You still can't photocopy or scan an entire book to make a "backup" of it!
Sure you can. You just can't give it to anyone else if you still have your original copy (that'd be the same as me copying my CD and giving a friend that copy, while keeping the original in my car). Note, you CAN loan it.
Leastwise, that's how I understand fair use and I'll fight tooth and nail to retain at least that much liberty.
Here's what bothers me about this, and it touches on what the parent poster himself mentioned:
Then maybe we can have a discussion about the need to participate in mainstream culture.
Your list of non-RIAA member music producers is impressively long, and I'll definitely be keeping that list to find artists there I like.
My problem is this.
While I am not a large consumer of mainstream media, there are several mainstream bands I like - what you're essentially telling me is to stop liking them [more specifically, that I can like them I just can't listen to them, which at that point is nothing but wordplay]. While I understand the ideology behind that, I simply cannot accept its consequences - particularly because you'll be hard pressed to get that kind of approach into widespread adoption. Too many people love their Britney Spears and American Idol and will probably never understand WHY they shouldn't buy music from RIAA member corporations.
I'm not trying to be pessimist in that claim, only realist. People's habits and opinions are incredibly difficult to change. Not that I think it isn't worth it to try, but I think we need additional approaches besides "stop buying their music."
One other thing about your answers bothered me - not just because I don't like it, but in some ways it simply doesn't make sense (and that could simply be my naivete' talking, correct me if I miss something):
1. There's no such thing as a listening right, I don't know where you get that from.
If we accept that the purpose of copyright is as the Founders intended, to encourage creation and innovation by allowing creators to benefit from their work for a limited time, and that this little bit of manipulation is undertaken because of the very high social value of artistic and technological creation, then we have to ask HOW we exercise that social value - music isn't a social value if nobody listens to it.
While I won't go so far as to say anyone has a RIGHT to listen to music (because that obligates someone to create it), I will say that the social value our Founders believed in can only be exercised by society actually consuming the music that IS created. Music belongs to the culture it is created for - and as much as anyone in that culture should listen to it, so should I. In the general 'you', who are 'you' to say I have no right to?
Granted, I am speaking social theory, not law. I do wonder what your take on that thought is, though.
I'm not sure you know how right you are here. I have a friend that worked in a maximum security prison as a sniper. He learned about pressure points and whatnot and the chief requirement for learning is that you have to allow the instructor to do it to you so you understand how it feels. That way you understand the level of pain your inflicting on your opponent. If it's non-lethal then they should go right ahead!
I have heard that part of police training is getting zapped by a stun gun so that you know exactly what you're doing to the people you're arresting.
If anyone works in law enforcement and can confirm or deny, I'd be greatful.
What makes you think they gaven't tested these weapons on individuals already? Maybe they just want to test them in real-life situations, like demonstrations gone out of hand or riots?
Then they don't need to be 'testing' them on the general population, because they've already had the opportunity to test them. Unless they're afraid the weapons for some reason wouldn't work on 'those people.'
No, after reading the article they're not interested so much in TESTING as they are in USING - that is - police using them to dispel riots, or control prisoners, that sort of thing. The argument is that "if we're not willing to use them on our own population, how are they acceptable to use on the battlefield?" I think that's a fair enough argument.
My concern with non-lethal weaponry is that it encourages the use of force, and in an age when police are becoming
a) increasingly jittery even at small infractions, afraid someone is going to pull a sawed-off shotgun on them, and b) becoming more enamored with their ever-growing amount of authority and power,
encouraging the use of force is probably not a good idea.
This can be a real problem in some cases because a trained fighter can be accused of using unreasonable force simply for punching someone.
A friend of mine has been in the military and has had a little bit of specialized hand to hand combat training.
One night, coming out of a bar, he was mugged by a man carrying a knife. He did exactly what anyone confident enough in their ability to defend themselves would do, he disarmed the guy and punched him in the face, knocking him down and allowing my friend to get away.
His parole just ended a couple of months ago. The court said that because of his military training, he had used 'unreasonable force.' Uh, right. How any LESS forceful could he have been and been equally as effective?
