Heh, exactly the same thing came immediately to my mind when I read the GP post. But didn't they raise some undersea plateau to the surface and claim that? It might be a loophole, since it is a natural land mass, albeit repositioned by unnatural means...
Well, it could be that they've just backed themselves into a corner with their ongoing pirate tirades and insistance on DRM and are looking for a way out without losing too much face. They could run the trial, say that piracy didn't increase substantially and claim it as a victory of their dilligence in pursuing said pirates. They get to drop DRM without it looking like their piracy crusade was ill placed - and we all benefit from the end of DRM - YAY!
The alternative, of course, is that this experiment is planned to fail. By not getting iTunes in on the deal it's hard to see how they'll make any real money, but if the aim is to not make money and use the comparison of how dismally DRM-less music sold vs. DRM-ed music in iTunes throughout the same period, then attribute the difference to the actions of piracy... well, the result is they finally get something which they can pretend is hard evidence (even though the results were actually so skewed by design, they were no better than the RSITDANTMUFG).
That's true - but then people are already producing nasty tag soup so it likely won't worsen the situation in places where it's already bad, while at the same time giving those who do care about accessibility, usability and semantics more tools to do things right.
Not only that, you also have to be instantly suspicious of the figure when they apparently lump in all identity theft with online fraud in a story about internet security. I don't have any hard and fast figures but I'll bet the majority of that £414m came from traditional identity theft - beefing up internet security is not going to stop thieves rooting through dustbins and stealing bank statements, etc. and there's a much lower threshold to entry into non-virtual identity theft.
If there's to be any jusitification for a massive redesign in the internet infrastructure then we could at least base it on accurate figures.
Well, the recording industry likely doesn't want the censorship since it will affect the "street" image of their "edgy" artists, which might turn some people off. Likewise, Cameron doesn't really gain anything from extended copyright periods. So there is an exchange here, it's just that both of these things screw over we, the public. So (big) business as usual...
What has this got to do with copyright infringement? If you "steal" state secrets they don't go after you for copyright infringement. You're more likely to face charges along the lines of treason.
Besides, the whole point of state secrets is that they are, well, secret. By copying them, you're taking away the secrecy, their key value, so it has even less to do with "copyright infringement", where it's not argued you are taking such a value away, just taking away a possible chance of making money from the copyrighted item.
Um, no. These little rocketplanes little in common with the challenges of real, orbital rocketry. Consequently, they contribute as much toward advancing the field as a company that builds bumper cars contributes to Formula One racing. "But hey -- they're making millions of bumper cars for amusement parks all across the country!" That doesn't change the fact that they're not really helping, because what they're making millions of is the wrong thing.
Well, I agree that it won't help with the technology, but it might help with the sociology. In the same way that millions of kids love bumper cars and they carry that on into their adult life by supporting motor racing, maybe this will get more people into space (excuse the pun), which could then result in more investment in actual space travel. Well, we can hope?
Maybe because the term "beta" has now been devalued and it's accepted practice that companies will release "beta" software, knowing that the uptake and usage will be almost as great as for the RCs or finished product.
More and more, the term beta is being applied as an excuse for releasing buggy software for mass market consumption. When we reach a position where a substantial section of the software market is in perpetual beta then the meaning of beta itself will change to accommodate this.
By the way, I'm not necessarily saying I agree with the changing usage of the term beta, nor am I claiming Apple would use the term in this manner - I have no reason to suspect that this is anything but a genuine beta release - just offering an explanation as to why people may now have higher expectations from beta software.
Part of the issue is that these companies have already been found guilty of price fixing, and they use their copyright to enable a stranglehold on the market which certainly has an effect on the free market system. These companies then use their government sanctioned monopolies to generate profits which are ploughed into forcing through ever more restrictive copyright laws which undermine the whole system of copyright.
Not everyone who is against the current system of copyright is just out to get free stuff - it's as unfair to say they are as it is to claim that copyright has no place in society (clearly it does, but there must be a balance, and at the moment the whole system is weighted unfairly in favour of the big corporations, even at the expense of the very artists who it's meant to protect).
