Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 26 Apr 2011 @ 12:02pm
The moral of the story?
they sent a DMCA takedown, despite not being the legitimate copyright holder (a violation of the DMCA process).
And that's an obvious consequence of allowing a pseudo-legal process that bypasses courts and put it in the hands of the people with most to gain from it.
Expediency of "enforcement" = "we've got more money than you and we say so" i.e. protection racket as legal process.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 26 Apr 2011 @ 11:26am
Re: Wow
How about Magic Decoder Rings? If there's a magic decoder ring that enables me to translate what that had to do with the article I might be interested in buying one.....
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 26 Apr 2011 @ 2:52am
Re:
Buy this because you want it and you can't get it for free.
Well done paraphrasing:
Of course, this also leaves out one of the key points that we've made: "buy this because there's no other way to get it,"
I suspect you mean it to apply to different things than Mike did because you seem to operate under the illusion that there will one day be a way to physically stop people getting digital goods for free, but either way those two phrases are very similar meanings.
duh.
I see you're still ignoring the obvious, Masnick.
I see you're still ignoring the bits of an article that don't fit your view of reality.
Your business model relies on a static landscape of piracy. Seriously, how fucking stupid is that?
I've yet to see Mike push any 1 specific business model so I'm not sure what "his" business model is, but the ones I've seen him talk about seem to revolve around there being zero or near-zero incremental cost to digital goods and how to recognise and leverage that to make more money. That's a rather different thing than "piracy" being part of the model. Zero incremental cost is and will be true however much piracy exists and the only way "piracy" reduces (not goes away, it's always been there) is by acknowledging that.
It does explain why your life is devoted to bitching about piracy enforcement.
But complaining about dumbness in others is so much fun. It's like responding to really obviously trolling comments when you know you shouldn't - you just can't resist.
Hope this career of selling willfully blind snake oil works out for you.
You seem to go through a few bottles a day of the competing brand so there's clearly a market. If that starts to fail I suppose he can always apply to the government to prop up his failing business model with a law or 2.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 26 Apr 2011 @ 2:19am
Buy this or you'll get in trouble
The Al Capone solution "You get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word". Shame they usually forget the "kind word" part. More accurately written as, "buy this because there's an almost vanishingly small chance you'll get in trouble and look on the bright side with those odds you might win the lottery too to make up for it"
Buy this because it's the right thing to do
Yeah? By who's definition?
Buy this because you're supporting something worthwhile
Meh. Also see above
Buy this because paying money will deliver high quality
Yep, sounds good to me.
Buy this because it is convenient
Yep, sounds good to me.
Buy this because your devices won't play the unauthorized version
....unless you use one of the 40 or 50 work-arounds that exist for whatever the tenuous technical block is, most of which will be readily available and many of which will make the product simpler to use.
Buy this and you'll get more features than you would with the unauthorized version
Meh. Too often features you didn't want in the first place that are clearly stuck in there to justify jacking up the price sky high.
but when they're happy to buy, because it's a transaction that is reasonable and makes both parties better off.
That'll do it every time - the feeling that you ended up with something that was actually worth whatever money you paid for it. Also makes for more repeat buyers I'd imagine since in my case if I end up having to buy something that I consider a rip-off either before or after purchase I'll go out of my way not to give my money to the same place next time.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 21 Apr 2011 @ 11:55am
Re: Albums per person
We're going to ignore that sales plateaued for for six years after a spike and just draw a line going up forever. That graph should be the most meaningful, but the fact that they push crap like that tells me they have nothing.
Yeah I was hoping some statistician could point out the correlation of their line to the preceding data because to my mere motal eyes it looks like the line is entirely arbitary and unrelated..... not to mention possibly done by someones 7-year old child with a ruler.
It's measured in albums per person, and they are asserting that individuals would have continued to purchase more and more albums over time.
... and since it's in ALBUMS per person, perhaps some helpful label executive could carefully explain why most people now buying singles rather than albums has absolutely nothing to do with the reality line too.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 21 Apr 2011 @ 9:03am
Another unintended consequence....
