The law doesn't agree with you. In fact the law provides safe harbors for those who provide spaces for users to put up content. Rapdishare is not run like any of the other businesses who have been sued for copyright infringement. By the current measures they are not inducing infringement. They even take down copyrighted content when notified and do so in a timely manner. They are providing a service and nothing more. Rapidshare's business is not based on infringement regardless of what you might think. There is legal and infringing content on the site and the site operators do not even offer a way to search the site nor do they promote any of the content available. They provide a service and the law says that they don't have to take on the burden of policing content.
They may not have DMCA agent registered, I don't doubt they will soon, but they do respond quickly to being notified of infringing content.
Here's the point you miss: They don't know what is infringing and what is not. They don't know who works for company X and is authorized to post their content or who doesn't. It is not possible for them to police infringement based on that alone which is why the legal burden, outside of inducing infringement, is not on the service provider but rather the rights holder. The service provider simply has no way of knowing. And since Rapidshare isn't inducing infringement they win. The risk of illegal content is a factor in the file hosting business but since they host cannot know what is infringing and what is not then they cannot be required to police it. As long as they remove content when notified, a morally questionable practice in my opinion since it steps around due process, they are not liable.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Why a tax break for porn warehouse?
The explanation is easy and simply put: Their intended use is not to provide pornography and they also fulfill their intended use. It unscrupulous people use it host pornographic images then the blame is not on Wikimedia but on those using it incorrectly. Unless they are notified, which I know happened in the case of the possible child pornography, they are not even legally liable under the Section 230 safe harbors. It is obvious that you have a bone to pick with the Wikimedia folks as you are blind to the simple argument that they provide a service with a specific intent and the public tries to use it in a different manner than they intended. It is likely they have reviewed the use and concluded that the actual public service they provide and its ease of use matters to them less than some silly pornography. To me, and just to me, it seems that either you are a prude who wants to get rid of all pornography or you are building strawmen. Furthermore pornography, regardless of your moral views, is considered to be protected by the first amendment. Coming from the argument that way you cannot discriminate against them for 501-C-3 status as it would be government censorship.
Your arguments are easily exposed for their truths and as strawmen. Your fight against Wikimedia may have justifiable basis and I make no assumptions one way or another about that but this attack is frankly childish.
Analogy fail. When you buy a movie ticket it is for a single showing. When you buy a concert ticket you are paying for a single performance. Neither of which are analogous to a book. A book you can read over and over and you can't watch a movie or a concert over and over with a single ticket. The rest of your post is predicated on that point and therefore you fail at making any valid point. You try with the statement "a hardcover book and and a digital book are not the same product" but if they both contain the same words in the same order and the only difference is the media on which they are contained then they are the same product. There are no misleading attempts here at all. Physical product to digital product just like CD to mp3 with the only difference being that it is harder to make a digital copy of a book. It's not that hard as there are digital copies of almost every book you can imagine whether the publishers wants there to be or not. It is not unethical to have a digital copy of a physical good that you purchased. Our current laws are wrong and should be changed to reflect this.
In one you are drastically changing format—in the other, you are not. Until there is software to easily convert a Hardback into a usable digital format, the more appropriate analogy is: CD is to Mp3 as Hardback is to Paperback. No doubt you are expected to purchase the paperback.
You are dead wrong about this one. For the home user it might be harder to convert a hardcover to digital format but for the publisher it is not. They already have the thing in digital format and to convert it to any number of e-book formats takes seconds. You present a false dilemma by presenting the conversion from hardback to paperback as valid. To put it bluntly: unless you are Rick Moranis you can't convert a hardback to a paperback and even then it's not close to the same. The original analogy was correct as both examples are: physical product to digital product.
The publisher is artificially creating the lack of a digital copy by simply not offering it to the public. If there is one out there and you have purchased the hardback, as showin by the OP and many posters in this thread, then the OP is saying it is not unethical to download it. The very fact that there are digital copies out there shows the analogy you present (physical copy to physical copy) is incorrect. If the publisher won't make them available them the consumers will and it's being proved out over and over. The publishers need to step up and start giving the public what we want.
Mike's not wrong. I use foursquare and check in places. I do this when I am out with my wife and there is a babysitter with the kids at my house, when the kids are somewhere else with a sitter and my wife and I are out, and when I am out alone. There is no way to tell if we are out with each other, out separately, if only one of us is home, or how long we will be gone from the house based on a check-in.
