I actually found the following sentence in the Google post the most interesting: "next week we will start offering an encrypted version of Google Search"
If search clients (such as the search boxes offered by many browsers) start using the encrypted version by default, that's actually a significant change in how easy it will be to intercept details on what people are searching for.
As far as the incident itself goes, Google submitted to an audit, found they had screwed up, and shut the whole program down as a result. They've stated they will work with authorities to ensure the data is properly deleted, and review their internal processes to see how this slipped through quality control (IMO, the fact that it happened 4 years ago is likely to be significant - their quality control processes then probably weren't as good as their processes now).
It would be better if they hadn't screwed up in the first place, but given that they did, this seems to be about the best way they could handle it.
So, since guns can be used to kill people, they should be banned?
Since computers can be used for nefarious purposes, they should be banned?
Since VCRs can be used to infringe copyright, they should be banned?
Bzzt, try again. Laws against certain behaviours and laws against technology which enable both legal and illegal behaviours are not the same thing. The former make sense (sometimes), but they latter generally do not.
It isn't just a religious thing - there are pragmatic reasons for a society to deem assisting in suicide illegal.
Those reasons generally have to do with the myriad of ways in which laws to legalise suicide can be exploited to get away with murder.
A society also has a vested interest in the well-being of individual members - allowing those members to off themselves due to otherwise temporary mental states may have nasty long-term consequences for the society as a whole (if we don't value and respect life itself, what does that imply for those things like truth, justice and beauty that are meaningful only in the context of human consciousness?).
Should euthanasia be an available option for people that have done everything they wish to in life? Possibly. But it isn't as simple as just making assisting in suicide legal across the board.
One other thing - those "right to sue" software prices also always come with a detailed list of supported configurations. If you aren't running on supported hardware/OS/database engine/etc, that will be used as a defence by the vendor. "Y'r honour, we never warranted correct operation in that configuration. The plaintiff chose not to follow our operating guidelines and suffered the consequences".
For product manufacturers with embedded code (e.g. car and aircraft manufacturers, medical device manufacturers), the manufacturer is just as liable for software defects as they are for hardware defects.
For Software-as-a-Service providers with service-level-agreements with their customers, failure to achieve the contracted level of service is grounds for a civil suit.
Generally speaking, when you see those huge price differences between general purpose software and "enterprise" software? The latter often has a "right to sue" built in to the price (not always, but in the cases where it isn't, the price difference often isn't quite so large, either).
An interesting way to tackle this in general may be to allow vendors to mitigate or eliminate their liability by providing the source code to their product, allowing prospective customers to perform their own due diligence.
One key point here is that LimeWire used filters to block sharing of their *own* stuff, but didn't make that technology available to anybody else. Kind of a fatal blow to any potential "undue burden" defences.
As for whether it can be done legally, note that the *AAs of the world aren't bothering to go after torrent client developers, they're only going after the torrent search engines and tracker hosts.
My guess is that the Attorneys General (all state Labour politicians) don't want to give the (non-Labour) federal opposition any "Won't somebody please think of the children!?" ammunition for the federal election we have coming up later this year.
So, possibly sensible from a political point of view, but the logic of it is entirely unrelated to the pros and cons of the rating itself.
Came across this again after claiming a bunch of comments I had made when not logged in.
I'll try and break this down for the edification of anyone that happens across this thread in the future.
Scenario 1 (download from central server):
- Server owner pays ISP X for a net connection
- Client A pays ISP Y for a net connection
- Client A downloads 1 Gigabyte file from Server
- Client B pays ISP Z for a net connection
- Client B downloads 1 Gigabyte file from Server
ISP X has sent 1 gigabyte each to ISP Y and ISP Z
Total bytes transferred: 2 Gigabytes
Each ISP has been paid by one end user, inter-ISP transfers are accounted for under whatever peering arrangements are in place.
Scenario 2 (peer-to-peer transfer):
- Server owner pays ISP X for a net connection
- Client A pays ISP Y for a net connection
- Client A downloads 1 Gigabyte file from Server
- Client B pays ISP Z for a net connection
- Client B downloads 1 Gigabyte file from Client A via P2P
ISP X has sent 1 gigabyte to ISP Y
ISP Y has sent 1 gigabyte to ISP Z
Total bytes transferred: 2 Gigabytes
Each ISP has been paid by one end user, inter-ISP transfers are accounted for under whatever peering arrangements are in place.
