetion, indie bands, don't have radio and rely on the internet.
Agree completely.
Who is Mr Pirate going to spend his music budget on?
Neither, in your scenario. He just downloaded the indie band's music for free - he's not going to pay them for another identical copy of it. Maybe he'll donate to them out of a sense of charity, I don't know. Is that the point you're making - that people will download music for free and then if they like it, they will donate? I think charity is nice too, but it's not a good business model.
It should be MY right to pay for only the minutes I use; it should be MY right to only pay for the specific music I want to hear; it should be MY right to only pay for the TV channels I actually value. I had those rights very deliberately taken away from me by greedy people to serve their selfish interest.
Those are not rights.
What's your bias?
I work in an industry - software - where the same thing is going on.
No one has ever actually PROVEN that so-called piracy affects sales.
That's true. No one can prove anything about piracy because data is hard to come by, and even if someone got good data about it, no one really knows if a person that downloaded something for $0 would have bought it otherwise. This is the fundamental problem anytime anyone makes any claims about piracy affecting sales.
But I didn't make that argument - instead I made a theoretical microeconomic argument on why piracy is bad. The theory may not even come true - and I hope it doesn't and I don't really think it will, honestly - but it doesn't have to to make my point. But people just keep making excuses and justifying piracy and refusing to acknowledge that it can be harmful.
There is of course credible evidence that hints that even the exact opposite may in fact be true: that piracy is an unintuitive form of free advertising that has actually been increasing sales...
That may certainly be true, but the decision to give away music for promotion lies (or, rather, should lie) with the copyright holder, not with random people who want to get things for $0. If groups are successful using that as a promotional tool and making money from other things like concerts, then maybe more groups will start doing it, and great, more free music for everyone.
The cost of producing the "art" contained in the digital file was incurred ONCE, and the expectation of recouping those expenses is SPECULATIVE;
This is exactly right, but you failed to take it two steps further and find negative consequences of free copying that no one on Slashdot will ever agree to. If musicians find that they always lose in their speculation that enough people will pay for their art to cover the one-time cost of producing it - due to everyone copying it for $0 and not paying them - then they will stop bothering to speculate at all and they will have to go do something else to make money. And society loses by losing an artist. And investors will stop investing money in an industry that can't make money, and even more artists will be without a means to produce their art.
Slashdot says that people will still make music/write books/make films/write software "for the love of it". I think that's a load of crap, and if peoples' monetary needs are not being met, then they have to devote most of their time and energy into some other means of making money. I'm sure some people would still make art for the love of it, but I don't think that model is good enough. Feel free to disagree with me there, but that's where the argument always dead-ends.
Slashdot also likes to invoke Shakespearean times when playwrights wrote plays for fun and writers wrote for fun and painters painted for fun. Actually they made money by being hired by wealthy people and organizations (like churches) that would commission them to create art for themselves, and the general public didn't really have much access to it. I don't think that's good enough either.
Um, how about the fact that Microsoft came out with the Kinect in the first place? Isn't that pretty innovative? We wouldn't have a headline that reads "Exciting Kinect Stuff Already Coming Out" if not for a previous headline that read "Microsoft Releases Exciting New Input Device That They Spent R&D Money On For The Last Couple Years".
Sorry, but just because MS didn't fully develop and support everything someone in a dorm room can think of at the launch of their brand new hardware product doesn't mean they lack vision or innovation or whatever. Anything they release has to be supported in SDKs, APIs, be tested, etc., and that costs money and time. It's great that people are hacking it and coming up with new things to do with it, and I don't know why they tried to lock it down, but it's not locked down anymore, so who gives a crap?
Three or four years ago, everything was moving to Web-based apps where no one cared about what OS you are running - they only cared about what browser/JavaScript/CSS/HTML/rendering software you were using. But then iPhone and iPad and iOS came out started taking marketshare, and now we're back to platform-specific apps, and this time they are ultimately controlled by one company with a maniacal CEO. I wrote about this here and got responses that said that competition would solve everything, but sadly it hasn't happened. And now iOS-style lockdown is moving to PCs and turning them into appliances. I can't see how this is good.
Maybe three or four years ago, Web-based everything was a few too many years ahead of its time, but lets try to get back to that. That's the best way I can see to prevent completely locked-down platforms like this.
As other posters have pointed out, this is about selling bootleg (trademark-infringing) merchandise during the festival.
The issue here is the timescale of the festival. IANAL but I'm assuming that the usual trademark infringement case takes weeks or months to get through the court system. Since the festival is only a few days long, having to wait to go to court until the day of the festival to get the injunction will defeat the purpose of the injuction; by the time it is issued, the festival will be over and it won't serve any purpose - its purpose being to stop the trademark infringement by the bootleggers.