So to be useful for a criminal:
1. Criminal has to know the person's online persona and real life identity in order to:
2. Know the person's home address and then criminal still has to:
3. Check out the home to make sure said person is really gone by the time they arrive and still:
4. Make sure no-one else is home and still has to deal with:
5. No knowing how long said person will be gone from the house.
In contrast to:
1. Know someone has a job and sit near their house to:
2. Watch someone leave for work and be able to:
3. Discern the house is empty
In the more traditional situation the person doesn't even have to be known in any manner to the criminal and it takes less effort to discern the same information on the victim. Criminals are, by their nature, lazy and as such spending the time to track down and link online personas to physical addresses, which they still have to check out, and then wait until said person checks in somewhere that's not their home along with being ready to head out and hit the house while they are gone. To put it bluntly it is much easier to pick a random joe-schmo with an obvious 9-5 gig who threw away the box his big screen TV came in than it is to do all the crap necessary to put the pieces together for using social networking to pick victims.
Your average burglary is random and most likely picked from what can be seen through windows or high end gadget packaging in the trash and it will remain that way because it's just easier. Your high end robberies are planned well in advance and honestly social networking wouldn't add much to the planning stages of one of those. To top it off the average user of one of these services wouldn't have high end criminals looking at them to begin with.
You are also wrong about the whole "I can go to a website and get an instant onscreen report of 10 likely candidates near my location". First off these services give you the current location of the persons using them and not their home address, second off you'd have to know whether or not they have anything worth taking, and thirdly you'd have to know who the hell they are outside of their online persona. Most of this would elude the crackhead breaking in to get money for a fix, the low end scumbag who wants high tech gadgets, and would add much to the high end criminals MO. So, you, like the venerable pleaserobme site are not taking everything into account and simply repeating provably wrong talking points in an attempt to put feat into people where there doesn't need to be any.
If a criminal is already targeting you then there stands a chance they might be able to use social networking to figure out when you were gone but without it they can simply use a physical presence and not posting to social networking sites won't have an affect on their choice to rob you. The best defense against any of this is to not toss out things that make it obvious you are a good target for a robbery. It matters more what you have that's worth taking than where you are at any given time because we live in a target rich environment. So make someone else a better target by not broadcasting what sort of crap you have.
But they won't rebel because this is marketed as a computer. It is marketed, in essence, as an electronic magazine and people don't expect to cut and paste from a magazine. The unwashed masses won't rebel because they never do. Apple made a ton of money on DRM crippled music, and still do, and they will make money on this the same way. It will all be in the marketing spin and the public will eat it up. Just look at how long it took them get cut and paste on their touch-screen phone and people didn't rebel at that, at least not the average ever day person.
I have to disagree with being able to replicate the touchscreen experience with a mouse. I would have said the same thing in the past but having just an Android phone, not even a tablet, there are just things that make touchscreen better than a mouse. For instance I can setup my browser to use mouse gestures but honestly the whole hand gesture sucks. I rarely use Google Reader on the desktop anymore because the touchscreen interface, in the mobile browser, is so much easier to use and nice overall. There are a few interfaces that are easier on the my phone than on the desktop, still more that aren't though, but those interfaces have almost killed me using those apps on the desktop because once they are better they are so much better that it's really outrageous.
Now a web interface could be developed that made these sites digital version pretty cool but the problem is that a lot of the companies have tried it already and failed. The reason they failed, for the most part, is they tried too early and the tech wasn't there to support making a nice, shiny, feature rich interface that was cross-platform and easy to use. A lot of them tried Flash and it sucked even though some still use it. There also appears to be a mental barrier in web design that says the site has to look like a web page of some sort. Hardly any of the media companies are breaking out of the box and using current tech to produce a user experience that would be worth paying for. I believe they could do so if they put their mind to it and used current tech. User experience is a scarcity and the right experience could be worth a little bit of jack from customers. But they seem to want to be able to, in relation to browser based interfaces, provide nothing to make the experience better and still charge which won't work.
The other issue, which I don't see mentioned, is the irrational fear that someone, somewhere, might cut and paste content for other people to see. This fear is relieved on the iPad (still makes me think of feminine products and my inner ten year old wants to make jokes) as they can control exactly what the user can and cannot do with the content. So from that perspective, as irrational and wrong as it is, it makes sense to provide a slick interface and user experience on this tablet to allow full media conglomerate control over their words. It's a sad position but one that we see more and more of with no apparent hope of correcting.
Most 4th amendment privacy expectations are based on "reasonable expectation of privacy" and have moved around based on different cases and circumstances. I think that it would be entirely reasonable, pardon the pun, for a sysadmin to have no expectation of privacy on any system connected to an open wifi network but my mom likely would. However Windows warns you when connecting to an open wifi network that your data is not encrypted and could be read by anyone else on the network so maybe even then there is a lowered expectation of privacy. So "I would suspect that most users have no idea that it's less secure" isn't likely accurate. Most users have read that warning, because most users are Windows users, and know it's less secure. How much that affects your 4th amendment rights may be another story.
