Sony is Sony. If they'd put rootkits on music CDs (it wasn't DRM, it was vandalism; I was hit by it. It stopped all CD burning and P2P software from working, and I had to reinstall the OS to get rid of it) what other evil would they stoop to?
The Playstation evil was from removing a feature from a product customers had bought and paid for -- OtherOS. It was like Ford coming to your house and removing the car stereo after the car was paid for.
Other companies have been hacked, but few have shown the total disregard for security Sony did -- the data weren't even encrypted. The other things you mention (like vendor lock in) were mere annoyances compared to having your computer wrecked, or having functionality removed from a device that YOU own, or having such bad security that they get cracked weekly.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Nice in theory, but after Sony has repeatedly done evil after evil to their customers they're still in business. I won't buy a Sony anything, but there are six billion people on the planet, and half of them have two digit IQs.
BTW, Cory Doctorow's Makers, about a fictional future about the transition, is a pretty good read. You can DL an ebook version from boingboing.
It's going to cost, one way or another. The cheapest I ever had cost a draft beer, the most expensive cost me a house, a car, and part of my pension. Granted, that last one lasted 27 years...
But porn? Paying for porn is like paying for kittens.
The data can't be copyrighted, but its presentation is. If you write a book about chemistry I can read it, learn from it, and write my own chemistry book using the facts from your book as long as I present those facts in my own words. The plagarists copied the entire thing whole cloth, even using the same IP address I used in one of the examples. Although my question here is about plagarism rather than copyright infringement (I had no problem with someone republishing it provided they gave me credit and a link to the original, which a few folks did), it was certainly copyright infringement. Were I a greedhead I could have probably hired a lawyer and gotten rich.
Will this help or hurt? A little before the turn of the century I researched Quake and Quake II console commands, tested them all, and wrote short descriptions of how to use them and what they did. It was copied on dozens of other web sites, word for word, usually with no attribution and usually with someone else's name on it.
Meta tags were badly misused to spam search engines. And what if you're putting content on someone else's site and have no control over the meta tags?
To commune with other people who have found God. That's like resolving Einstein's Unification theory, then goiing to a retreat with other theoretical physicists.
To misquote Pogo, "common sense ain't so common no more". What seems to be "just common sense" (the sun revolves around the earth) is often wrong. Scientific studies (at least the ones not funded by the RIAA) have shown that piracy helps sales, not hurts. Music pirates spend more on music than non-pirates. The RIAA has a dog in this fight -- they have radio, their competetitors don't, and they've shown themselves to be immoral and unethecial liars, cheats, and thieves. Nobody with a lick of common sense would trust anything they say, or any study they fund.
A couple of years ago a book publisher commissioned a study to see how badly book piracy was hurting his sales. Common sense says that "nobody will pay for what they can get for free" despite the fact that million$ are made selling bottled water.
He was amazed and pleased when he found that there was a sales spike rather than a drop in sales when the pirate version hit the web. I'd offer a link, but I'm at work and half the internet is firewalled off.
As I said in another comment, if your stuff's not very good or isn't worth the price you're demanding and people know it, they're not going to buy it whether or not they can pirate it. If you can only sell five copies of your $100 program but a thousand people download it, that should tell you that your program isn't worth $100 and may not even be worth ten.
Yes, if your program is bug-ridden and barely useable, or your song doesn't strike a chord with people, or your music and software is overpriced, piracy will hurt you, but it isn't the fault of piracy, it's your fault for producing overpriced crap.
Of course you can own physical things. Yes, it's a societal concept, but homo sapiens is a social animal. Not being social is to be crazy. I grow and pick a bushel of tomatos and I own those tomatos. Since I own them, I can trade them for your strawberries if you want tomatos and I want strawberries. Money just makes barter easier.
I can't believe that anybody trusts MS; this is far from the first time something like this has happened. I've been managing databases (among other things) for a couple of decades. Used dBase II and got good at it. When datasets got too big for a PC, Nomad took over on the mainframe. Its language structure was similar enough to dBase that learning Nomad and porting apps to it was easy if you knew dBase.
FoxPro was a better dBase than dBase when MS bought it. FoxPro 6 was a pretty good program, but when they upgraded our PCs, it wouldn't run on them, so they upgraded to version 8.