.... of declaring wireless packet capture to be illegal:
Even assuming you put in a provision for "accepted but thrown away" packets (it's a broadcast medium - your wireless card picks up EVERYTHING and *then* decides what was aimed at it) as someone else pointed out, you'd pretty much stuff a large chunk of wireless security on the corporate side.
Most decent wireless solutions do IPS/IDS and analyse detected "rogue" access points and signals for intrusion attempts. Declare interception illegal and you've just reduced the security of every major corporate wireless network and rendered them unsafe to use. Last major system I saw in a business in a residential area was tracking and monitoring (and whitelisting/blacklisting as necessary) over 100 extraneous access points and often the clients of them. That's a whole lot of counts of a criminal charge and/or a lot of lawsuits just for keeping your data safe.....
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 21 Apr 2011 @ 3:58am
Re:
Yes, potential inconsistencies are regularly raised, but upon analysis they do not withstand scrutiny.
As in "the people formulating the agreement dismiss the argument"?
If opponents of ACTA are convinced that such inconsistencies are present, then in my view it behooves them to specifically spell out what they are and why.
I was under the impression that the negotiations and exact provisions were supposedly secret. Am I wrong? A bit hard to "specifically spell out" objections to something non-specific don't you think?
Frankly, I hope the legislation meets an inglorious death, and if it does not, then I look forward to a date in the future when the US returns the "favor".
So you think the US should be in the position of a 4-year-old in a playground - "Well HE started it!" - or an old testament "eye-for-an-eye" do you? Mature.....
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 20 Apr 2011 @ 1:29am
Re: Google presumption
Supposing someone was opening their wallet in the middle of the shop pulling out handfuls of notes and throwing them high in the air would you think they were an idiot or arrest all the people picking up the cash? Does it help any if they are shouting "No! No! Leave it alone! It's all MY money!" while they do it?
And yes, that's a crap analogy, but then so was yours.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 19 Apr 2011 @ 5:22pm
I feel I must....
... call here upon my patent; 8,999,666 "A method of showing contempt for silly IP law by exposing intimate anatomy parts in a lewdly insulting but not quite illegal manner." :-)
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 19 Apr 2011 @ 8:55am
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Actually, I am OK with wifi snooping or war driving. I encrypt my wifi with WPA and a 20+ character alpha-numeric password that will take a few years to crack via brute force.
Not so much actually - especially if you're using the standard "Pre-Shared Key" implementation for home use. Think minutes, hours at best - last time I looked at it and that was a while ago, even WPA-2 wasn't that hard to break with the right tool.
All that's kinda beside the point though and that's where the physical analogy breaks down - encrypt at all even with WEP and you are saying "go away it's private". Indeed there are already laws about breaking computer encryption for "copy protection" so dumb though they may be I don't see any reason that same standard shouldn't apply to WiFi. On the other hand unencrypted as you say you are literally shouting in the street and shouldn't have any expectation of privacy.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 19 Apr 2011 @ 8:40am
Re: Re:
Perhaps a cordless phone eavesdropping law might better apply to someone who has a wifi router without any encryption capabilities and to someone who can't reasonably afford a wifi-router with such capabilities.
I don't know about the US, but I don't believe *any* UK WiFi kit ever (and certainly not since it became "consumer" instead of "rich business toy",) does not have at least WEP capability. OK as encryption goes it's about the equivalent of a "No Trespassing" sign on a fenceless property, but it *is* at least a go-away sign and whispering instead of the "shouted conversation in the street" equivalence of unencrypted WiFi.
IMO If you don't put *any* protection of WiFi you can't claim any privacy over people listening to you shout, if you put up the "go-away sign", that's where the law should kick in no matter how easy or hard it is to listen after that.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 19 Apr 2011 @ 6:25am
Free in next week's issue....
...... magic decoder ring guaranteed to untangle any alleged infringement puzzle. Certified more accurate than legal proceedings.....