Actually, the lack of capitals makes me more inclined to believe this than less. I've worked for several companies, from huge blue-chip affairs to small sole-proprietors, and in almost every case the one thing that unites the people at the top is poor grammar.
I don't know whether they think their time is too important to waste by hitting the shift or caps lock keys, whether they're just not that great with the technology, or whether it's some kind of power trip that they don't need to bother - it seems to be almost universal. Sure, the official press releases are usually immaculate. They're also usually typed up and checked by someone else. Internal stuff is almost always of the quality demonstrated by the GP.
As the other poster stated, the image is distorted so that standard OCR technology won't be able to make a very good guess with any certainty. Additionally I think a double-blind is used, where two words are displayed, one the system knows in advanced and one it doesn't. The OCR would have to get the first one exactly correct in order to distort the results of the second one (since if the first verification check is failed the suggested word is discarded completely and ha no skewing effects on results). If OCR was already capable of that, captchas would already be pretty useless, so it seems like a fairly secure method.
You're missing the point. This veiled threat isn't aimed at the open source world, since most of the open source world don't believe it's valid anyway. It's aimed at those people in big business responsible for buying in systems architecture. These people don't care if MS sue Linux developers, what they do care about is sinking several million dollars worth of company money into a venture which could be sunk by the threatened legal action.
It doesn't matter how much you love the OSS movement, this "threat" (they're saying they won't sue but that carries the implicit threat that they have reason to sue) would cause anyone to think twice before taking their company down the OSS route.
Unfortunately, even if MS's claims are groundless, this story is damaging to the open source movement since it implies (without any requirement of proof) that there *are* infringements but that MS is good enough to let them slide... for now. Publicising their claims is still helping to spread the FUD. The only way to end this is if either the open source movement calls MS's bluff and takes them to court, or if MS take it to court themselves and are thrown out.
Re:What about piracy psycology though?
on
Piracy Economics
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· Score: 2, Insightful
At the end of the day, surely it doesn't matter how many people download the sounds, since the guy's business model is selling the sounds to people who want to use them in their tracks. Copyright still protects him in that instance - since anyone who does use the sound in a track which they gain any kind of commercial success from will be liable for breech of his copyright unless they pay up.
Instead of trying to restrict access to the sounds he produces (which will always fail in this new digital age, anyone paying attention over the last ten years will see that) he could do far better offering the sounds free for non-commercial usage. That way people come to him to download them, not some dodgy torrent site, and it's easier for him to explain his pricing model for anyone who does want to use his work. By forcing the sharers to go underground, he makes it harder for people who find his works to figure out how to get in touch with him and pay for them.
Anyone who is serious about using his sounds in their own works will want to pay, anyone who isn't serious isn't really a lost sale, since they wouldn't have bought the sounds no matter how strongly enforced copyright was. Your friend needs to learn to use sharing to his advantage instead of fighting back the tide - being small makes him more adaptable, an advantage the RIAA dinosaurs don't have. Decrying file sharing won't make it stop, instead it's time to grasp new opportunities.
Where does this argument about copyrights not holding water, come from? Do you really think so many books, magazines, and movies would be created if there was no copyright? Can you offer proof Steven King would of written books if he couldn't get a copyright?
The "proof" is in the fact that people were producing works of art for most of human history and that remuneration was usually not the driving incentive in their doing so (since there are many examples are working artists who received little recompense during their lifetimes yet carried on producing expansive collections).
Before copyright was even dreamed of, people were producing works of art. The evidence is already there. Maybe the specific names you mentioned wouldn't have produced their works of art without copyright, but equally, maybe they would. If anything, maybe copyright has been detrimental to the various art forms - since it attracts people who are "only in it for the money", rather than people who genuinely love their chosen medium and want to share that passion with others. I can't prove that's the case, but your comment that you wouldn't even consider writing a book without the prospect of making money from it seems to support it. I can't help feeling if there were more people in it for the love and less in it for the money, we might all enjoy generally better standards in art.
While I agree that MS should be allowed to protect their profit margins, I have to say I disagree with your points 1 and 2.
I had the original XBOX and I modded mine because it made an awesome media centre, I could drop in a 250GB HDD and store all my media on the thing, or even hook it straight up to a network and stream the media from my PC. It turned the XBOX into what MS always wanted it to be, and did a much better job than MS have done so far with the 360.