@intellectual integrity: This case is really more like having your door open and kilo of cocaine on your table. If the cops drive by and see it they most certainly can arrest you for having it. These items were in folders shared through limewire AND iTunes (RTFA) to anyone on the intertubes and this was mentioned in the decision. In fact the point was made that he had to change settings to share everything in the manner in which he did. He purposefully made the materials available to the world. The open wifi connection is merely the manner in which they viewed the publicly shared material. I don't think there could be any expectation of privacy after reading the article. The open wifi isn't even really the issue here, despite Mike focusing on it for his op-ed, the core of the case was the this dude shared his stuff to the world, from multiple sources, and the wifi connection was just the vehicle that they verified it with. So it's more like giving away drugs to anyone that walks into your yard and then complaining that the cops walked into your yard, got drugs, and arrested you. The privacy issue was null and void when he shared those folders over the intertubes.
The long and short of it is: .99 is WAY different to the brain than 1.00 and does make a huge difference in sales. But you don't seem to want to consider that point. You want to throw up a strawman in response (talking price vs demand when dealing with psychological price barriers is a strawman).
I disagree with you on your theory that the difference between .99 and 1.29 isn't enough to turn people away from buying music. Any first year economics student can tell you that, as a general rule, if you raise prices you will lose sales and the key is to price at a point were you maximize your dollars and minimize your loss of customers. Secondly there are plenty of studies that show there are "magical" price points. For instance the difference between sales for a product costing 9.99 and the same product costing 10.00 is a very measurable difference. Likewise the difference between .99 and 1.00 is the same. The change in price to 1.29 from .99 affects people who would not download music illegally to a point where they just don't buy the music because the "whole dollar" line was crossed. While logically the difference between 1.00 and .99 is a single penny and doesn't make any difference in the grand scheme of things it makes a huge difference in sales. Tack another .29 onto it and you add in people who just won't pay that much but weren't affected by the psychology involved.
I buy all of my music, that I don't get for free legally, from amazon.com and I wouldn't pay 1.29 a song for any of it. 1.29 a song, for a 15 song album, comes to 19.35 for an album which is more than retail for a CD and you don't get physical media (a scarcity), liner notes or lyrics. Pricing digital music the same as physical media doesn't make sense. Even if you ignore the economics governing pricing you get less for your money with digital music. So yes 1.29 is enough of a difference to turn people away.
You also mis-state Mike's logic (which isn't Mike's logic to begin with but a standard economic rule) in the infinite goods have no price. While I know explaining this to you will have no effect because you are little more than a troll, here it is, if the marginal cost of reproduction is zero then the price will approach zero in the marketplace. That's not an exact quote but it's close. Sure there are initial costs but initial costs don't set the market price. The marginal cost of an item sets the market price. It costs nothing to reproduce digital music and it will follow the laws of economics whether through piracy or whether the record companies finally figure it out.
Your apocalyptic prediction of the music industry's downfall, based on people learning not to pay for music (provably untrue) is pretty much tripe. You cite a list of very few scarce goods and ignore everything else that an artist, or a label, can offer fans. You fall into the trap that most critics of free fall in to. You zero on in a small subset of the idea and pound it to death. If all there was too offer was t-shirts, autographs, and personal time then you would be right but the fact is that's not all there is to offer.
I used to download all of my music over file sharing services because it was free but something changed. Sure I can find a torrent out there for most of what I want but the time involved in finding a decent seeded torrent, downloading, sorting and so on is not worth it to me. For .99 a song, and less if I buy a whole album, I don't have to deal with the hassle of going to torrent sites, firing up limewire, or whatever. I also have a near-zero risk of getting a virus downloading from amazon.com. Add that all up: convenience, ease of use, time, safety and you have a marketable product however at 1.29 (or higher if the labels got their way) it starts to become a question of worth but at .99 a song worth isn't even a blip on the radar.
Take Suburban Home Records http://www.suburbanhomerecords.com and look what they have done. They offer digital for a good price, offer Suburban Home For Life (100.00 for access to everything they put out in digital format for as long you live or they stay in business), vinyl, streams of almost every album, and offer interesting multi-level package deals for some new albums. They are offering scarcities as well as digital and doing quite well. Virgil (he runs the show over there) gets it. He's been a fan of music for a long time and knows what fans want. The major labels have disconnected from the music and fans and are fans of making money and nothing more. Music existed before the record labels and will continue to exist as they die out because they didn't change their strategy. The .99 and 1.29 price points are just more proof that they don't get it.
Remember three sales @ .60 makes the company more than one sale at 1.29. But I guess that's wrong somehow as well. Heck six sales at .25 makes the company more than one sale at 1.29 but that's way too low a price...for a reason no-one can explain.
Really, this is a socialist vs. capitalist debate that you are just trying to validate through an attempt to misdirect and simplify flanking arguments that have no merit.
This has nothing to do with Socialism or Capitalism to be perfectly frank. I can see how some might attempt to frame the debate in that manner but it's truly not the case. When dealing with utilities there are a different set of rules involved and the internet is a utility much like electricity, water, natural gas, and so on. For what it's worth the term "capitalism" is not even well defined enough to use in a "vs Socialism" framework. I suspect you mean Free Market Capitalism as opposed to State Capitalism so the rest of my response will be based on that.