Lack of intent. It is required to prove guilt, and the courts generally do a good job of figuring it out. Terry Childs had it, the idiots that did not redact the VPN passwords in court documents did not.
That's true, but for virtual goods, there is a non-zero (and sometimes significant) creation cost to create the first copy, and creators try to use repeated sales of the good to cover that creation cost.
Slashdot Mirror
The title refers to the x86 version of the OLPC, clearly.
That was not at all clear to me.
I also believe that these ARM SoCs are faster than any x86 system constrained to the same power budget.
I completely disagree. If you allow both CPUs 20W, there is not an ARM microarchitecture available today that will outperform a Core i3 in the 18W TDP, and I doubt that the Cortex-A9 (coming soon) would either. An A-15 is in the ballpark but that's a couple years away right now.
If you allow both systems 500mW, there isn't an x86 available to do a comparison. Designing a CPU for 500mW power budget with the expected (relatively) low performance is an entirely different game than designing a CPU for 20W power budget and the expected (relatively) high performance.
So you're saying an ARM SoC is lower powered than an x86 system? I agree! That's not what the title of the article says though.
The original XO-1 uses an AMD Geode LX 800, which was released in 2002/2003 or thereabouts. This latest XO-1.75 uses a Marvell Armada 610, and the marketing material I'm looking at from Marvell has a copyright of 2010 on it. The CPU in there is a Marvell Sheeva which the earliest reference I can find is from 2008, but that's not even a fair date because that's when they announced it, not shipped it.
So yes, this processor is faster than an 8-year-old AMD Geode. I would like to see power/performance tradeoffs vs. today's Atom and AMD Fusion stuff before everyone goes nuts about how ARM is faster than x86 for half the power.
They get a busy signal? :)
Well, except that parking spots are not the end-item that the city is trying to sell. What the parking spot provides is convenient access to nearby restaurants, shops, music halls, etc., where people spend real money. The parking spot is worthless without those things, so it should be priced only so high as to allow most people to get to those things without feeling ripped off and avoiding the area in the future. Jack up parking spot rates in an urban shopping district, and suddenly maybe a trip to the 'burbs and the gigantic shopping mall with a gigantic, free parking lot may look more attractive, and then the city loses probably much more revenue. The free market works both ways.
So only big banks are supposed to taking these risks and making huge returns, while Joe Taxpayer is not supposed to do that and just "live within his means"? Why should Joe Taxpayer be locked out of potentially big returns in a hot housing market? And why shouldn't Joe Taxpayer get a bailout when things inevitably go south? Banks take risks all the time to maximize their profits, and they were making huge profits (which turned into huge bonuses for executives) during the housing bubble. Joe Taxpayer was just trying to get in on the action.
Let me quote from this outstanding article by James Kwak:
The pragmatic argument in favor of open-source software on your CPU - you run lots of stuff on your CPU, and buggy non-open software can interact badly with it in ways that are hard to diagnose and impossible to fix - doesn't apply to firmware running in isolation on a separate microcontroller in a hardware device.
It sounds like you're making an idealogical argument for open hardware[1], rather than a pragmatic argument for open software. Maybe that's what Debian is doing too, and that's what I'm missing. That's fine, but I doubt it will ever happen - because like I said, it's equivalent to requiring the actual hardware itself (the RTL) to be open too.
[1] Firmware running on an external device is hardware. In fact all the bad things you mentioned about non-open firmware - bugs and restrictions - those apply to hardware too. At some point, you buy the hardware because it allows you to do enough of what you want.
Non-free, closed-source binary blobs running on the CPU in the kernel are bad, I fully agree. They can corrupt system memory in terrible, subtle ways, and without the source code it's nearly impossible to diagnose problems. Non-free, closed-source binary blobs running on an external device with completely separate microcontroller, RAM, etc? What's wrong with that?
The whole point of having firmware in an external device is to separate/wall-off the functionality of that device from the general-purpose CPU and memory. In fact I can't think of a single device in a modern computer system that doesn't have some sort of firmware. Not all devices have loadable firmware like the ones Debian is targeting, but who gives a crap if it's loadable or not? In fact I would rather that every device have loadable (or at least flashable) firmware so that I can upgrade it or get bugfixes from the vendor.
The usual argument against these firmwares goes something like, "IO devices have access to full system memory, and are thus unsafe unless we see their firmware." Well, any IO device has access to system memory whether or not it has firmware. A buggy piece of firmware-free hardware can just as easily scribble on anything in memory or generate a flood of interrupts or whatever as something with firmware. This requirement is tantamount to requiring all the RTL for every device attached to the computer, which is certainly not going to happen.