Having said that, I also very much enjoyed playing (legit) games on my XBOX, and the one thing I lamented was not feeling I could use the Live service (okay, some chip makers claimed to allow safe Live access, I didn't think it was worth the risk). At the time, I didn't lament enough to give up my media centre solution - now I'm hooked on Live and I have to have separate online console gaming/media centre solutions vying for space in my living room. If I could chip the 360 to do what the XBOX did AND still get my online gaming fix, it would be perfect.
So, not just pirates that miss being able to chip their console and play online.
Oh no! Terabytes of extra space!! Oh, the humanity... oh, wait, it's 2007 and for a company the size of Amazon or Apple a few terabytes of extra storage could easily be absorbed in their monthly nominal running costs. The reason nobody has done it is that the vast majority of people are happy to buy MP3's. Sure, they might prefer higher quality in the same way as they'd prefer a Ferrari while they're still perfectly happy to drive a Ford.
At the end of the day it's not worth going that extra mile as a music store and offering better quality when all it will net you are higher bandwidth fees and one or two audiophiles. If people are happy with what you're selling them 99% of the time, it'd be pretty insane to restructure your business model to cater to the 1%.
I have to say that if anything, this move could lead to my actually wanting to buy an ipod.
If Apple open up the ipod and allow me to use it as a mass storage device with the ability to drag and drop non-DRM encumbered music from any OS and create my own playlists without installing their client software (and let's face it, if they dump DRM there's no reason for them not to), I'd buy a couple right now.
The ipod is still a design icon, it still looks great and has some nice features, it's only the DRM/iTMS that makes me not want one, and I'm sure many people feel the same way (a lot of people have been burned by even the relatively unoffensive DRM on the ipod).
That's not the point though - in terms of marketing it makes more sense for MS to compare to FF because it's the FF defectors they want to win back. In a technical sense it's better to (if they can't innovate) steal features from Opera, but they still want to "sell" IE as a competitor to FF, since Opera barely registers as a serious competitor at this point (despite arguably being the better browser).
Of course, what the owner doesn't see (because he's not there) is that the dog goes and waits at the door every five minutes until it gets bored and wanders off so it's highly likely that the dog is there when he gets in. Even if there's another observer there watching the dog, it can still be the case that the dog makes frequent visits to the door but the observer won't rationalise that the dog make fifity unsuccessful journeys, because it's much more intriguing and engaging to focus on the one successful journey.
It's still a fascinating example, but it's less to do with the mystical powers of foresight in dogs than the way the human mind works (that we find it so much easier to believe in the amazing than to rationalise the trivial).
At the moment, so many people are doing this badly, that simply doing it right is enough to gain an advantage which is so great it seems almost "unfair" - and most of the big names in SEO are now stringently advocating white-hat tactics (using good, semantic markup, providing a useful and usable service with good quality content, etc) - they know it's not worth cheating when the likely result is blacklisting.
I know there's a lot of hatred towards old-school SEO here (and rightly so), but the new breed seem to be getting it right (and even if they are still only doing it for money, if it results in more usable and useful websites for us, I think we can allow them that one), and there is still a big advantage in doing it right. Maybe this will change in the future as more people learn the difference between good SEO and bad/no SEO, but we should cross that bridge if/when we get to it (and from some of the examples I still see of many so-called "web professionals'" work, it's a long way off...)
The figures from TFA state that 31% of US internet users delete their cookies once per month. So if they only visit a particular site once per month, and everyone else visits the same site once per month with cookies, then the 150% figure possibly makes sense - but there are a lot of undeclared variables here. Where did they collect these stats? A tech savvy source, for instance, could skew the figures a lot. How often do visitors return to a website? If they only delete their cookies once per month but they visit every day then the inflation of figures would be much lower than 150%, not to mention that over time it would even out (a consistent influx of new users each month would balance out with a drop off of the same number of users if it was simply the same group of users deleting their cookies).
It seems to me there's too little mathematics and too much marketing in the original figures.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, exactly the same thing came immediately to my mind when I read the GP post. But didn't they raise some undersea plateau to the surface and claim that? It might be a loophole, since it is a natural land mass, albeit repositioned by unnatural means...