You can argue slippery-slope all you want, but the fact remains that you ALWAYS have a choice
I don't think you understood what I was trying to say -
You can only make a choice you're aware you have - and very few people have that kind of information. You're assuming a far greater degree of participation in any decision making than most Americans will ever have (and in fact most people because this is a conceptual issue, not a social one).
Why aren't you paying attention to the humming of the air conditioner three doors down? Why aren't you wondering why its making that kind of noise, and choosing to close a door or go somewhere else?
Because you're not paying attention to it, and you have absolutely no reason to.
And that is the reason that 99.999% of people will simply buy what's available without giving things a second thought.
You can argue 'choice' all you want but free will is a consequence of information, it doesn't work by default in the absence of motivating factors.
Once you realize that you don't have the NEED for mass-produced drivel, and have the WILL to stay away from it
Honestly, you really think the vast majority of Americans will ever comprehend that? THAT is the weak link in your thinking - you're ascribing more intellectual involvement in the issue than any person will ever reasonably apply.
That kind of thinking fails for the same reasons that "If people would only realize that peace comes from everyone loving each other..." fails. It's pie-in-the-sky and does not in any way reflect the behaviors of true humans and only serves to make true solutions impossible (because so long as one is insisting that the perfect solution IS possible, one is also discarding potential stop-gap solutions which may very well be good stepping stones to the desired result).
Yes. Arrested for sitting their asses down in front of the White House and refusing to move. You don't get to do that just because you really, really, gosh darn it, really believe in your cause.
So let me get this straight. They sat down, on public land, to exercise their free speech, did not present a clear danger to the rest of the public, and it's ok to arrest them?
When you distort things for the purpose of rhetoric, you just demean your cause.
Basically, child porn is a picture or video of someone under 18, either having sex or not having sex, naked or clothed, and lavaciously exhibiting genitals, or appearing sexual in any way*.
Well holy crap. By that standard, pictures of young girls in swimsuits on Yahoo! advertising hotel specials should result in Yahoo! getting ransacked and their advertising staff arrested.
But then, the point really isn't to make a coherent standard; it's to make anyone prosecutable so that you can pick and choose your victims.
The truth is there is not guarantee to anonymity in the US constitution out side of voting.
Wrong.
"The congress shall pass no law restricting the freedom of speech."
1st Amendment to the US Constitution. Anonymity is a prerequisite for truly free speech, and any judge who rules otherwise should be shot. The founders themselves published under pseudonyms in order to protect their identities while still spreading the word about their new government, for two reasons:
1. Anonymous writers do not have to deal with ad hominem attacks, meaning nobody can try to kill the message by attacking the messenger, and
2. People saying unpopular things tend to become the focus of alot of violence very quickly, and anonymous speech protects their lives.
The founders recognized that ideas are more important than stability and should be kept safe from force. THAT is the value in anonymity and that was one of the intentions behind the 1st Amendment.
Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers (or even a good review of them) would know that, and that damn well includes ANY judge ruling on ANY topic that might even HINT at a Constitutional issue.
Ah the age old question.. one almost equally as important as "What can I do about it?" when one begins to realize that the current shape and direction of the world is not a sustainable nor even enviable one.
In times past, we avoided the difficulty of both questions by merely leaving, moving someplace else, discovering New Worlds to colonize.. but of course, that just avoids the issue. I've said it here before, and I say it again.. we really can't avoid the issue anymore.
Personally I am a proponent of Daniel Quinn's "New Tribal Revolution" which is not the best name for most people, but an accurate one when one understands what Quinn means by it - probably the most controversial word is 'Tribal' - but it is used in the sense that the most successful basic human social unit has always been the tribe - it's why they worked so well for our species for 200,000 years, and the reference has nothing to do with religious belief or physical prosperity.