I'm a person, have free speech, and I'm giving you my opinion.
That's fair.
I'm just advocating for a market-economy-based thing here, factoring the cost of the privacy violation in to the total cost of the trip. I had a conversation yesterday with a friend of mine who is a much more frequent traveler than I, and he made a good point. Infrequent travelers such as myself (2-3 trips per year) will put up with just about anything because the value of seeing family, taking a vacation, whatever far outweighs the total trip cost (ticket price plus infrequent privacy violation.) But frequent travelers (10, 15, 20 trips per year) may be more offended by this, and as a consequence they may opt to not take some of those trips. Maybe they were business trips and instead they'll do video conference, for example. If that starts happening, the passenger volumes and profit margins of the airlines will go down, and the cost of my flights will go up, perhaps so much so that I will in fact consider a driving trip in lieu of a $800 plane ticket.
Any violation of your rights should be a deterrent for you.
Who are you to tell me what I should consider a deterrent or not? I (and lots of other people, apparently) would rather stand in a naked picture machine or be groped for 2 minutes, giving up my right to privacy, for the privilege of air travel to somewhere 1000 miles away, than refuse the naked picture machine or groping and lose the privilege of the fast travel. You are saying it shouldn't be necessary to give up the right to privacy for the privilege of air travel; that's fine too, but that's not the point I'm making.
How is a false sense of security worth the loss of privacy?
This is not trading a right to privacy for a false sense of security. This is trading a right to privacy for the privilege of fast travel to distant places.
I would also like to point out that plenty of people fly El Al Israel and subject themselves to invasive questioning for the privilege of secure air travel.
Parent post is unpopular opinion for sure, but definitely not a troll. Troll is not a synonym for "disagree".
See my other response a couple posts above.
Locking down the interstate highway system would probably be too much of a deterrent for me, and I'd protest that. Making me stand in a nude-o-scope and a security line for 30 minutes? Not enough of a deterrent for me vs. the benefit of getting somewhere 1000 miles away in 2 hours.
My point is that the line hasn't been crossed for 99% of people.
But getting my body and penis felt up because I choose to exercise my right [yes, right -- see Shapiro vs. Thompson] to interstate travel, or even intrastate travel for California flights, because I decline the 'privilege' of stepping through a Rapiscan?
No one is infringing on your right to interstate travel. You are free to drive a car (your own car or a rented car) on the interstate highway system without any involvement of body scanners or security personnel.
You chose airline travel as your method of interstate travel, but that is your own choice. The overwhelming reason someone chooses airline travel is because he values the time he saves by flying higher than the cost of the plane ticket. Well, you are now free to include personal privacy in that equation. Is your privacy worth 1-3 days of driving to get to your destination? For 99% of us, for 99% of our air travel destinations, it is still not, and so we put up with the nude-o-scopes and TSA gropes. For you, it may be, and in that case you are free to use a car and the interstates.
Do you think that the first iPad that was sold covered the cost of Apple's R&D?
I hate to hijack this thread, but since you said that I feel compelled. I agree with you completely, yet all the pro-piracy "information wants to be free" Slashdotters [1] say that amortizing the R&D/design costs over the sale of multiple copies of a piece of IP - a song, a book, a piece of software, a movie - is not a good business model and that it needs to change. Other than medieval-style patronage by wealthy groups to do their bidding, I don't see how anyone expects to recoup millions or billions of R&D/creation cost of the first copy of the IP if they can't amortize that cost over multiple sales.
[1] I looked at some of your post history and you seem to favor a reasonable copyright term (15-20 years) so I don't think you fall into that category, so don't take this as any sort of attack.
How did this get a positive moderation? This is absolutely nothing more than anti-US flamebait - something that's becoming Slashdot groupthink du jour.
That's a complete and utter fallacy that's been disproved time and time again. Studies have shown the "pirates" spend more money on music than non-pirates.
I hate to do this, but you need to cite these studies and their funding/sources, because there are similar studies funded by the MAFIAA (that you will immediately discount due to their funding) which show the opposite.
The RIAA artists have radio and want the internet gone because their competetion, indie bands, don't have radio and rely on the internet.
Agree completely.
Who is Mr Pirate going to spend his music budget on?
Neither, in your scenario. He just downloaded the indie band's music for free - he's not going to pay them for another identical copy of it. Maybe he'll donate to them out of a sense of charity, I don't know. Is that the point you're making - that people will download music for free and then if they like it, they will donate? I think charity is nice too, but it's not a good business model.