Version 8 was a complete and utter mess. MS changed it so much that none of my old programs would run. A lot of functionality was replaced by "ease of use" which was hell on someone used to real programming.
I think they did it purposely in order to kill FoXpro and migrate everybody to the train wreck that is MS Access. I'm stuck with that now. Do they still sell FoxPro, I wonder?
Then they upgraded to a newer version of Access, and again none of my old apps would run on it without a lot of hocuc-pocus to get the old Access engine to run in sync with the new engine. Jesus, what a mess.
I would never again voluntarily use any MS development platform. I'm just glad I'm retiring in a couple of years.
I'm happy to use open source at home. Migrate to kubuntu from an ancient copy of Mandriva and the migration is easy and painless. Upgrade to a new version of any MS product and expect to need retraining.
You folks must be shaking in your boots about Star Wreck. I own a lot of tapes and DVDs, no way will I buy one I haven't seen. No way will I buy a CD from an artist I haven't heard, let alone heard of. I have dozens of Isaac Asimov books, and hundreds from other writers, but were it not for the free public library I'd never had bought a single one of them.
Nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. The only artists that are hurt by file sharing are talentless hacks. If your films are good, P2P will help sales, not hurt.
Well, computers used to be monsters taking up entire buildings, but these days most computers are cute and cuddly little things. As to soulless, Tracy Kidder begs to differ.
It's grammatically correct and should cause no brain farts at all. Of course, there are some ignorant people who will write "Doe's". If you read ignorant, ungrammatical, and misspelled messageboard postings all day I can see how it might become a problem for some. The cure is reading more books and less internet.
The clue your brain is missing is there's no period after "filesharing".
John Doe's does are all healthy, but Jane Doe's does were all eaten by wolves."
It's their work, but not their property. When, say, I write a short science fiction story I don't own the story, I simply have a "limited time" (HAH!) monopoly. I no more own that story than I own the house I rent.
I agree completely. The insand copyright lengths harm the arts. However, I'd make it 20 years with MAYBE one fifteen year extension. DRM and long terms are completely contrary to what the constitution's intent is, to make more work for the public domain.
As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved because of obscurity. That's why he posts all his books on his website in ebook form for free. He credits his status as a NYT best seller to that. There's no need to give tax money to authors and artists, if the work is good people will buy it despite being able to get it for free.
Thank you for putting "own" in quotes! If I buy a book, I own the book and can do whatever I want with it. I can loan it out, sell it, do whatever I want with it except publish copies of it. Not so with any DRMed media. If it's copy protected, you own nothing.
I'd like to see copyright changed so that an attempt to copy-protect a work deprives it of copyright.
Bookstores could and should sell thumb drives with non-DRM content. If they did that, you could still buy them anonymously.
At one time the record labels were actually useful. Recording studios were incredibly expensive to build and maintain, and the pressing factories likewise. These days the most expensive part of making a professional recording is the musical instrument. The record labels are as obsolete as buggy whips.
Well, that's an example of a completely differnt thing wrong with current copyright law -- music recordings are, by law, "works for hire" and the label actually holds the copyright, not the artist. A guy I know refused a record contract for that reason, he's written a lot of good songs and wasn't about to let a record label "own" them.
I'm not arguing against copyright itself; copyright protects me, too. I think people who sell knockoff CDs and DVDs and books should be prosecuted. But you ask "if noncommercial infringement in the developed world were considered 'okay', would anyone pay for music or movies?" The answer is yes, they would, or Cory Doctorow would not be on the NYT best seller list. He publishes his books under a noncommercial CC license, gives his ebooks away for free on his website and encourages his readers to share them.
The only people who aren't helped by noncommercial infringement are talentless hacks. If you give shitty books and music away, nobody will buy it, but give quality away and it will sell. Would you buy a CD of an artist you've never heard before?
As to "artists should be paid for what they do", it depends on how good they are. If you invest time and money on a brick and mortar business selling tangible goods that nobody wants, you're not going to be paid for your work. Like art, it's a crapshoot.
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Sony is Sony. If they'd put rootkits on music CDs (it wasn't DRM, it was vandalism; I was hit by it. It stopped all CD burning and P2P software from working, and I had to reinstall the OS to get rid of it) what other evil would they stoop to?