The short answer to "Where do you GO?" is.. nowhere. You change the world very close to you, your neighborhood, or your town if it's very small. Some people are trying to buy up existing wild land and create small communities of like-minded people to try to build new ways of life (please keep in mind these are NOT communes as they are not ideologically based and not led by a single god-like leader; also, they are not Luddite in any way - most of them have all the modern amenities, just without the monstrous amount of waste that we tend to create), but these are as yet somewhat unstable, and very young communities and it remains to be seen whether they will be stable enough to really provide an example to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately changing things now will be much harder than they would have been 100 or 200 years ago. But then, nobody that long ago really could realize that a change was necessary, because there was still room for expansion.
If you're more interested and your question wasn't just hypothetical, I can provide some links.
This is one of the most insightful comments I've read on this entire discussion.
More and more it is becoming very attractive to simply 'walk away' from this culture and all its ills and simply build something new. And this gets modded troll?
Someone doesn't like the idea that anyone would walk away from paradise, because [sarcasm]nobody ever leaves paradise![/sarcasm].
But the average person is just as enabled to find the facts as the average slashdotter.
From my post:
Yes, it may be readily available to any who looks for it (like your average Slashdotter), however, we are a very small segment of the population. The VAST majority of people know absolutely nothing about DRM, the rights being taken from them, or the coming restrictions on their viewing experience and the control over their own computers being taken from them, but worse than that is that they don't even know that they should be looking.
You add something important to that point, though:
it might just be a symptom that DRM and such does not affect their lives in any way signifigant enough to motivate them to research, or even care.
So far, this is exactly the case. Most people aren't even aware they're being restricted, because so much of the DRM is so insidious (very few people are even aware regular DVDs contain any DRM).
The important part, though, is so far, because:
but I still can't manage to get a single lay person I know interested in IP, nor can I even cite a single example that effects THEM. It really doesn't, much. Yes, there are very esoteric arguements about the good of the public and such, but these don't wash since they aren't immediate, nor obvious.
And a huge part of the reason for that is the popularity of the iPod [as a specific example]. Yes, believe it or not, a product with very very high market penetration is prohibiting consumer knowledge - because very few people ever encounter the fact that they can't put their iTunes purchases on anything but an iPod. And this is true about alot of things - most people aren't aware DVDs are DRM'd because all commercially sold DVD players are sold by companies by that forked over the license key extortion money.
Culture has been doing pretty good, even under the infinitely prolonged copyright, it could be better, but that is an unprovable abstraction.
The worst part is, we're still in the baby steps of what DRM's long term effects will be. It's a relatively new invention. We really don't know yet what it will do to creativity in the long term, and we won't until some of those DRM'd copyrights start expiring and people begin to learn what was taken away from them so long ago.
But by then, it may well be too late. That's why those "esoteric arguments about the good of the public and such" matter so much - if nobody cares NOW, it may be too late to care LATER. Key words of course being may be, but I would rather fight to keep what we have than lose it because of an uncertainty.
So while of course we don't want a big bust and all the nasty knock-on effects, it is not in most of society's interests to perpetuate our current credit culture. Aiming for people to be as self-sufficient as possible in their finances, and realistic about borrowing for big, long-term loans like mortgages, is ultimately in everyone's best interests except those currently making a fortune out of the poor by keeping them poor through one-sided credit agreements.
I'll preface by saying, I agree with you entirely.
Part of the problem we're beginning to face, though, is a population in excess of available money - there is literally not enough dollars for everyone to live on (well.. there might be, but so many of them are tied up in so few individuals and corporations that there isn't enough to go around). So we end up living in what is almost essentially a slave culture - the few entities with the vast wealth loan it back out to the people who could never hope to have it and get richer by collecting interest. [and by the way, I'm only talking about the US here].
In an economy whose lifeblood is the continued spending of millions of consumers who don't have the money to do it, it would be disastrous no matter WHAT we do - credit or no credit, this system is unsustainable.
But I'll ask anyway: how long does (student loan) hardship forebearance typically last?
By the way, answer to your question:
A total of 36 months over the life of the loan. You can take it in as many pieces for as long a period as you want, up to a total of 36 months (for example, 2 months here, 8 months there, whenever necessary to a maximum of 36 months total).
This was how the representative at the Direct Loans services explained it to me, anyway.
For someone who spends years out of a job, that can become quite a problem.