So, two downloads of a 1 gigabyte file result in 2 gigabytes being transferred across the internet, regardless of whether the second download is from the original server or from a different client that had already downloaded the file.
P2P vs central dowload *does* make a difference when it comes to ISP peering arrangements and the bandwidth requirements for the server provider, but those have to do with the *distribution* of the data traffic rather than its overall volume.
The 3rd case is not the same, but should still be reversed on appeal
I agree the third situation is somewhat different from the first two, but I also believe the decision in that case should still be reversed.
The problem is that Blizzard can ban bots in their Terms of Service and cancel people's account if they catch them using a bot. That's all fine and well within Blizzard's rights (and as a WoW player, hooray for them doing it - bots can seriously mess up server economies).
What Blizzard have done in this third case, however, is to go after the *maker* of one of the bot programs and attempt to use copyright law to get the bot program *itself* declared illegal.
That's an abuse of copyright law, and the courts shouldn't allow it. Sure, the bot maker is creating a tool that has the sole purpose of helping people to violate Blizzard's Terms of Service in WoW, but that isn't illegal as things currently stand. If Blizzard would like it to be illegal, then they should be lobbying the legislative branch rather than persuading the judicial branch to get creative in interpreting the law.
The prebuilt games still cost money. They also only open sourced the code, while the game art is provided under a non-commercial use license.
So you can get the games for free, *if* you're in a position to pull the source from Mercurial and build them yourself. Most people don't how to do that, and many of those that do will quite happily pay someone else to do it for them. Plus, as is frequently mentioned around here, getting games (even DRM heavy ones) for free is a trivial task for any even remotely tech savvy PC gamer.
See, this is what connecting with fans means: we give the developers money because we like what they're providing and the way they're providing it, and want them to continue doing what they're doing.
(Hell, I'd already bought World of Goo on Steam ages ago and still gave the WoG developers a cut of my contribution to this deal)
Re: Re: Re: Re: Have a look at what's happened in Australia...
They actually do sometimes call them "unlimited", since even if you go over your quota, your connection remains active and you don't pay any extra (so they're technically telling the truth).
However, most of them don't do that, and even the ones that do still clearly spell out what the quotas are as well as the shaped and unshaped maximum speeds.
Any given ISP is only going to have so much bandwidth connecting it to the backbone. I'd prefer them to have some honest accounting method (such as download quotas) to rate limit their users rather than making unrealistic promises of being able to offer full speed connections to every user, all the time.
As I said, the *only* service I can think of that this system may cause substantial difficulties for is a high resolution Netflix type video-on-demand service. With a 100 GB quota (typical size for a current "heavy user" account down here), that's only about 44 hours of 5 Mbps video (and full HDTV signals can require significantly more bandwidth than that).
However, the bandwidth demands of high resolution video so thoroughly dwarf the demands for anything else that it probably makes sense to target plans specifically at a TV replacement role rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all model. In particular, I don't want my comparatively low bandwidth network gaming subscription fees subsidising somebody else's HDTV viewing.
Hey, RJR, if you're really only speaking on your own behalf, why do you insist on padding out every single post (even the one-liners) with half a page of your professional associations?
Nobody else here seems to find it necessary to appeal to the authority of the positions they hold rather than letting their arguments speak for themselves. Why do you?
Drop the list of associations and you could drop the disclaimer, too.
They're also getting a whole lot of email addresses for the price of some free downloads. Sure, not everyone will sign up for their mailing list (which is an optional part of the download process), but a lot of people will :)
It's similar to something Mike has said many times: just like many other artists, obscurity is a much bigger problem for small scale game developers than piracy.
Re: Have a look at what's happened in Australia...
Generally agreed on everything Nathaniel posted. The "sky is falling" rhetoric from US commentators about tiered pricing being the death of the internet has never made a lot of sense to me, since download quota + over quota throttling + readily available usage information really doesn't put that much of a crimp in your internet usage. It *may* start to be an issue for HD video heavy services like Netflix, since they won't be getting subsidised by the non-Netflix users any more.
The biggest hassle with metered usage here in Australia is the *way* it is implemented.
If the ISP wanted to be nice, they would instruct the equipment responsible for the link to your house to drop the link and renegotiate it at a lower speed. Your router/computer would see the lower speed and everything would generally adjust fairly gracefully.