It should be MY right to pay for only the minutes I use; it should be MY right to only pay for the specific music I want to hear; it should be MY right to only pay for the TV channels I actually value. I had those rights very deliberately taken away from me by greedy people to serve their selfish interest.
Those are not rights.
What's your bias?
I work in an industry - software - where the same thing is going on.
No one has ever actually PROVEN that so-called piracy affects sales.
That's true. No one can prove anything about piracy because data is hard to come by, and even if someone got good data about it, no one really knows if a person that downloaded something for $0 would have bought it otherwise. This is the fundamental problem anytime anyone makes any claims about piracy affecting sales.
But I didn't make that argument - instead I made a theoretical microeconomic argument on why piracy is bad. The theory may not even come true - and I hope it doesn't and I don't really think it will, honestly - but it doesn't have to to make my point. But people just keep making excuses and justifying piracy and refusing to acknowledge that it can be harmful.
There is of course credible evidence that hints that even the exact opposite may in fact be true: that piracy is an unintuitive form of free advertising that has actually been increasing sales...
That may certainly be true, but the decision to give away music for promotion lies (or, rather, should lie) with the copyright holder, not with random people who want to get things for $0. If groups are successful using that as a promotional tool and making money from other things like concerts, then maybe more groups will start doing it, and great, more free music for everyone.
The cost of producing the "art" contained in the digital file was incurred ONCE, and the expectation of recouping those expenses is SPECULATIVE;
This is exactly right, but you failed to take it two steps further and find negative consequences of free copying that no one on Slashdot will ever agree to. If musicians find that they always lose in their speculation that enough people will pay for their art to cover the one-time cost of producing it - due to everyone copying it for $0 and not paying them - then they will stop bothering to speculate at all and they will have to go do something else to make money. And society loses by losing an artist. And investors will stop investing money in an industry that can't make money, and even more artists will be without a means to produce their art.
Slashdot says that people will still make music/write books/make films/write software "for the love of it". I think that's a load of crap, and if peoples' monetary needs are not being met, then they have to devote most of their time and energy into some other means of making money. I'm sure some people would still make art for the love of it, but I don't think that model is good enough. Feel free to disagree with me there, but that's where the argument always dead-ends.
Slashdot also likes to invoke Shakespearean times when playwrights wrote plays for fun and writers wrote for fun and painters painted for fun. Actually they made money by being hired by wealthy people and organizations (like churches) that would commission them to create art for themselves, and the general public didn't really have much access to it. I don't think that's good enough either.
Um, how about the fact that Microsoft came out with the Kinect in the first place? Isn't that pretty innovative? We wouldn't have a headline that reads "Exciting Kinect Stuff Already Coming Out" if not for a previous headline that read "Microsoft Releases Exciting New Input Device That They Spent R&D Money On For The Last Couple Years".
Sorry, but just because MS didn't fully develop and support everything someone in a dorm room can think of at the launch of their brand new hardware product doesn't mean they lack vision or innovation or whatever. Anything they release has to be supported in SDKs, APIs, be tested, etc., and that costs money and time. It's great that people are hacking it and coming up with new things to do with it, and I don't know why they tried to lock it down, but it's not locked down anymore, so who gives a crap?
This.
Three or four years ago, everything was moving to Web-based apps where no one cared about what OS you are running - they only cared about what browser/JavaScript/CSS/HTML/rendering software you were using. But then iPhone and iPad and iOS came out started taking marketshare, and now we're back to platform-specific apps, and this time they are ultimately controlled by one company with a maniacal CEO. I wrote about this here and got responses that said that competition would solve everything, but sadly it hasn't happened. And now iOS-style lockdown is moving to PCs and turning them into appliances. I can't see how this is good.
Maybe three or four years ago, Web-based everything was a few too many years ahead of its time, but lets try to get back to that. That's the best way I can see to prevent completely locked-down platforms like this.
As other posters have pointed out, this is about selling bootleg (trademark-infringing) merchandise during the festival.
The issue here is the timescale of the festival. IANAL but I'm assuming that the usual trademark infringement case takes weeks or months to get through the court system. Since the festival is only a few days long, having to wait to go to court until the day of the festival to get the injunction will defeat the purpose of the injuction; by the time it is issued, the festival will be over and it won't serve any purpose - its purpose being to stop the trademark infringement by the bootleggers.
Lack of intent. It is required to prove guilt, and the courts generally do a good job of figuring it out. Terry Childs had it, the idiots that did not redact the VPN passwords in court documents did not.
That's true, but for virtual goods, there is a non-zero (and sometimes significant) creation cost to create the first copy, and creators try to use repeated sales of the good to cover that creation cost.