The bottom line gentlemen is that it doesn't matter if voice is data, what matters is who owns the pipe. Period. Doesn't matter if tax payer dollars were used to augment the cost of the pipe, tax payer dollars are used a lot to "stimulate". The different is that 20 years ago it was considered an investment in infrastructure, now it's a end-around the free-market.
It does matter that tax payer dollars were used. It may be an end-run about the free market on your opinion but the companies in question accepted the money and therefore must live with the consequences. If you want a free market, which the US does not have to begin with, you cannot inject government dollars and then complain about government regulation. If federal tax dollars were used to augment, develop, build, or tied to these networks in other manners then the companies involved accepted government oversight and regulation. You can claim it was ignorant for them to do so but those are the simple facts of the matter. They accepted tax payer dollars and are now subject to regulation by the elected representatives of those same tax payers. There is a moral obligation involved in accepting tax payer money to use that money, or the products of that money, for the good of the people.
This is purely against the constitution by the way. We have a constitution that guarantees "free contract". There is a difference between government regulation and corporate regulation. One has a constitutional right, the other not so much.
You are wrong here. The 14th amendment is generally the amendment used to cover "freedom of contract" but the first case that the language was used in: Lochner v. New York was struck down in the years that followed. In fact "free contract" is not mentioned in the Constitution and it seems you are making up right out of whole cloth.
Net Neutrality is simply another of a string of attempts of this government to seize control of yet more of our infrastructure and take over this country.
Are the black helicopters following you today? In case you haven't noticed net neutrality is less regulation and a guarantee of more personal freedom. Right now there is nothing stopping AT&T from throttling all traffic inbound to its network from all of its competitors. That is what this debate is about.
If you are a socialist or communist and this is how you believe...I suggest you move. Our constitution does not support or allow for your ideology. It protects property ownership. If you are not a socialist or a communist and you really believe that you have the right to own property and enter into free contract under your own responsibilities and merit...then I suggest that you read up on this topic.
Here is where you veer off track. First you present a false dilemma in which those who do not see eye to eye with you on this don't believe in property ownership and it's a pretty text logical fallacy. Then you use the term "free contract" again which isn't a right guaranteed or granted in the Constitution. You imply that this is government asserting control of private property when it is not. You completely lose the ball here. This infrastructure was paid for, in large, by tax payer dollars which makes it subject to regulation. Are you opposed to "Do Not Call" lists? That is regulation of what can be transmitted over "private" phone lines. Are you opposed to laws against spam faxing? It's the same concept overall.
Remember, once the government takes over the internet, and after they have taken over health care, and businesses...then the next logical step (look into Stalin's Russia) they will then seize your property...your home, your land, and your money.
And here's where I suspect you think fearless leader isn't a US citizen as well. The government already controls the internet as much as they possibly can. But the design of said network makes it pretty much impossible to exert control over. Even Iran has trouble shutting down dissidents and they are much smaller than the US. This not a takeover of the internet. This is a statement that you can't place higher value on certain kinds of traffic if you are providing a utility. It's the same as telling the electric company that they can't not provide power over the grid to the business office of their competitor. The internet is a utility and it's about time it was treated as such.
He who owns it...gets to make the decisions. Remember the "net" does not belong to you...or the federal government. And if you think it should...then look at which country's tech and business sector really invented it and took it to this level. Do you think socialist France, Russia, China or Venezuela could have? I think not.
Dude the government invented the internet. Read up on DARPA some time. The protocols that survive and have high rates of adoption are open protocols, like the backbone of all internet traffic TCP/IP, with very few exceptions. We are not talking about the internet belonging to anyone we are talking about regulating what utility companies can and cannot do with their wires. We already regulate the same thing for phone lines and electric lines and the government hasn't taken over those industries yet.
And as far as the "roads" comment goes...Eisenhower copied the German "interstate" system for the same reasons the Germans had it...to freely move military assets throughout a country's interior. You using the roads now...that's like you drinking tang or using velcro...it was never designed for you, so don't use it as an analogy for your socialist validation...its disingenuous.
And the internet was invented by DARPA to provide a network infrastructure for the military that would withstand just about any attack. It wasn't meant for you...I can't even follow that line of logic with a straight face to be perfectly honest.
History dear fellow...learn your history before you try to argue for things that have already failed in 100% of the attempts.
Now here's the best part. I don't think goverment SHOULD be involved in this battle. I despise most government intervention. I am a proud Libertarian. But people like you make me cringe. You are spewing ignorant inanities and you generally make the rest of us who oppose things like this look like we are in the same nutbag boat as you and your ilk. I think the government has too much control and its hands in too many pies but the idiotic stuff you spew is just outrageous. Please switch sides so I don't have to be associated with morons like you.