Well, it could be that they've just backed themselves into a corner with their ongoing pirate tirades and insistance on DRM and are looking for a way out without losing too much face. They could run the trial, say that piracy didn't increase substantially and claim it as a victory of their dilligence in pursuing said pirates. They get to drop DRM without it looking like their piracy crusade was ill placed - and we all benefit from the end of DRM - YAY!
The alternative, of course, is that this experiment is planned to fail. By not getting iTunes in on the deal it's hard to see how they'll make any real money, but if the aim is to not make money and use the comparison of how dismally DRM-less music sold vs. DRM-ed music in iTunes throughout the same period, then attribute the difference to the actions of piracy... well, the result is they finally get something which they can pretend is hard evidence (even though the results were actually so skewed by design, they were no better than the RSITDANTMUFG).
That's true - but then people are already producing nasty tag soup so it likely won't worsen the situation in places where it's already bad, while at the same time giving those who do care about accessibility, usability and semantics more tools to do things right.
Not only that, you also have to be instantly suspicious of the figure when they apparently lump in all identity theft with online fraud in a story about internet security. I don't have any hard and fast figures but I'll bet the majority of that £414m came from traditional identity theft - beefing up internet security is not going to stop thieves rooting through dustbins and stealing bank statements, etc. and there's a much lower threshold to entry into non-virtual identity theft.
If there's to be any jusitification for a massive redesign in the internet infrastructure then we could at least base it on accurate figures.
Well, the recording industry likely doesn't want the censorship since it will affect the "street" image of their "edgy" artists, which might turn some people off. Likewise, Cameron doesn't really gain anything from extended copyright periods. So there is an exchange here, it's just that both of these things screw over we, the public. So (big) business as usual...
What has this got to do with copyright infringement? If you "steal" state secrets they don't go after you for copyright infringement. You're more likely to face charges along the lines of treason.
Besides, the whole point of state secrets is that they are, well, secret. By copying them, you're taking away the secrecy, their key value, so it has even less to do with "copyright infringement", where it's not argued you are taking such a value away, just taking away a possible chance of making money from the copyrighted item.
Oh crap, now you tell me. This is why we should never, ever RTFA.
Heaven has glassy transparency effects. Hell just runs on Windows ME.
This is the space travel equivelent of porn.
Or at least, it will be once people start joining the 100km high club...
Um, no. These little rocketplanes little in common with the challenges of real, orbital rocketry. Consequently, they contribute as much toward advancing the field as a company that builds bumper cars contributes to Formula One racing. "But hey -- they're making millions of bumper cars for amusement parks all across the country!" That doesn't change the fact that they're not really helping, because what they're making millions of is the wrong thing.
Well, I agree that it won't help with the technology, but it might help with the sociology. In the same way that millions of kids love bumper cars and they carry that on into their adult life by supporting motor racing, maybe this will get more people into space (excuse the pun), which could then result in more investment in actual space travel. Well, we can hope?
Maybe because the term "beta" has now been devalued and it's accepted practice that companies will release "beta" software, knowing that the uptake and usage will be almost as great as for the RCs or finished product.
From Wikipedia -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_beta
More and more, the term beta is being applied as an excuse for releasing buggy software for mass market consumption. When we reach a position where a substantial section of the software market is in perpetual beta then the meaning of beta itself will change to accommodate this.
By the way, I'm not necessarily saying I agree with the changing usage of the term beta, nor am I claiming Apple would use the term in this manner - I have no reason to suspect that this is anything but a genuine beta release - just offering an explanation as to why people may now have higher expectations from beta software.
Part of the issue is that these companies have already been found guilty of price fixing, and they use their copyright to enable a stranglehold on the market which certainly has an effect on the free market system. These companies then use their government sanctioned monopolies to generate profits which are ploughed into forcing through ever more restrictive copyright laws which undermine the whole system of copyright.
Not everyone who is against the current system of copyright is just out to get free stuff - it's as unfair to say they are as it is to claim that copyright has no place in society (clearly it does, but there must be a balance, and at the moment the whole system is weighted unfairly in favour of the big corporations, even at the expense of the very artists who it's meant to protect).