Horton, 30, of Dorchester, didn't get the job after her credit report showed $18,000 in deferred student loans.
"My credit wasn't perfect, but I never thought my student loans would go against me," said Horton. "The company said I could reapply once I had two years of excellent credit, but there is no way I am going to be able to pay off those loans that quickly."
And that was just a deferrment. How the hell do you think a forebearance is going to look?
Your suggestion really isn't one.
There is only ONE direction this kind of "wheat from the chaff" tactic can go - keep the poor poorer and penalize anyone for actually investing in themselves.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the United States of America
I just wanted to say thank you for having this in your sig. I get very tired of people merely being considered another statistic - we're people dammit and I'd really appreciate being treated like one.
How would you block outgoing traffic on common household routers such as Linksys WRT(forgotthenumber) to this address?
My guess is, if it couldn't get an outgoing connection it would simpy refuse to play the movie (at best), or simply delete everything you bought (at worst) if it decided you had somehow violated the license.
*I* for one like that and really don't care if anyone knows that I'm watching re-runs of Star Trek in my skivvies at 3:08am
You'll care when they decide for no discernible reason that you've violated the license and delete everything you've fairly purchased.
Like, say, uninstalling the player. You paid for the damn movies, why should you not be able to watch them once you delete the player?
That's like saying that if you return your DVD player you should burn all your DVDs.
Re:Should Congressional Action Be Warranted?
on
UnBox Calls Home, A Lot
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There is no "right" to entertainment.
That statement really is not the issue. IF people/companies/whomever decides to provide entertainment, they do so under some very specific conditions, namely, the ones laid out in copyright law.
Copyright law was created NOT to benefit content creators (artists, musicians, etc.) but to benefit society as a whole - copyright is merely a ploy to encourage creation by allowing the creators to benefit from their work for a limited time and only applies to the right to reproduce and distribute the work - not the right to control how it is consumed.
That, at least, was the intention, an intention that creators lived happily with for almost 200 years, until recently when the mega-corporations decided that those restrictions weren't profitable enough and decided to buy some congressmen to change them.
That is not a defensible behavior.
If you don't like the way the companies are run, don't buy their products.
This statement assumes a perfect world in which all the participants are at least equally educated. You can only make a choice you're aware of - and the content companies have worked very, very hard to ensure that the common consumer is not educated.
As a test, go out on the street and ask how many people if they know what the DMCA is. Out of those who know WHAT it is, ask if they can state any single clear requirement it contains.
Then you'll know exactly how well educated Joe Consumer is, and exactly how level that playing field is.
People cannot refuse to buy what they have no reason to refuse to buy. That requires education and knowledge, and in a world where information is power, all the information is in the hands of very few people. Yes, it may be readily available to any who looks for it (like your average Slashdotter), however, we are a very small segment of the population. The VAST majority of people know absolutely nothing about DRM, the rights being taken from them, or the coming restrictions on their viewing experience and the control over their own computers being taken from them, but worse than that is that they don't even know that they should be looking. And you can rack that ignorance up to pure malice on the part of the entertainment industry. They have a vested interest in keeping people ignorant - it allows services like UnBox to even be considered viable.
That is not an environment in which you can fairly claim "If you don't like the way the companies are run, don't buy their products."
As someone else pointed out, the patent on their packaging is one of the 2 patents in question, and I happen to agree with that one.
I agree. The packaging was definitely an original work.
Again, just to make my personal opinion clear -- I don't think business practices should be patentable.
Me neither.
But to say the Netflix model was unoriginal or obvious is just wrong.
It may have been original (as in, the first ones doing it online instead of in a store) but to me it was perfectly obvious. In fact that's how I found Netflix to begin with - I merely assumed someone would be renting DVDs online, since they were doing everything else online, so I went looking for a way to do so.
Even still, it is irrelevant to me whether it was 'novel' or 'original' or 'obvious' - the consequence of a judge ruling in Netflix' favor would be disastrous. It would be an open invitation for every "first entrant" under the sun to have a defacto monopoly, you'd begin to see patent filings left and right by all sorts of past first entrants under "prior art" and I hesitate to even wonder where that would send us.