Guess who gives that software piracy group the best leads on who is pirating software? Jilted business partners and fired employees.
Of course it's been shown that fired employees have also made sure that even legit companies can't pass the BSA muster. Hell I'd lay odd that your home can't pass BSA muster.
Are her statements credible? Hmmm, guess who gives the IRS the best information for tax cheats? Jilted wives, business partners, lovers and fired employees.
And usually this sort of information includes a deal for the person dropping the dime because in almost all the cases they are legally responsible as well. And if you do some checking you'll find the largest number of false CPS complaints as well as false reports of cheating on taxes are the exact same group. Their information is no more credible than the information received from other sources there just tends to be a lot more of it so even with a lower percentage of accuracy there will be a lot more actual truth.
Does she have an axe to grind? Maybe, but that doesn't mean she doesn't know where the bodies are buried.
It doesn't mean there are any bodies to begin with. At this point she's offering conflicting testimony. She has lied either now or the first time. No matter when she happened to be telling the truth, if she did at all, then she still cannot be trusted.
Re: Re: Circumstantial evidence should be sufficient
"beyond reasonable doubt" is the bar for criminal cases only. These trials are civil and the standard of proof is lower. At present we can only use the laws in place and for civil trials the bar is: "Preponderance of the evidence" or in some cases "Clear and convincing evidence". Like it or not there are different standards. Wikipedia has a pretty nice write up on the whole thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof
This is why the *AAs are winning. "A preponderance of the evidence" is merely: "it is more likely that it happened than it did not" for most cases. I haven't looked ddep enough but with the awards in these cases it is possible the judges should be using the "clear and convincing evidence" standard, which it appears this judge may be doing.
Hey dummy! Clonezilla is free (http://clonezilla.org/) and even has a server edition. On top of that there are plenty of free deployment tools that are not image based and will work for Microsoft products such as: Unattended (http://unattended.sourceforge.net/)
And a Checkpoint firewall? You have to be kidding right? Checkpoint is arse in a handbasket. If you can't afford a real firewall then your best bet is a *nix box of some sort running the firewall with a nice web interface for changing/adding rules.
I think my solutions are more cost effective than yours. And don't bother telling me they won't work in corporate America I have installed them in small to mid size shops for years. The large shops use real firewalls and can afford Ghost. Strangely enough where I work now is a very large shop and Ghost used to be standard for images until someone pointed out clonezilla. We don't do many images and use OSS tools for our OS installs worldwide. And while I can't tell you who I work for I can safely say it's one of the largest shops around.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Actually, Mike, your "easy way" won't work
The headers are forged. The dictionary does not reflect the technical use of the word. The headers make the email appear to have come from an account that it did not. While userx may have said "send this in my name" the email still did not originate from the address in the headers so it is forged. Whether this is bad or not is a whole other debate but the headers are forged in the technical use of the word.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Actually, Mike, your "easy way" won't work
Having also worked in the industry for years I can assure you that the messages from Facebook are not spam. Unsolicited email != spam. The fact is the email is initiated by someone you know or who has you in their address book. It is not initiated by FB. FB is very careful about this so their messages are not counted as spam. There are multiple verifications before any email is sent. It is not FB's spam as they are sending only what their users request. Saying these messages are FB's spam is like saying that all the damn forwards I get from my mom are hotmail's spam because hotmail sent them regardless of who pushed the button and it is ridiculous.
Forging the headers is also debatable but there is a much better case for it. FB asks if you want to send email and is clear that it will appear to be from you. They use your email address but do not send through your smtp server. While the headers are technically forged they are forged in a legitimate manner. Most corporation forge headers to some degree. My from address here at the office isn't even closely related to the server that sends the email but if you respond the email goes through the system and ends up in my inbox. So technically the headers are forged according to the RFC. FB is doing what amounts to the same thing.
While you may not like FBs methods and they may violate an RFC or two the best you get is forged headers. It is not spam due to the means by which it is initiated or FB would be in every spamlist around and they frankly aren't. It could be considered commercial email even but last.fm didn't offer a way to invite your friends and I sent you an email asking you to join from my gmail account it wouldn't be spam. This is the same thing. FB just makes it easy to ask your friends to join.
Any police officer could ticket you for any number of moving violations, whether or not you committed them or not, and you'd stand no chance of escaping the fine.
It's easy to get out of tickets if you aren't a jerk to the officer first, the prosecutor second, and the judge third. If you are an ass like you show in your post above then sure you don't stand a change but that's your own fault.
First and foremost if the officer doesn't show up for court then you will automatically be found no guilty. Secondly if you can prove you didn't have a headlight out on your care (or any other random malfunction) at the time you were given a ticket for it then you will be found no guilty. Hell in Texas if your inspection is out you can just go get your car inspected within ten days of getting a ticket then you get found no guilty and pay a few dollars for the paperwork. I admit I don't know much about other stated but here in Houston, TX most judges work with you easily.