They typically don't do that though - they just drop a percentage of your packets until you're below the limit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_bucket). When we're talking cutting a 5+ Mbps connection to 256 kbps or less, that's a lot of potential for dropped packets.
Yes, it's better than overage charges and a lot better than no internet at all, but you still don't want to be gaming on a shaped connection.
(Techy types with ADSL and a router with adjustable SNR margins can smooth out a shaped link by cranking the SNR margin up to ridiculous levels, but that trick is going to be far beyond most internet users)
But for basic services like access to email, instant messaging, job search websites and government services? It should do the trick just fine (and much better than 57.6 kbps dial-up).
If people want access to the "fun" side of the internet, or more powerful educational and communications tools (which are likely to require sufficient bandwidth to handle reasonably high quality video), then that's an optional service they can pay for.
There may be plenty of other problems with M2Z's proposal, but the idea of a universal, publicly available basic level of internet access (even at relatively "slow" data rates) can't be counted as a major flaw.
I don't think techdirt has ever stated any particular concern over appropriately constrained data collection. In this case, Google is collecting the bare minimum of information (SSID, MAC address, street car location) needed to provide a specific service (efficient, GPS independent geolocation).
A DPA audit to confirm that really is all they're collecting is likely a good idea, but the basic service is fine.
Where massive databases are objectionable is when they overreach and collect data that has nothing to do with their stated purpose (or will obviously fail to achieve their stated purpose while still creating plenty of unnecessary vulnerabilities).
Strange as it may seem to TAM, it actually is possible to hold a nuanced opinion that lies somewhere between "data collection is always OK" and "data collection is always evil".
Whether or not the grandparent poster sounds sensible depends on which point of view you take.
If you look at it from the point of view of society *as a whole* (which is what lawmakers should be doing), then the article is saying that society is better off overall when there is a free flow of ideas and hence it is easier to make incremental improvements.
If you look at it from the point of view of individuals and companies with a myopic zero-sum view of the world ("if the other guy makes any money, that must mean they're cutting into my potential profits, not that they're growing the market for both of us"), then the article is saying that you must protect your imaginary property as aggressively as you can in order to preserve your profits.
This is why Mike hammers on about "growing the market for everyone" so much. The misguided belief in a zero-sum game is the key difference between IP protectionists and those favouring a more permissive imaginary property regime - it's an underlying assumption which significantly affects the way one interprets various situations.
(Warning: this turned into a bit of a wall o' text, but I've already spent too much time putting it together)
You yourself say that it isn't the DRM that keeps you on NetFlix - it is the quality of the service they provide.
Any engineering effort Netflix expend on their DRM system is engineering effort that could have been better spent providing you with an improved experience, thus making you even less likely to leave. DRM doesn't work at a fundamental level, because the very people you're trying to keep from accessing the content are the ones who have paid you money in order to access the content!
Regardless, in this case, Nina is merely taking the opposite stand from the major studios. They say "you can't use our content unless you place DRM on it". Nina is saying "you can't use my content unless you turn the DRM off or let me tell viewers where they can get it for free".
Since the NetFlix system apparently doesn't allow for DRM-free streams, and the "no bumper" policy rules out the second option, her answer currently means NetFlix simply won't have the movie.
That's her choice, and the one she feels best fits her principles (although the whole point of the article is whether allowing it crossed the line or not wasn't all that clear even to her - our innate senses of justice really aren't well adapted to dealing with the abundance resulting from non-destructive perfect duplication).
As you are free as a consumer to accept the NetFlix DRM, so Nina as a provider is free to reject it as an acceptable distribution mechanism. There are still plenty of DRM free ways to obtain it.
On a more general note, we're in a time of competing business models. The old guard (which includes NetFlix as an enabler) want to enforce DRM in the digital world so the scarcity based models continue to work. The up and comers (which include Nina and Techdirt) want to build models that take the proliferation of free copies as a starting assumption and figure out ways to personally prosper anyway.
The degree to which you see that competition as a moral conflict (in terms of rights to access information), as opposed to a mere recognition of the underlying technical reality, will affect the way you answer questions such as the one Nina wrote about in the article. The pragmatic answer (which I would give) would be to say "Sure, let NetFlix distribute it. It will make you a bit more money, and the inexorable decline of the old guard is unlikely to be either slowed nor hastened by it." On the other hand, you may, as Nina has, take the more principled view that says that there are ways that doing this may actually slow the decline of the old guard (such as being seen as legitimising the use of DRM) and hence feel it is better to disallow it.