The Playstation evil was from removing a feature from a product customers had bought and paid for -- OtherOS. It was like Ford coming to your house and removing the car stereo after the car was paid for.
Other companies have been hacked, but few have shown the total disregard for security Sony did -- the data weren't even encrypted. The other things you mention (like vendor lock in) were mere annoyances compared to having your computer wrecked, or having functionality removed from a device that YOU own, or having such bad security that they get cracked weekly.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Nice in theory, but after Sony has repeatedly done evil after evil to their customers they're still in business. I won't buy a Sony anything, but there are six billion people on the planet, and half of them have two digit IQs.
BTW, Cory Doctorow's Makers, about a fictional future about the transition, is a pretty good read. You can DL an ebook version from boingboing.
Script kiddies is probably right. I get the idea that nobody in that club is old enough to drink.
It's going to cost, one way or another. The cheapest I ever had cost a draft beer, the most expensive cost me a house, a car, and part of my pension. Granted, that last one lasted 27 years...
But porn? Paying for porn is like paying for kittens.
The data can't be copyrighted, but its presentation is. If you write a book about chemistry I can read it, learn from it, and write my own chemistry book using the facts from your book as long as I present those facts in my own words. The plagarists copied the entire thing whole cloth, even using the same IP address I used in one of the examples. Although my question here is about plagarism rather than copyright infringement (I had no problem with someone republishing it provided they gave me credit and a link to the original, which a few folks did), it was certainly copyright infringement. Were I a greedhead I could have probably hired a lawyer and gotten rich.
If I've legally downloaded all of Cory Doctorow's books for free onto my eReader, why would I then go and buy them?
Because it's the right thing to do, and most would.
Will this help or hurt? A little before the turn of the century I researched Quake and Quake II console commands, tested them all, and wrote short descriptions of how to use them and what they did. It was copied on dozens of other web sites, word for word, usually with no attribution and usually with someone else's name on it.
Meta tags were badly misused to spam search engines. And what if you're putting content on someone else's site and have no control over the meta tags?
To commune with other people who have found God. That's like resolving Einstein's Unification theory, then goiing to a retreat with other theoretical physicists.
To misquote Pogo, "common sense ain't so common no more". What seems to be "just common sense" (the sun revolves around the earth) is often wrong. Scientific studies (at least the ones not funded by the RIAA) have shown that piracy helps sales, not hurts. Music pirates spend more on music than non-pirates. The RIAA has a dog in this fight -- they have radio, their competetitors don't, and they've shown themselves to be immoral and unethecial liars, cheats, and thieves. Nobody with a lick of common sense would trust anything they say, or any study they fund.
A couple of years ago a book publisher commissioned a study to see how badly book piracy was hurting his sales. Common sense says that "nobody will pay for what they can get for free" despite the fact that million$ are made selling bottled water.
He was amazed and pleased when he found that there was a sales spike rather than a drop in sales when the pirate version hit the web. I'd offer a link, but I'm at work and half the internet is firewalled off.
As I said in another comment, if your stuff's not very good or isn't worth the price you're demanding and people know it, they're not going to buy it whether or not they can pirate it. If you can only sell five copies of your $100 program but a thousand people download it, that should tell you that your program isn't worth $100 and may not even be worth ten.
Yes, if your program is bug-ridden and barely useable, or your song doesn't strike a chord with people, or your music and software is overpriced, piracy will hurt you, but it isn't the fault of piracy, it's your fault for producing overpriced crap.
Of course you can own physical things. Yes, it's a societal concept, but homo sapiens is a social animal. Not being social is to be crazy. I grow and pick a bushel of tomatos and I own those tomatos. Since I own them, I can trade them for your strawberries if you want tomatos and I want strawberries. Money just makes barter easier.
I can't believe that anybody trusts MS; this is far from the first time something like this has happened. I've been managing databases (among other things) for a couple of decades. Used dBase II and got good at it. When datasets got too big for a PC, Nomad took over on the mainframe. Its language structure was similar enough to dBase that learning Nomad and porting apps to it was easy if you knew dBase.
FoxPro was a better dBase than dBase when MS bought it. FoxPro 6 was a pretty good program, but when they upgraded our PCs, it wouldn't run on them, so they upgraded to version 8.