In most states a yellow light means 'stop' (unless you cannot stop).
Texas Transportation Code
§544.007. Traffic-control signals in general.
(e) An operator of a vehicle facing a steady yellow signal is warned by that
signal that:
(1) movement authorized by a green signal is being terminated; or
(2) a red signal is to be given.
There's at least one state where a yellow light doesn't mean anything but a red light is about happen. It is not illegal to enter an intersection on yellow in Texas at all.
It's not "End of story" by any means. If she hadn't been texting and fallen into an open manhole cover it might be. If I were her parent, and I am a parent of seven children, there would be no lawsuit and she would be sans phone until she could learn to be aware of her surroundings. There may be grounds for a lawsuit but she is responsible for the fact she was not paying attention to where she was walking. What if the city had erected a light pole in her usual path? What if she had crossed against the light while texting? An open manhole cover without the proper safety equipment is a danger to be sure but as far as culpability goes she is responsible for walking into a freaking open manhole while paying attention to her phone. The city may be on the hook for some damages but I pray the state has laws to limit the city's liability since she was doing something damn stupid and fell in a damn hole while doing it.
On the post: Details Of The Rapidshare Decision: No Search Engine, Plus Efforts To Takedown Copyright Material Helped
Re:
They may not have DMCA agent registered, I don't doubt they will soon, but they do respond quickly to being notified of infringing content.
Here's the point you miss: They don't know what is infringing and what is not. They don't know who works for company X and is authorized to post their content or who doesn't. It is not possible for them to police infringement based on that alone which is why the legal burden, outside of inducing infringement, is not on the service provider but rather the rights holder. The service provider simply has no way of knowing. And since Rapidshare isn't inducing infringement they win. The risk of illegal content is a factor in the file hosting business but since they host cannot know what is infringing and what is not then they cannot be required to police it. As long as they remove content when notified, a morally questionable practice in my opinion since it steps around due process, they are not liable.
Guess you missed how the law actually works.
On the post: Disgruntled Ex-Wikipedia Guy, Larry Sanger, Accuses Wikipedia Of Distributing Child Porn
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Why a tax break for porn warehouse?
Your arguments are easily exposed for their truths and as strawmen. Your fight against Wikimedia may have justifiable basis and I make no assumptions one way or another about that but this attack is frankly childish.
On the post: NYTimes Ethicist: Not Unethical To Download Unauthorized Copy Of Physical Book You Own
Re:
On the post: NYTimes Ethicist: Not Unethical To Download Unauthorized Copy Of Physical Book You Own
Re: Just a thought
On the post: How Does Copyright Apply To Your Kids' Monster Drawings?
Re: Creative Commons to the rescue
On the post: Moral Panic: PleaseRobMe Is Today's Equivalent Of Freaking Out About Answering Machines In 1983
Re: Mike, you're wrong about this one.
So to be useful for a criminal:
1. Criminal has to know the person's online persona and real life identity in order to:
2. Know the person's home address and then criminal still has to:
3. Check out the home to make sure said person is really gone by the time they arrive and still:
4. Make sure no-one else is home and still has to deal with:
5. No knowing how long said person will be gone from the house.
In contrast to:
1. Know someone has a job and sit near their house to:
2. Watch someone leave for work and be able to:
3. Discern the house is empty
In the more traditional situation the person doesn't even have to be known in any manner to the criminal and it takes less effort to discern the same information on the victim. Criminals are, by their nature, lazy and as such spending the time to track down and link online personas to physical addresses, which they still have to check out, and then wait until said person checks in somewhere that's not their home along with being ready to head out and hit the house while they are gone. To put it bluntly it is much easier to pick a random joe-schmo with an obvious 9-5 gig who threw away the box his big screen TV came in than it is to do all the crap necessary to put the pieces together for using social networking to pick victims.
Your average burglary is random and most likely picked from what can be seen through windows or high end gadget packaging in the trash and it will remain that way because it's just easier. Your high end robberies are planned well in advance and honestly social networking wouldn't add much to the planning stages of one of those. To top it off the average user of one of these services wouldn't have high end criminals looking at them to begin with.
You are also wrong about the whole "I can go to a website and get an instant onscreen report of 10 likely candidates near my location". First off these services give you the current location of the persons using them and not their home address, second off you'd have to know whether or not they have anything worth taking, and thirdly you'd have to know who the hell they are outside of their online persona. Most of this would elude the crackhead breaking in to get money for a fix, the low end scumbag who wants high tech gadgets, and would add much to the high end criminals MO. So, you, like the venerable pleaserobme site are not taking everything into account and simply repeating provably wrong talking points in an attempt to put feat into people where there doesn't need to be any.