The fact that I would personally have made a different decision in this case doesn't prevent me from respecting the views that lead to Nina making the decision she did.
On the post: Google Admits It Was Accidentally Collecting Some Open WiFi Data
Enabling HTTPS for Google search
If search clients (such as the search boxes offered by many browsers) start using the encrypted version by default, that's actually a significant change in how easy it will be to intercept details on what people are searching for.
As far as the incident itself goes, Google submitted to an audit, found they had screwed up, and shut the whole program down as a result. They've stated they will work with authorities to ensure the data is properly deleted, and review their internal processes to see how this slipped through quality control (IMO, the fact that it happened 4 years ago is likely to be significant - their quality control processes then probably weren't as good as their processes now).
It would be better if they hadn't screwed up in the first place, but given that they did, this seems to be about the best way they could handle it.
On the post: Can Someone Explain Why Circumvention For Non-Infringing Purposes Is Illegal?
Re:
Since computers can be used for nefarious purposes, they should be banned?
Since VCRs can be used to infringe copyright, they should be banned?
Bzzt, try again. Laws against certain behaviours and laws against technology which enable both legal and illegal behaviours are not the same thing. The former make sense (sometimes), but they latter generally do not.
On the post: Is It Illegal To Tell People How To Commit Suicide Online?
Re: Whats wrong with assisted suicide?
Those reasons generally have to do with the myriad of ways in which laws to legalise suicide can be exploited to get away with murder.
A society also has a vested interest in the well-being of individual members - allowing those members to off themselves due to otherwise temporary mental states may have nasty long-term consequences for the society as a whole (if we don't value and respect life itself, what does that imply for those things like truth, justice and beauty that are meaningful only in the context of human consciousness?).
Should euthanasia be an available option for people that have done everything they wish to in life? Possibly. But it isn't as simple as just making assisting in suicide legal across the board.
On the post: UK Court Says Software Company Can Be Liable For Buggy Software
Re: Software liability already exists
On the post: UK Court Says Software Company Can Be Liable For Buggy Software
Software liability already exists
For Software-as-a-Service providers with service-level-agreements with their customers, failure to achieve the contracted level of service is grounds for a civil suit.
Generally speaking, when you see those huge price differences between general purpose software and "enterprise" software? The latter often has a "right to sue" built in to the price (not always, but in the cases where it isn't, the price difference often isn't quite so large, either).
An interesting way to tackle this in general may be to allow vendors to mitigate or eliminate their liability by providing the source code to their product, allowing prospective customers to perform their own due diligence.
On the post: RIAA Wins Again: Judge Says LimeWire Induced Copyright Infringement
Key point: LimeWire filtered out their own stuff
As for whether it can be done legally, note that the *AAs of the world aren't bothering to go after torrent client developers, they're only going after the torrent search engines and tracker hosts.
On the post: Because Too Many People Think It's A Good Idea, Australia Holding Off On Approving Adult Video Game Rating
Gotta love election year :P
So, possibly sensible from a political point of view, but the logic of it is entirely unrelated to the pros and cons of the rating itself.
On the post: Now, Apparently It's Not Just Content Providers That Are Getting A Free Ride On Broadband Networks, But Consumers Too
Counting bandwidth
I'll try and break this down for the edification of anyone that happens across this thread in the future.
Scenario 1 (download from central server):
- Server owner pays ISP X for a net connection
- Client A pays ISP Y for a net connection
- Client A downloads 1 Gigabyte file from Server
- Client B pays ISP Z for a net connection
- Client B downloads 1 Gigabyte file from Server
ISP X has sent 1 gigabyte each to ISP Y and ISP Z
Total bytes transferred: 2 Gigabytes
Each ISP has been paid by one end user, inter-ISP transfers are accounted for under whatever peering arrangements are in place.
Scenario 2 (peer-to-peer transfer):
- Server owner pays ISP X for a net connection
- Client A pays ISP Y for a net connection
- Client A downloads 1 Gigabyte file from Server
- Client B pays ISP Z for a net connection
- Client B downloads 1 Gigabyte file from Client A via P2P
ISP X has sent 1 gigabyte to ISP Y
ISP Y has sent 1 gigabyte to ISP Z
Total bytes transferred: 2 Gigabytes
Each ISP has been paid by one end user, inter-ISP transfers are accounted for under whatever peering arrangements are in place.