Uhm, maybe I'm missing the obvious, but all they did was take Blockbuster and throw it online. It's the same business model, i.e. rent movies, ergo the fact that you have the added setp of having to ship the product back and forth from the customer to your warehouse. Seems more like a natural progression of the business model than anything truly unique. They just eliminated the need to spend money on real-estate. *shrug*
Thank you. I said the same thing in an above post - online DVD rentals never seemed novel to me in any way, merely the extension of an existing business model to the internet (sort of like.. gosh.. buying books online, or buying stock online, or looking up research online).
There's nothing novel about it.
What was novel was the idea of renting something, but that idea is hundreds of years old by now.
Slashdot Mirror
Leastwise, that's how I understand fair use and I'll fight tooth and nail to retain at least that much liberty.
Your list of non-RIAA member music producers is impressively long, and I'll definitely be keeping that list to find artists there I like.
My problem is this.
While I am not a large consumer of mainstream media, there are several mainstream bands I like - what you're essentially telling me is to stop liking them [more specifically, that I can like them I just can't listen to them, which at that point is nothing but wordplay]. While I understand the ideology behind that, I simply cannot accept its consequences - particularly because you'll be hard pressed to get that kind of approach into widespread adoption. Too many people love their Britney Spears and American Idol and will probably never understand WHY they shouldn't buy music from RIAA member corporations.
I'm not trying to be pessimist in that claim, only realist. People's habits and opinions are incredibly difficult to change. Not that I think it isn't worth it to try, but I think we need additional approaches besides "stop buying their music."
One other thing about your answers bothered me - not just because I don't like it, but in some ways it simply doesn't make sense (and that could simply be my naivete' talking, correct me if I miss something):
If we accept that the purpose of copyright is as the Founders intended, to encourage creation and innovation by allowing creators to benefit from their work for a limited time, and that this little bit of manipulation is undertaken because of the very high social value of artistic and technological creation, then we have to ask HOW we exercise that social value - music isn't a social value if nobody listens to it.
While I won't go so far as to say anyone has a RIGHT to listen to music (because that obligates someone to create it), I will say that the social value our Founders believed in can only be exercised by society actually consuming the music that IS created. Music belongs to the culture it is created for - and as much as anyone in that culture should listen to it, so should I. In the general 'you', who are 'you' to say I have no right to?
Granted, I am speaking social theory, not law. I do wonder what your take on that thought is, though.
If anyone works in law enforcement and can confirm or deny, I'd be greatful.
No, after reading the article they're not interested so much in TESTING as they are in USING - that is - police using them to dispel riots, or control prisoners, that sort of thing. The argument is that "if we're not willing to use them on our own population, how are they acceptable to use on the battlefield?" I think that's a fair enough argument.
My concern with non-lethal weaponry is that it encourages the use of force, and in an age when police are becoming
a) increasingly jittery even at small infractions, afraid someone is going to pull a sawed-off shotgun on them, and
b) becoming more enamored with their ever-growing amount of authority and power,
encouraging the use of force is probably not a good idea.
One night, coming out of a bar, he was mugged by a man carrying a knife. He did exactly what anyone confident enough in their ability to defend themselves would do, he disarmed the guy and punched him in the face, knocking him down and allowing my friend to get away.
His parole just ended a couple of months ago. The court said that because of his military training, he had used 'unreasonable force.' Uh, right. How any LESS forceful could he have been and been equally as effective?
Crap like that is ridiculous.
You can only make a choice you're aware you have - and very few people have that kind of information. You're assuming a far greater degree of participation in any decision making than most Americans will ever have (and in fact most people because this is a conceptual issue, not a social one).
Why aren't you paying attention to the humming of the air conditioner three doors down? Why aren't you wondering why its making that kind of noise, and choosing to close a door or go somewhere else?
Because you're not paying attention to it, and you have absolutely no reason to.
And that is the reason that 99.999% of people will simply buy what's available without giving things a second thought.
You can argue 'choice' all you want but free will is a consequence of information, it doesn't work by default in the absence of motivating factors.