Actually, the lack of capitals makes me more inclined to believe this than less. I've worked for several companies, from huge blue-chip affairs to small sole-proprietors, and in almost every case the one thing that unites the people at the top is poor grammar.
I don't know whether they think their time is too important to waste by hitting the shift or caps lock keys, whether they're just not that great with the technology, or whether it's some kind of power trip that they don't need to bother - it seems to be almost universal. Sure, the official press releases are usually immaculate. They're also usually typed up and checked by someone else. Internal stuff is almost always of the quality demonstrated by the GP.
As the other poster stated, the image is distorted so that standard OCR technology won't be able to make a very good guess with any certainty. Additionally I think a double-blind is used, where two words are displayed, one the system knows in advanced and one it doesn't. The OCR would have to get the first one exactly correct in order to distort the results of the second one (since if the first verification check is failed the suggested word is discarded completely and ha no skewing effects on results). If OCR was already capable of that, captchas would already be pretty useless, so it seems like a fairly secure method.
You're missing the point. This veiled threat isn't aimed at the open source world, since most of the open source world don't believe it's valid anyway. It's aimed at those people in big business responsible for buying in systems architecture. These people don't care if MS sue Linux developers, what they do care about is sinking several million dollars worth of company money into a venture which could be sunk by the threatened legal action.
It doesn't matter how much you love the OSS movement, this "threat" (they're saying they won't sue but that carries the implicit threat that they have reason to sue) would cause anyone to think twice before taking their company down the OSS route.
Unfortunately, even if MS's claims are groundless, this story is damaging to the open source movement since it implies (without any requirement of proof) that there *are* infringements but that MS is good enough to let them slide... for now. Publicising their claims is still helping to spread the FUD. The only way to end this is if either the open source movement calls MS's bluff and takes them to court, or if MS take it to court themselves and are thrown out.
At the end of the day, surely it doesn't matter how many people download the sounds, since the guy's business model is selling the sounds to people who want to use them in their tracks. Copyright still protects him in that instance - since anyone who does use the sound in a track which they gain any kind of commercial success from will be liable for breech of his copyright unless they pay up.
Instead of trying to restrict access to the sounds he produces (which will always fail in this new digital age, anyone paying attention over the last ten years will see that) he could do far better offering the sounds free for non-commercial usage. That way people come to him to download them, not some dodgy torrent site, and it's easier for him to explain his pricing model for anyone who does want to use his work. By forcing the sharers to go underground, he makes it harder for people who find his works to figure out how to get in touch with him and pay for them.
Anyone who is serious about using his sounds in their own works will want to pay, anyone who isn't serious isn't really a lost sale, since they wouldn't have bought the sounds no matter how strongly enforced copyright was. Your friend needs to learn to use sharing to his advantage instead of fighting back the tide - being small makes him more adaptable, an advantage the RIAA dinosaurs don't have. Decrying file sharing won't make it stop, instead it's time to grasp new opportunities.
Where does this argument about copyrights not holding water, come from? Do you really think so many books, magazines, and movies would be created if there was no copyright? Can you offer proof Steven King would of written books if he couldn't get a copyright?
The "proof" is in the fact that people were producing works of art for most of human history and that remuneration was usually not the driving incentive in their doing so (since there are many examples are working artists who received little recompense during their lifetimes yet carried on producing expansive collections).
Before copyright was even dreamed of, people were producing works of art. The evidence is already there. Maybe the specific names you mentioned wouldn't have produced their works of art without copyright, but equally, maybe they would. If anything, maybe copyright has been detrimental to the various art forms - since it attracts people who are "only in it for the money", rather than people who genuinely love their chosen medium and want to share that passion with others. I can't prove that's the case, but your comment that you wouldn't even consider writing a book without the prospect of making money from it seems to support it. I can't help feeling if there were more people in it for the love and less in it for the money, we might all enjoy generally better standards in art.
While I agree that MS should be allowed to protect their profit margins, I have to say I disagree with your points 1 and 2.