So, two downloads of a 1 gigabyte file result in 2 gigabytes being transferred across the internet, regardless of whether the second download is from the original server or from a different client that had already downloaded the file.
P2P vs central dowload *does* make a difference when it comes to ISP peering arrangements and the bandwidth requirements for the server provider, but those have to do with the *distribution* of the data traffic rather than its overall volume.
On the post: Trio Of Important First Sale Cases All Hit Appeals Court In Early June
The 3rd case is not the same, but should still be reversed on appeal
The problem is that Blizzard can ban bots in their Terms of Service and cancel people's account if they catch them using a bot. That's all fine and well within Blizzard's rights (and as a WoW player, hooray for them doing it - bots can seriously mess up server economies).
What Blizzard have done in this third case, however, is to go after the *maker* of one of the bot programs and attempt to use copyright law to get the bot program *itself* declared illegal.
That's an abuse of copyright law, and the courts shouldn't allow it. Sure, the bot maker is creating a tool that has the sole purpose of helping people to violate Blizzard's Terms of Service in WoW, but that isn't illegal as things currently stand. If Blizzard would like it to be illegal, then they should be lobbying the legislative branch rather than persuading the judicial branch to get creative in interpreting the law.
On the post: Humble Indie Bundle Hits One Million In Sales... Goes Open Source
Re:
So you can get the games for free, *if* you're in a position to pull the source from Mercurial and build them yourself. Most people don't how to do that, and many of those that do will quite happily pay someone else to do it for them. Plus, as is frequently mentioned around here, getting games (even DRM heavy ones) for free is a trivial task for any even remotely tech savvy PC gamer.
See, this is what connecting with fans means: we give the developers money because we like what they're providing and the way they're providing it, and want them to continue doing what they're doing.
(Hell, I'd already bought World of Goo on Steam ages ago and still gave the WoG developers a cut of my contribution to this deal)
On the post: T-Mobile, Leap Move Take A Different Tack On Mobile Broadband
Re: Re: Re: Re: Have a look at what's happened in Australia...
However, most of them don't do that, and even the ones that do still clearly spell out what the quotas are as well as the shaped and unshaped maximum speeds.
Any given ISP is only going to have so much bandwidth connecting it to the backbone. I'd prefer them to have some honest accounting method (such as download quotas) to rate limit their users rather than making unrealistic promises of being able to offer full speed connections to every user, all the time.
As I said, the *only* service I can think of that this system may cause substantial difficulties for is a high resolution Netflix type video-on-demand service. With a 100 GB quota (typical size for a current "heavy user" account down here), that's only about 44 hours of 5 Mbps video (and full HDTV signals can require significantly more bandwidth than that).
However, the bandwidth demands of high resolution video so thoroughly dwarf the demands for anything else that it probably makes sense to target plans specifically at a TV replacement role rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all model. In particular, I don't want my comparatively low bandwidth network gaming subscription fees subsidising somebody else's HDTV viewing.
On the post: Apple Sued For Patent Infringement Over One Of The Broadest Patents You'll Ever See
Re: Masnick is qualified to render opinions ?
Nobody else here seems to find it necessary to appeal to the authority of the positions they hold rather than letting their arguments speak for themselves. Why do you?
Drop the list of associations and you could drop the disclaimer, too.
On the post: World Of Goo (This Time With Four Friends) Tries The Pay What You Want Model Once Again
Marketing connections
It's similar to something Mike has said many times: just like many other artists, obscurity is a much bigger problem for small scale game developers than piracy.
On the post: T-Mobile, Leap Move Take A Different Tack On Mobile Broadband
Re: Have a look at what's happened in Australia...
The biggest hassle with metered usage here in Australia is the *way* it is implemented.
If the ISP wanted to be nice, they would instruct the equipment responsible for the link to your house to drop the link and renegotiate it at a lower speed. Your router/computer would see the lower speed and everything would generally adjust fairly gracefully.
They typically don't do that though - they just drop a percentage of your packets until you're below the limit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_bucket). When we're talking cutting a 5+ Mbps connection to 256 kbps or less, that's a lot of potential for dropped packets.
Yes, it's better than overage charges and a lot better than no internet at all, but you still don't want to be gaming on a shaped connection.
(Techy types with ADSL and a router with adjustable SNR margins can smooth out a shaped link by cranking the SNR margin up to ridiculous levels, but that trick is going to be far beyond most internet users)
On the post: Startup Still Clamoring For Free Spectrum To Build Out Wireless Broadband
Plenty fast enough for critical services
But for basic services like access to email, instant messaging, job search websites and government services? It should do the trick just fine (and much better than 57.6 kbps dial-up).