If a criminal is already targeting you then there stands a chance they might be able to use social networking to figure out when you were gone but without it they can simply use a physical presence and not posting to social networking sites won't have an affect on their choice to rob you. The best defense against any of this is to not toss out things that make it obvious you are a good target for a robbery. It matters more what you have that's worth taking than where you are at any given time because we live in a target rich environment. So make someone else a better target by not broadcasting what sort of crap you have.
On the post: Why Can't All These Ideas For Content On The iPad/Tablets Also Work On The Web?
Re: Re: Why it wouldn't work for the web
On the post: Why Can't All These Ideas For Content On The iPad/Tablets Also Work On The Web?
Why it wouldn't work for the web
Now a web interface could be developed that made these sites digital version pretty cool but the problem is that a lot of the companies have tried it already and failed. The reason they failed, for the most part, is they tried too early and the tech wasn't there to support making a nice, shiny, feature rich interface that was cross-platform and easy to use. A lot of them tried Flash and it sucked even though some still use it. There also appears to be a mental barrier in web design that says the site has to look like a web page of some sort. Hardly any of the media companies are breaking out of the box and using current tech to produce a user experience that would be worth paying for. I believe they could do so if they put their mind to it and used current tech. User experience is a scarcity and the right experience could be worth a little bit of jack from customers. But they seem to want to be able to, in relation to browser based interfaces, provide nothing to make the experience better and still charge which won't work.
The other issue, which I don't see mentioned, is the irrational fear that someone, somewhere, might cut and paste content for other people to see. This fear is relieved on the iPad (still makes me think of feminine products and my inner ten year old wants to make jokes) as they can control exactly what the user can and cannot do with the content. So from that perspective, as irrational and wrong as it is, it makes sense to provide a slick interface and user experience on this tablet to allow full media conglomerate control over their words. It's a sad position but one that we see more and more of with no apparent hope of correcting.
On the post: Leaving Your WiFi Open Decreases Your Fourth Amendment Rights To Privacy?
@intellectual integrity: This case is really more like having your door open and kilo of cocaine on your table. If the cops drive by and see it they most certainly can arrest you for having it. These items were in folders shared through limewire AND iTunes (RTFA) to anyone on the intertubes and this was mentioned in the decision. In fact the point was made that he had to change settings to share everything in the manner in which he did. He purposefully made the materials available to the world. The open wifi connection is merely the manner in which they viewed the publicly shared material. I don't think there could be any expectation of privacy after reading the article. The open wifi isn't even really the issue here, despite Mike focusing on it for his op-ed, the core of the case was the this dude shared his stuff to the world, from multiple sources, and the wifi connection was just the vehicle that they verified it with. So it's more like giving away drugs to anyone that walks into your yard and then complaining that the cops walked into your yard, got drugs, and arrested you. The privacy issue was null and void when he shared those folders over the intertubes.
On the post: Duh: Raise Music Prices To $1.29/Song; Music Sales Growth Slows
Re: Re: Get a clue
The long and short of it is: .99 is WAY different to the brain than 1.00 and does make a huge difference in sales. But you don't seem to want to consider that point. You want to throw up a strawman in response (talking price vs demand when dealing with psychological price barriers is a strawman).
On the post: Duh: Raise Music Prices To $1.29/Song; Music Sales Growth Slows
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I buy all of my music, that I don't get for free legally, from amazon.com and I wouldn't pay 1.29 a song for any of it. 1.29 a song, for a 15 song album, comes to 19.35 for an album which is more than retail for a CD and you don't get physical media (a scarcity), liner notes or lyrics. Pricing digital music the same as physical media doesn't make sense. Even if you ignore the economics governing pricing you get less for your money with digital music. So yes 1.29 is enough of a difference to turn people away.
You also mis-state Mike's logic (which isn't Mike's logic to begin with but a standard economic rule) in the infinite goods have no price. While I know explaining this to you will have no effect because you are little more than a troll, here it is, if the marginal cost of reproduction is zero then the price will approach zero in the marketplace. That's not an exact quote but it's close. Sure there are initial costs but initial costs don't set the market price. The marginal cost of an item sets the market price. It costs nothing to reproduce digital music and it will follow the laws of economics whether through piracy or whether the record companies finally figure it out.
Your apocalyptic prediction of the music industry's downfall, based on people learning not to pay for music (provably untrue) is pretty much tripe. You cite a list of very few scarce goods and ignore everything else that an artist, or a label, can offer fans. You fall into the trap that most critics of free fall in to. You zero on in a small subset of the idea and pound it to death. If all there was too offer was t-shirts, autographs, and personal time then you would be right but the fact is that's not all there is to offer.