I had the original XBOX and I modded mine because it made an awesome media centre, I could drop in a 250GB HDD and store all my media on the thing, or even hook it straight up to a network and stream the media from my PC. It turned the XBOX into what MS always wanted it to be, and did a much better job than MS have done so far with the 360.
Having said that, I also very much enjoyed playing (legit) games on my XBOX, and the one thing I lamented was not feeling I could use the Live service (okay, some chip makers claimed to allow safe Live access, I didn't think it was worth the risk). At the time, I didn't lament enough to give up my media centre solution - now I'm hooked on Live and I have to have separate online console gaming/media centre solutions vying for space in my living room. If I could chip the 360 to do what the XBOX did AND still get my online gaming fix, it would be perfect.
So, not just pirates that miss being able to chip their console and play online.
Oh no! Terabytes of extra space!! Oh, the humanity... oh, wait, it's 2007 and for a company the size of Amazon or Apple a few terabytes of extra storage could easily be absorbed in their monthly nominal running costs. The reason nobody has done it is that the vast majority of people are happy to buy MP3's. Sure, they might prefer higher quality in the same way as they'd prefer a Ferrari while they're still perfectly happy to drive a Ford. At the end of the day it's not worth going that extra mile as a music store and offering better quality when all it will net you are higher bandwidth fees and one or two audiophiles. If people are happy with what you're selling them 99% of the time, it'd be pretty insane to restructure your business model to cater to the 1%.
I have to say that if anything, this move could lead to my actually wanting to buy an ipod.
If Apple open up the ipod and allow me to use it as a mass storage device with the ability to drag and drop non-DRM encumbered music from any OS and create my own playlists without installing their client software (and let's face it, if they dump DRM there's no reason for them not to), I'd buy a couple right now.
The ipod is still a design icon, it still looks great and has some nice features, it's only the DRM/iTMS that makes me not want one, and I'm sure many people feel the same way (a lot of people have been burned by even the relatively unoffensive DRM on the ipod).
That's not the point though - in terms of marketing it makes more sense for MS to compare to FF because it's the FF defectors they want to win back. In a technical sense it's better to (if they can't innovate) steal features from Opera, but they still want to "sell" IE as a competitor to FF, since Opera barely registers as a serious competitor at this point (despite arguably being the better browser).
Of course, what the owner doesn't see (because he's not there) is that the dog goes and waits at the door every five minutes until it gets bored and wanders off so it's highly likely that the dog is there when he gets in. Even if there's another observer there watching the dog, it can still be the case that the dog makes frequent visits to the door but the observer won't rationalise that the dog make fifity unsuccessful journeys, because it's much more intriguing and engaging to focus on the one successful journey.
It's still a fascinating example, but it's less to do with the mystical powers of foresight in dogs than the way the human mind works (that we find it so much easier to believe in the amazing than to rationalise the trivial).
At the moment, so many people are doing this badly, that simply doing it right is enough to gain an advantage which is so great it seems almost "unfair" - and most of the big names in SEO are now stringently advocating white-hat tactics (using good, semantic markup, providing a useful and usable service with good quality content, etc) - they know it's not worth cheating when the likely result is blacklisting.
I know there's a lot of hatred towards old-school SEO here (and rightly so), but the new breed seem to be getting it right (and even if they are still only doing it for money, if it results in more usable and useful websites for us, I think we can allow them that one), and there is still a big advantage in doing it right. Maybe this will change in the future as more people learn the difference between good SEO and bad/no SEO, but we should cross that bridge if/when we get to it (and from some of the examples I still see of many so-called "web professionals'" work, it's a long way off...)
The figures from TFA state that 31% of US internet users delete their cookies once per month. So if they only visit a particular site once per month, and everyone else visits the same site once per month with cookies, then the 150% figure possibly makes sense - but there are a lot of undeclared variables here. Where did they collect these stats? A tech savvy source, for instance, could skew the figures a lot. How often do visitors return to a website? If they only delete their cookies once per month but they visit every day then the inflation of figures would be much lower than 150%, not to mention that over time it would even out (a consistent influx of new users each month would balance out with a drop off of the same number of users if it was simply the same group of users deleting their cookies).
It seems to me there's too little mathematics and too much marketing in the original figures.