If people want access to the "fun" side of the internet, or more powerful educational and communications tools (which are likely to require sufficient bandwidth to handle reasonably high quality video), then that's an optional service they can pay for.
There may be plenty of other problems with M2Z's proposal, but the idea of a universal, publicly available basic level of internet access (even at relatively "slow" data rates) can't be counted as a major flaw.
On the post: Germany "Horrified" That Google's Collecting Publicly-Available Data
Re:
A DPA audit to confirm that really is all they're collecting is likely a good idea, but the basic service is fine.
Where massive databases are objectionable is when they overreach and collect data that has nothing to do with their stated purpose (or will obviously fail to achieve their stated purpose while still creating plenty of unnecessary vulnerabilities).
Strange as it may seem to TAM, it actually is possible to hold a nuanced opinion that lies somewhere between "data collection is always OK" and "data collection is always evil".
On the post: Imitation Isn't Just The Sincerest Form Of Flattery; It Can Be An Important Business Strategy
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
There's a reason "Patent protection is the mother of invention" has never become a cliche.
On the post: Imitation Isn't Just The Sincerest Form Of Flattery; It Can Be An Important Business Strategy
Re: Re:
If you look at it from the point of view of society *as a whole* (which is what lawmakers should be doing), then the article is saying that society is better off overall when there is a free flow of ideas and hence it is easier to make incremental improvements.
If you look at it from the point of view of individuals and companies with a myopic zero-sum view of the world ("if the other guy makes any money, that must mean they're cutting into my potential profits, not that they're growing the market for both of us"), then the article is saying that you must protect your imaginary property as aggressively as you can in order to preserve your profits.
This is why Mike hammers on about "growing the market for everyone" so much. The misguided belief in a zero-sum game is the key difference between IP protectionists and those favouring a more permissive imaginary property regime - it's an underlying assumption which significantly affects the way one interprets various situations.
On the post: Nina Paley: My Decision To Turn Down Netflix Due To DRM
Re:
You yourself say that it isn't the DRM that keeps you on NetFlix - it is the quality of the service they provide.
Any engineering effort Netflix expend on their DRM system is engineering effort that could have been better spent providing you with an improved experience, thus making you even less likely to leave. DRM doesn't work at a fundamental level, because the very people you're trying to keep from accessing the content are the ones who have paid you money in order to access the content!
Regardless, in this case, Nina is merely taking the opposite stand from the major studios. They say "you can't use our content unless you place DRM on it". Nina is saying "you can't use my content unless you turn the DRM off or let me tell viewers where they can get it for free".
Since the NetFlix system apparently doesn't allow for DRM-free streams, and the "no bumper" policy rules out the second option, her answer currently means NetFlix simply won't have the movie.
That's her choice, and the one she feels best fits her principles (although the whole point of the article is whether allowing it crossed the line or not wasn't all that clear even to her - our innate senses of justice really aren't well adapted to dealing with the abundance resulting from non-destructive perfect duplication).
As you are free as a consumer to accept the NetFlix DRM, so Nina as a provider is free to reject it as an acceptable distribution mechanism. There are still plenty of DRM free ways to obtain it.
On a more general note, we're in a time of competing business models. The old guard (which includes NetFlix as an enabler) want to enforce DRM in the digital world so the scarcity based models continue to work. The up and comers (which include Nina and Techdirt) want to build models that take the proliferation of free copies as a starting assumption and figure out ways to personally prosper anyway.
The degree to which you see that competition as a moral conflict (in terms of rights to access information), as opposed to a mere recognition of the underlying technical reality, will affect the way you answer questions such as the one Nina wrote about in the article. The pragmatic answer (which I would give) would be to say "Sure, let NetFlix distribute it. It will make you a bit more money, and the inexorable decline of the old guard is unlikely to be either slowed nor hastened by it." On the other hand, you may, as Nina has, take the more principled view that says that there are ways that doing this may actually slow the decline of the old guard (such as being seen as legitimising the use of DRM) and hence feel it is better to disallow it.
The fact that I would personally have made a different decision in this case doesn't prevent me from respecting the views that lead to Nina making the decision she did.
On the post: Blizzard Sells $2 Million In Virtual Livestock In Four Hours
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
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