Honestly, you really think the vast majority of Americans will ever comprehend that? THAT is the weak link in your thinking - you're ascribing more intellectual involvement in the issue than any person will ever reasonably apply.
That kind of thinking fails for the same reasons that "If people would only realize that peace comes from everyone loving each other..." fails. It's pie-in-the-sky and does not in any way reflect the behaviors of true humans and only serves to make true solutions impossible (because so long as one is insisting that the perfect solution IS possible, one is also discarding potential stop-gap solutions which may very well be good stepping stones to the desired result).
After finishing my scalding hot shower, I promptly wiped the harddrive (in the secure sense) and reinstalled Windows.
I have since stopped using IE.
Quoth the poster.
But then, the point really isn't to make a coherent standard; it's to make anyone prosecutable so that you can pick and choose your victims.
"The congress shall pass no law restricting the freedom of speech."
1st Amendment to the US Constitution. Anonymity is a prerequisite for truly free speech, and any judge who rules otherwise should be shot. The founders themselves published under pseudonyms in order to protect their identities while still spreading the word about their new government, for two reasons:
1. Anonymous writers do not have to deal with ad hominem attacks, meaning nobody can try to kill the message by attacking the messenger, and
2. People saying unpopular things tend to become the focus of alot of violence very quickly, and anonymous speech protects their lives.
The founders recognized that ideas are more important than stability and should be kept safe from force. THAT is the value in anonymity and that was one of the intentions behind the 1st Amendment.
Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers (or even a good review of them) would know that, and that damn well includes ANY judge ruling on ANY topic that might even HINT at a Constitutional issue.
In times past, we avoided the difficulty of both questions by merely leaving, moving someplace else, discovering New Worlds to colonize.. but of course, that just avoids the issue. I've said it here before, and I say it again.. we really can't avoid the issue anymore.
Personally I am a proponent of Daniel Quinn's "New Tribal Revolution" which is not the best name for most people, but an accurate one when one understands what Quinn means by it - probably the most controversial word is 'Tribal' - but it is used in the sense that the most successful basic human social unit has always been the tribe - it's why they worked so well for our species for 200,000 years, and the reference has nothing to do with religious belief or physical prosperity.
The short answer to "Where do you GO?" is.. nowhere. You change the world very close to you, your neighborhood, or your town if it's very small. Some people are trying to buy up existing wild land and create small communities of like-minded people to try to build new ways of life (please keep in mind these are NOT communes as they are not ideologically based and not led by a single god-like leader; also, they are not Luddite in any way - most of them have all the modern amenities, just without the monstrous amount of waste that we tend to create), but these are as yet somewhat unstable, and very young communities and it remains to be seen whether they will be stable enough to really provide an example to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately changing things now will be much harder than they would have been 100 or 200 years ago. But then, nobody that long ago really could realize that a change was necessary, because there was still room for expansion.
If you're more interested and your question wasn't just hypothetical, I can provide some links.
Troll?
This is one of the most insightful comments I've read on this entire discussion.
More and more it is becoming very attractive to simply 'walk away' from this culture and all its ills and simply build something new. And this gets modded troll?
Someone doesn't like the idea that anyone would walk away from paradise, because [sarcasm]nobody ever leaves paradise![/sarcasm].
You add something important to that point, though:
So far, this is exactly the case. Most people aren't even aware they're being restricted, because so much of the DRM is so insidious (very few people are even aware regular DVDs contain any DRM).
The important part, though, is so far, because:
And a huge part of the reason for that is the popularity of the iPod [as a specific example]. Yes, believe it or not, a product with very very high market penetration is prohibiting consumer knowledge - because very few people ever encounter the fact that they can't put their iTunes purchases on anything but an iPod. And this is true about alot of things - most people aren't aware DVDs are DRM'd because all commercially sold DVD players are sold by companies by that forked over the license key extortion money.
The worst part is, we're still in the baby steps of what DRM's long term effects will be. It's a relatively new invention. We really don't know yet what it will do to creativity in the long term, and we won't until some of those DRM'd copyrights start expiring and people begin to learn what was taken away from them so long ago.