Laws are supposed to be clearly written so you can easily tell if you're breaking one or not and courts are supposed to be there to determine the area of doubt in the small centre ground. When no-one, including the lawyers, can consistently point any given use and say "that's definitely OK" or "That's definitely bad" you just know it's bad law.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 19 Apr 2011 @ 5:10am
Gosh I love these
I'd be interested to see if there's anything more to this, but from what's there:
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab computer tablet also slavishly copies a combination of several elements of the Apple Product Configuration Trade Dress,” Apple says in its suit, noting that Samsung’s tablet, like Apple’s, uses a similar rectangular design with rounded corners, similar black border and array of icons.
So... not at all like the predates-the-iPhone HTC in my pocket which has a rectangular design touch screen with rounded corners a black border and a grid-array of square-ish application icons on the OS.... oh, wait a minute....
And, to be honest, this lawsuit actually makes me more interested in checking out those Samsung devices, because it signals to me that it may actually be getting "close" to the design quality associated with Apple's devices...
Yep that was the first thing that occurred to me too. "Pay no attention to that infringing man behind the curtain....."
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 8 Apr 2011 @ 5:28am
I did notice...
.. that neither the film industry, nor the music industry - i.e. the bits that actually manage (i won't say produce) the content - make the top 10 despite all the loud bitching they do about how they are being killed. This despite the lower level parts of the distribution method of each being on the list. Funny that really.....
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 7 Apr 2011 @ 5:03pm
Re: Re: Re: Re:
You are aware that the DMCA has been abused extensively against non-infringing cases, right?
How shocking to find that when your standard is "We (who have a specific vested interesting in saying you are ingringing) say you are infringing so you are.", then you get a lot more "accidental" false positives than if "guilt" is determined by someone at least nominally independant like, say, a court. Wierd huh?
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 7 Apr 2011 @ 8:46am
Transcript error
I am not convinced that exposing contested text, potentially including ambit claims, would assist informed public debate on the issues.
He mumbled you see... they missed out the "un" in the transcript. The thing they want to assist is UNinformed debate so that the public debates about and swallows the nice-sounding sound-bites they release about how it's going to protect them from raporists and bad things. Releasing the text does indeed not assist in uninformed debate.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 7 Apr 2011 @ 3:14am
And that is likely why they scream "theft" so much
(1) infringement is different than theft and (2) infringement online has a very different impact than "theft" of the same content in the offline world
I know there's quotes around the "theft" but even that's conflating a little there, which is why the term copyright theft annoys me so much.
Online or offline copying is copying and theft is theft.
If I copy a bunch of content online I've infringed copyright, possibly committed the crime of illegal computer entry depending where I got it from but basically not harmed or deprived anyone of anything. If I copy the content then deleted it off their server afterwards then perhaps it could be said to be theft as I have removed it from their possession.
In the "real world" if were I pick the lock on someone's house and rip their CD collection to my laptop, I have committed the crime of breaking an entering and also committed copyright infringement. I have not, however, stolen anything. If I take their CD collection with me I have.
In both the "real world" and the "online world" theft is different from copying. Using the word "theft" at all confuses the real issue and the real "crime" (or otherwise). That, I suspect, is why it's deliberately used that way - to obscure that infringement primarily affects "imaginary" money you didn't have (and may or may not ever have got anyway), whereas theft has a direct tangible financial cost.
It's an easy trap to fall into because it's so easy to say and everyone *thinks* they knows what it means (I do it myself too) but it's just NOT theft.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 6 Apr 2011 @ 12:02pm
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Well done for totally ignoring the question in favour of a sematic attack.
For reference:
Nope not smoking anything, simply following the logic of the prosecuting lawyer as I explained above.
If you actually bothered to read my comment before wading in to try and trash it you'd have read that I was simply excluding "He was the only one they could get" as a valid justification for such a grossly out of proportion to the damage award.
I also excluded "Because it's the law" as a justification as it's a fact not a reason. Not so long ago it was fact in england that killing a dear was cause for summary execution according to law. The fact of it being a law doesn't make it a just one. I asked what your reason for thinking it justified was.
The defendant's idiocy or not is also not a justification for a law. If it were I suspect you would not be able to afford the computer to (not) reply.