I used to download all of my music over file sharing services because it was free but something changed. Sure I can find a torrent out there for most of what I want but the time involved in finding a decent seeded torrent, downloading, sorting and so on is not worth it to me. For .99 a song, and less if I buy a whole album, I don't have to deal with the hassle of going to torrent sites, firing up limewire, or whatever. I also have a near-zero risk of getting a virus downloading from amazon.com. Add that all up: convenience, ease of use, time, safety and you have a marketable product however at 1.29 (or higher if the labels got their way) it starts to become a question of worth but at .99 a song worth isn't even a blip on the radar.
Take Suburban Home Records http://www.suburbanhomerecords.com and look what they have done. They offer digital for a good price, offer Suburban Home For Life (100.00 for access to everything they put out in digital format for as long you live or they stay in business), vinyl, streams of almost every album, and offer interesting multi-level package deals for some new albums. They are offering scarcities as well as digital and doing quite well. Virgil (he runs the show over there) gets it. He's been a fan of music for a long time and knows what fans want. The major labels have disconnected from the music and fans and are fans of making money and nothing more. Music existed before the record labels and will continue to exist as they die out because they didn't change their strategy. The .99 and 1.29 price points are just more proof that they don't get it.
Remember three sales @ .60 makes the company more than one sale at 1.29. But I guess that's wrong somehow as well. Heck six sales at .25 makes the company more than one sale at 1.29 but that's way too low a price...for a reason no-one can explain.
On the post: Recognizing That Voice Is Just Data (Or How Google Voice Could Be Disruptive)
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On the post: EMI Back To Trying To Personally Bankrupt Michael Robertson
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On the post: Judge In IsoHunt Case Tells MPAA It Needs To Actually Prove Infringement By US Residents
Re: Re: Circumstantial evidence should be sufficient
This is why the *AAs are winning. "A preponderance of the evidence" is merely: "it is more likely that it happened than it did not" for most cases. I haven't looked ddep enough but with the awards in these cases it is possible the judges should be using the "clear and convincing evidence" standard, which it appears this judge may be doing.
Oh yeah IANAL
On the post: Time For IT Guys To Unshackle Corporate Computers
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And a Checkpoint firewall? You have to be kidding right? Checkpoint is arse in a handbasket. If you can't afford a real firewall then your best bet is a *nix box of some sort running the firewall with a nice web interface for changing/adding rules.
I think my solutions are more cost effective than yours. And don't bother telling me they won't work in corporate America I have installed them in small to mid size shops for years. The large shops use real firewalls and can afford Ghost. Strangely enough where I work now is a very large shop and Ghost used to be standard for images until someone pointed out clonezilla. We don't do many images and use OSS tools for our OS installs worldwide. And while I can't tell you who I work for I can safely say it's one of the largest shops around.
On the post: New Lawsuit Against Facebook From People Who Just Don't Like Facebook
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Actually, Mike, your "easy way" won't work
On the post: New Lawsuit Against Facebook From People Who Just Don't Like Facebook
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Actually, Mike, your "easy way" won't work
Forging the headers is also debatable but there is a much better case for it. FB asks if you want to send email and is clear that it will appear to be from you. They use your email address but do not send through your smtp server. While the headers are technically forged they are forged in a legitimate manner. Most corporation forge headers to some degree. My from address here at the office isn't even closely related to the server that sends the email but if you respond the email goes through the system and ends up in my inbox. So technically the headers are forged according to the RFC. FB is doing what amounts to the same thing.
While you may not like FBs methods and they may violate an RFC or two the best you get is forged headers. It is not spam due to the means by which it is initiated or FB would be in every spamlist around and they frankly aren't. It could be considered commercial email even but last.fm didn't offer a way to invite your friends and I sent you an email asking you to join from my gmail account it wouldn't be spam. This is the same thing. FB just makes it easy to ask your friends to join.
On the post: Judge Throws Out Red Light Camera Tickets As Program Declared Illegal And Void
Re: Re: easy sparky
Any police officer could ticket you for any number of moving violations, whether or not you committed them or not, and you'd stand no chance of escaping the fine.
It's easy to get out of tickets if you aren't a jerk to the officer first, the prosecutor second, and the judge third. If you are an ass like you show in your post above then sure you don't stand a change but that's your own fault.
First and foremost if the officer doesn't show up for court then you will automatically be found no guilty. Secondly if you can prove you didn't have a headlight out on your care (or any other random malfunction) at the time you were given a ticket for it then you will be found no guilty. Hell in Texas if your inspection is out you can just go get your car inspected within ten days of getting a ticket then you get found no guilty and pay a few dollars for the paperwork. I admit I don't know much about other stated but here in Houston, TX most judges work with you easily.
On the post: Judge Throws Out Red Light Camera Tickets As Program Declared Illegal And Void
Re: not so clear
In most states a yellow light means 'stop' (unless you cannot stop).
There's at least one state where a yellow light doesn't mean anything but a red light is about happen. It is not illegal to enter an intersection on yellow in Texas at all.
On the post: The No Responsibility Society: Suing Because Your Daughter Is Texting So Much She Didn't Notice The Open Manhole
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