But by then, it may well be too late. That's why those "esoteric arguments about the good of the public and such" matter so much - if nobody cares NOW, it may be too late to care LATER. Key words of course being may be, but I would rather fight to keep what we have than lose it because of an uncertainty.
Troll?! I suppose I should have added ";-)" after it.
Doh.
Blah blah blah.
Part of the problem we're beginning to face, though, is a population in excess of available money - there is literally not enough dollars for everyone to live on (well.. there might be, but so many of them are tied up in so few individuals and corporations that there isn't enough to go around). So we end up living in what is almost essentially a slave culture - the few entities with the vast wealth loan it back out to the people who could never hope to have it and get richer by collecting interest. [and by the way, I'm only talking about the US here].
In an economy whose lifeblood is the continued spending of millions of consumers who don't have the money to do it, it would be disastrous no matter WHAT we do - credit or no credit, this system is unsustainable.
A total of 36 months over the life of the loan. You can take it in as many pieces for as long a period as you want, up to a total of 36 months (for example, 2 months here, 8 months there, whenever necessary to a maximum of 36 months total).
This was how the representative at the Direct Loans services explained it to me, anyway.
For someone who spends years out of a job, that can become quite a problem.
And that was just a deferrment. How the hell do you think a forebearance is going to look?
Your suggestion really isn't one.
There is only ONE direction this kind of "wheat from the chaff" tactic can go - keep the poor poorer and penalize anyone for actually investing in themselves.
Like, say, uninstalling the player. You paid for the damn movies, why should you not be able to watch them once you delete the player?
That's like saying that if you return your DVD player you should burn all your DVDs.
That statement really is not the issue. IF people/companies/whomever decides to provide entertainment, they do so under some very specific conditions, namely, the ones laid out in copyright law.
Copyright law was created NOT to benefit content creators (artists, musicians, etc.) but to benefit society as a whole - copyright is merely a ploy to encourage creation by allowing the creators to benefit from their work for a limited time and only applies to the right to reproduce and distribute the work - not the right to control how it is consumed.
That, at least, was the intention, an intention that creators lived happily with for almost 200 years, until recently when the mega-corporations decided that those restrictions weren't profitable enough and decided to buy some congressmen to change them.
That is not a defensible behavior.
This statement assumes a perfect world in which all the participants are at least equally educated. You can only make a choice you're aware of - and the content companies have worked very, very hard to ensure that the common consumer is not educated.
As a test, go out on the street and ask how many people if they know what the DMCA is. Out of those who know WHAT it is, ask if they can state any single clear requirement it contains.
Then you'll know exactly how well educated Joe Consumer is, and exactly how level that playing field is.
People cannot refuse to buy what they have no reason to refuse to buy. That requires education and knowledge, and in a world where information is power, all the information is in the hands of very few people. Yes, it may be readily available to any who looks for it (like your average Slashdotter), however, we are a very small segment of the population. The VAST majority of people know absolutely nothing about DRM, the rights being taken from them, or the coming restrictions on their viewing experience and the control over their own computers being taken from them, but worse than that is that they don't even know that they should be looking. And you can rack that ignorance up to pure malice on the part of the entertainment industry. They have a vested interest in keeping people ignorant - it allows services like UnBox to even be considered viable.
That is not an environment in which you can fairly claim "If you don't like the way the companies are run, don't buy their products."
Me neither.
It may have been original (as in, the first ones doing it online instead of in a store) but to me it was perfectly obvious. In fact that's how I found Netflix to begin with - I merely assumed someone would be renting DVDs online, since they were doing everything else online, so I went looking for a way to do so.
Even still, it is irrelevant to me whether it was 'novel' or 'original' or 'obvious' - the consequence of a judge ruling in Netflix' favor would be disastrous. It would be an open invitation for every "first entrant" under the sun to have a defacto monopoly, you'd begin to see patent filings left and right by all sorts of past first entrants under "prior art" and I hesitate to even wonder where that would send us.
I'm taking you to court.
Oh, wait...
There's nothing novel about it.
What was novel was the idea of renting something, but that idea is hundreds of years old by now.