To recap:
Other than there I was referring to the plaintiffs' own lawyer's argument in response to your previous post I wasn't referring to this case. I am also not necessarily saying that it is not a crime nor that there should not be a reasonable punishment if it is.
I was asking what you believe to be the justification for bankrupting someone for life when their individual actions had little or no effect of actual damage on the plaintiff.
Are you interested in answering the question or woudl you like to rant tangentially some more?
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 6 Apr 2011 @ 11:14am
Re: Re: Re:
am having great difficulty identifying the constitutional rights associated with persons who operate with relative impunity outside the borders of US jurisdiction.
No they instead have rights under their own laws that determine what is and isn't legal for themselves as soverign nations. I know it may seem strange to a number of Americans (including its government it often seems) but the whole world is no more subject to American law than protected by its constitution.
"Because we say so and we're AMERICAN!" is not a terribly compelling argument to implement an international agreement that tramples rough-shod over what other countries laws in favour of measures that primarily benefit American protectionism. That's why you see COICA being negotiated around the world in a series of closed-room shady deals often accompanied by posturing, bullying and bribery.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 6 Apr 2011 @ 6:33am
Re: Hope they have REALLY good IP lawyers
Those guys probably pay their IP lawyers more than the entire net worth of H-W Technology.
There are 2 things I find worrying about that post;
Firstly that it's probably true..
Secondly that the statement actually has bearing on the outcome. Aren't "right" (as in correct) and "justice" (as in fairness) in the legal system supposed to be independent of the amount of money spent on them? (Oooh I LIKE the colour of my new glasses - all rosy.. everything looks so pink and fluffy now)
On the post: Dropbox Tries To Kill Off Open Source Project With DMCA Takedown
The moral of the story?
And that's an obvious consequence of allowing a pseudo-legal process that bypasses courts and put it in the hands of the people with most to gain from it.
Expediency of "enforcement" = "we've got more money than you and we say so" i.e. protection racket as legal process.
On the post: Deconstructing Reasons To Buy
Re: Wow
On the post: Deconstructing Reasons To Buy
Re:
Well done paraphrasing:
I suspect you mean it to apply to different things than Mike did because you seem to operate under the illusion that there will one day be a way to physically stop people getting digital goods for free, but either way those two phrases are very similar meanings.
I see you're still ignoring the bits of an article that don't fit your view of reality.
I've yet to see Mike push any 1 specific business model so I'm not sure what "his" business model is, but the ones I've seen him talk about seem to revolve around there being zero or near-zero incremental cost to digital goods and how to recognise and leverage that to make more money. That's a rather different thing than "piracy" being part of the model. Zero incremental cost is and will be true however much piracy exists and the only way "piracy" reduces (not goes away, it's always been there) is by acknowledging that.
But complaining about dumbness in others is so much fun. It's like responding to really obviously trolling comments when you know you shouldn't - you just can't resist.
You seem to go through a few bottles a day of the competing brand so there's clearly a market. If that starts to fail I suppose he can always apply to the government to prop up his failing business model with a law or 2.
On the post: Deconstructing Reasons To Buy
Yeah? By who's definition?
Meh. Also see above
Yep, sounds good to me.
Yep, sounds good to me.
....unless you use one of the 40 or 50 work-arounds that exist for whatever the tenuous technical block is, most of which will be readily available and many of which will make the product simpler to use.
Meh. Too often features you didn't want in the first place that are clearly stuck in there to justify jacking up the price sky high.
That'll do it every time - the feeling that you ended up with something that was actually worth whatever money you paid for it. Also makes for more repeat buyers I'd imagine since in my case if I end up having to buy something that I consider a rip-off either before or after purchase I'll go out of my way not to give my money to the same place next time.
On the post: New RIAA Evidence Comes To Light: Napster Killed Kerosene Too!
Re: Albums per person
Yeah I was hoping some statistician could point out the correlation of their line to the preceding data because to my mere motal eyes it looks like the line is entirely arbitary and unrelated..... not to mention possibly done by someones 7-year old child with a ruler.