Version 8 was a complete and utter mess. MS changed it so much that none of my old programs would run. A lot of functionality was replaced by "ease of use" which was hell on someone used to real programming.
I think they did it purposely in order to kill FoXpro and migrate everybody to the train wreck that is MS Access. I'm stuck with that now. Do they still sell FoxPro, I wonder?
Then they upgraded to a newer version of Access, and again none of my old apps would run on it without a lot of hocuc-pocus to get the old Access engine to run in sync with the new engine. Jesus, what a mess.
I would never again voluntarily use any MS development platform. I'm just glad I'm retiring in a couple of years.
I'm happy to use open source at home. Migrate to kubuntu from an ancient copy of Mandriva and the migration is easy and painless. Upgrade to a new version of any MS product and expect to need retraining.
You folks must be shaking in your boots about Star Wreck. I own a lot of tapes and DVDs, no way will I buy one I haven't seen. No way will I buy a CD from an artist I haven't heard, let alone heard of. I have dozens of Isaac Asimov books, and hundreds from other writers, but were it not for the free public library I'd never had bought a single one of them.
Nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. The only artists that are hurt by file sharing are talentless hacks. If your films are good, P2P will help sales, not hurt.
Well, computers used to be monsters taking up entire buildings, but these days most computers are cute and cuddly little things. As to soulless, Tracy Kidder begs to differ.
It's grammatically correct and should cause no brain farts at all. Of course, there are some ignorant people who will write "Doe's". If you read ignorant, ungrammatical, and misspelled messageboard postings all day I can see how it might become a problem for some. The cure is reading more books and less internet.
The clue your brain is missing is there's no period after "filesharing".
John Doe's does are all healthy, but Jane Doe's does were all eaten by wolves."
You're not very likely to be inside a church unless you've already found God.
It's their work, but not their property. When, say, I write a short science fiction story I don't own the story, I simply have a "limited time" (HAH!) monopoly. I no more own that story than I own the house I rent.
I agree completely. The insand copyright lengths harm the arts. However, I'd make it 20 years with MAYBE one fifteen year extension. DRM and long terms are completely contrary to what the constitution's intent is, to make more work for the public domain.
As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved because of obscurity. That's why he posts all his books on his website in ebook form for free. He credits his status as a NYT best seller to that. There's no need to give tax money to authors and artists, if the work is good people will buy it despite being able to get it for free.
"It's a poor atom blaster that won't point both ways." -- Salvor Hardin (Asimov, Foundation
Thank you for putting "own" in quotes! If I buy a book, I own the book and can do whatever I want with it. I can loan it out, sell it, do whatever I want with it except publish copies of it. Not so with any DRMed media. If it's copy protected, you own nothing.
I'd like to see copyright changed so that an attempt to copy-protect a work deprives it of copyright.
Bookstores could and should sell thumb drives with non-DRM content. If they did that, you could still buy them anonymously.
At one time the record labels were actually useful. Recording studios were incredibly expensive to build and maintain, and the pressing factories likewise. These days the most expensive part of making a professional recording is the musical instrument. The record labels are as obsolete as buggy whips.
Well, that's an example of a completely differnt thing wrong with current copyright law -- music recordings are, by law, "works for hire" and the label actually holds the copyright, not the artist. A guy I know refused a record contract for that reason, he's written a lot of good songs and wasn't about to let a record label "own" them.
I'm not arguing against copyright itself; copyright protects me, too. I think people who sell knockoff CDs and DVDs and books should be prosecuted. But you ask "if noncommercial infringement in the developed world were considered 'okay', would anyone pay for music or movies?" The answer is yes, they would, or Cory Doctorow would not be on the NYT best seller list. He publishes his books under a noncommercial CC license, gives his ebooks away for free on his website and encourages his readers to share them.
The only people who aren't helped by noncommercial infringement are talentless hacks. If you give shitty books and music away, nobody will buy it, but give quality away and it will sell. Would you buy a CD of an artist you've never heard before?
As to "artists should be paid for what they do", it depends on how good they are. If you invest time and money on a brick and mortar business selling tangible goods that nobody wants, you're not going to be paid for your work. Like art, it's a crapshoot.
If so then he's offtopic; the topic is copyright, not patents.