... and since it's in ALBUMS per person, perhaps some helpful label executive could carefully explain why most people now buying singles rather than albums has absolutely nothing to do with the reality line too.
On the post: Judge In Google WiFiSpy Case Trying To Determine If Packet Sniffing Open Networks Is An Illegal Wiretap
Another unintended consequence....
Even assuming you put in a provision for "accepted but thrown away" packets (it's a broadcast medium - your wireless card picks up EVERYTHING and *then* decides what was aimed at it) as someone else pointed out, you'd pretty much stuff a large chunk of wireless security on the corporate side.
Most decent wireless solutions do IPS/IDS and analyse detected "rogue" access points and signals for intrusion attempts. Declare interception illegal and you've just reduced the security of every major corporate wireless network and rendered them unsafe to use. Last major system I saw in a business in a residential area was tracking and monitoring (and whitelisting/blacklisting as necessary) over 100 extraneous access points and often the clients of them. That's a whole lot of counts of a criminal charge and/or a lot of lawsuits just for keeping your data safe.....
On the post: USTR Says Congress Won't Be Restricted By ACTA
Re:
As in "the people formulating the agreement dismiss the argument"?
I was under the impression that the negotiations and exact provisions were supposedly secret. Am I wrong? A bit hard to "specifically spell out" objections to something non-specific don't you think?
So you think the US should be in the position of a 4-year-old in a playground - "Well HE started it!" - or an old testament "eye-for-an-eye" do you? Mature.....
On the post: Judge In Google WiFiSpy Case Trying To Determine If Packet Sniffing Open Networks Is An Illegal Wiretap
Re: Google presumption
And yes, that's a crap analogy, but then so was yours.
On the post: Details Of Apple's Lawsuit Against Samsung Revealed; And It's Even More Ridiculous
I feel I must....
On the post: Judge In Google WiFiSpy Case Trying To Determine If Packet Sniffing Open Networks Is An Illegal Wiretap
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Not so much actually - especially if you're using the standard "Pre-Shared Key" implementation for home use. Think minutes, hours at best - last time I looked at it and that was a while ago, even WPA-2 wasn't that hard to break with the right tool.
All that's kinda beside the point though and that's where the physical analogy breaks down - encrypt at all even with WEP and you are saying "go away it's private". Indeed there are already laws about breaking computer encryption for "copy protection" so dumb though they may be I don't see any reason that same standard shouldn't apply to WiFi. On the other hand unencrypted as you say you are literally shouting in the street and shouldn't have any expectation of privacy.
On the post: Judge In Google WiFiSpy Case Trying To Determine If Packet Sniffing Open Networks Is An Illegal Wiretap
Re: Re:
I don't know about the US, but I don't believe *any* UK WiFi kit ever (and certainly not since it became "consumer" instead of "rich business toy",) does not have at least WEP capability. OK as encryption goes it's about the equivalent of a "No Trespassing" sign on a fenceless property, but it *is* at least a go-away sign and whispering instead of the "shouted conversation in the street" equivalence of unencrypted WiFi.
IMO If you don't put *any* protection of WiFi you can't claim any privacy over people listening to you shout, if you put up the "go-away sign", that's where the law should kick in no matter how easy or hard it is to listen after that.
On the post: Not Just YouTube's Copyright School Video That Has Problems... The Quizzes Are Misleading Too
Free in next week's issue....
Laws are supposed to be clearly written so you can easily tell if you're breaking one or not and courts are supposed to be there to determine the area of doubt in the small centre ground. When no-one, including the lawyers, can consistently point any given use and say "that's definitely OK" or "That's definitely bad" you just know it's bad law.
On the post: Apple Sues Samsung Because Galaxy Tab Looks Too Much Like An iPad
Gosh I love these
So... not at all like the predates-the-iPhone HTC in my pocket which has a rectangular design touch screen with rounded corners a black border and a grid-array of square-ish application icons on the OS.... oh, wait a minute....
Yep that was the first thing that occurred to me too. "Pay no attention to that infringing man behind the curtain....."
On the post: 10 Industries That Are 'Dying'? Or 10 Industries That Are Changing?
I did notice...
On the post: Cyberlocker Responds To MPAA Lawsuit Which Tries To Give Hollywood A Veto On Tech It Doesn't Like
Re: Re: Re: Re:
How shocking to find that when your standard is "We (who have a specific vested interesting in saying you are ingringing) say you are infringing so you are.", then you get a lot more "accidental" false positives than if "guilt" is determined by someone at least nominally independant like, say, a court. Wierd huh?
On the post: Australian Trade Minister Says That Releasing IP Enforcement TPP Treaty Text Would Be 'Problematic'
Transcript error
He mumbled you see... they missed out the "un" in the transcript. The thing they want to assist is UNinformed debate so that the public debates about and swallows the nice-sounding sound-bites they release about how it's going to protect them from raporists and bad things. Releasing the text does indeed not assist in uninformed debate.
See? Makes much more sense that way...
On the post: Parade Of Strawmen Dominate House Hearing About Online Infringement
And that is likely why they scream "theft" so much
I know there's quotes around the "theft" but even that's conflating a little there, which is why the term copyright theft annoys me so much.
Online or offline copying is copying and theft is theft.
If I copy a bunch of content online I've infringed copyright, possibly committed the crime of illegal computer entry depending where I got it from but basically not harmed or deprived anyone of anything. If I copy the content then deleted it off their server afterwards then perhaps it could be said to be theft as I have removed it from their possession.
In the "real world" if were I pick the lock on someone's house and rip their CD collection to my laptop, I have committed the crime of breaking an entering and also committed copyright infringement. I have not, however, stolen anything. If I take their CD collection with me I have.
In both the "real world" and the "online world" theft is different from copying. Using the word "theft" at all confuses the real issue and the real "crime" (or otherwise). That, I suspect, is why it's deliberately used that way - to obscure that infringement primarily affects "imaginary" money you didn't have (and may or may not ever have got anyway), whereas theft has a direct tangible financial cost.
It's an easy trap to fall into because it's so easy to say and everyone *thinks* they knows what it means (I do it myself too) but it's just NOT theft.
/rant
On the post: Tenenbaum Appeal Heard: Is It Okay To Make Someone Pay $675,000 For Downloading 30 Songs?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
For reference:
Nope not smoking anything, simply following the logic of the prosecuting lawyer as I explained above.
If you actually bothered to read my comment before wading in to try and trash it you'd have read that I was simply excluding "He was the only one they could get" as a valid justification for such a grossly out of proportion to the damage award.
I also excluded "Because it's the law" as a justification as it's a fact not a reason. Not so long ago it was fact in england that killing a dear was cause for summary execution according to law. The fact of it being a law doesn't make it a just one. I asked what your reason for thinking it justified was.
The defendant's idiocy or not is also not a justification for a law. If it were I suspect you would not be able to afford the computer to (not) reply.
To recap:
Other than there I was referring to the plaintiffs' own lawyer's argument in response to your previous post I wasn't referring to this case. I am also not necessarily saying that it is not a crime nor that there should not be a reasonable punishment if it is.
I was asking what you believe to be the justification for bankrupting someone for life when their individual actions had little or no effect of actual damage on the plaintiff.
Are you interested in answering the question or woudl you like to rant tangentially some more?
On the post: Are Homeland Security's Domain Seizures Actually Working? Doesn't Look Like It
Re: Re: Re:
No they instead have rights under their own laws that determine what is and isn't legal for themselves as soverign nations. I know it may seem strange to a number of Americans (including its government it often seems) but the whole world is no more subject to American law than protected by its constitution.
"Because we say so and we're AMERICAN!" is not a terribly compelling argument to implement an international agreement that tramples rough-shod over what other countries laws in favour of measures that primarily benefit American protectionism. That's why you see COICA being negotiated around the world in a series of closed-room shady deals often accompanied by posturing, bullying and bribery.
On the post: Phone That Can Search The Internet & Display Ads Patented; Everyone Sued
Re: Hope they have REALLY good IP lawyers
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