You have to consider it a victory when you lose the ruling, as in the SCO case and your side has to pay costs on top of that. A spectacular victory that drove SCO into monetary bankruptcy to match their moral and technical bankruptcy. Even if the corpse hasn't stopped twitching.
As for actual damages, if Oracle can establish any, one of our AC's has pointed out the breadth of Google's business as one reason this may be almost impossible to do so I'll add another one which is the nearly equal breadth of Oracle's business. It's hard to imagine what if any profit some part of Google's business made from that and what part of Oracle's operations would have been impacted and to what degree.
Seems like the ideal place to "take the money and run" the shut up about it all. Perhaps Boies got infected with "SCOX Self Importance Complex Disease" from hanging around with Darryl McBride for so long.
As Mike's pointed out the cost has always been borne by the rights holder. It's only since the "rights holders" have decided that everyone and every file is a real or potential thief that costs such as this have become an issue.
"Can you imagine how much it would cost if each copyright holder in the world had to hire enough staff to check every file locker, every p2p site, all the millions of torrents and every search engine daily to track down violators?"
There, FIFY.
Not that it makes any more sense but might as well take it all in. They don't HAVE to now. They CHOOSE to. There IS a difference.
The *AAs have hired people to do just that for all the good it's done them I doubt that "piracy" has declined all that much. It's like looking for prions and much less useful to society as a whole. Nor has it added a penny to the productivity of the rights holders when the money spent on tracking down the monster under the bed than busting grannies and 14 year olds.
I don't know how much longer they can withstand all this before the costs of lawyers, shady investigative firms who seem to find "pirates" in the atoms of water, buying legislators and governments around the planet, propping up ACTA and TPP and ever increasing profits drive them into the poor house and eventual bankruptcy. Or worse some sort of Dickensian workhouse to pay off their debts while they exist on gruel instead of caviar.
Oh, and the high judgements are a result of Statue Law and bought off legislators not, in almost all cases, the validity of their case or evidence of real damages caused.
Actually I found the ruling to be quite clear. The judge sets up the various scenarios EMI pled and knocks them down.
My understanding is that in a counter notice the locker is only required to "delete" the link to the allegedly infringing file and not the file itself. If the counter notice is successful then the locker is expected to restore the file link.
As for records of who side/up loaded to a site and when the server and the database where this information is kept will already be storing this information in a properly designed site. Otherwise you're stuck with a bunch of hand coded HTML links and if something goes wrong no one knows where anything really is because the design has invited disaster. So you just turn off or rehome the link/file with an appropriate message. There's no chaos except for the normal WTF when the person who side loaded the file. Ideally that would never happen but we're human and far from ideal.
It's a good ruling all the way around and while I'm sure it will go to appeal, IF an appeal court will hear it, it appears to be on solid ground no matter what OOTB may think. Nor do I see file lockers being made untouchable by this ruling because MP3tunes respond appropriately when they received them much as YouTube does.
Should a range of IPs be fraudulently used to sideload the file/link then there's a registrar who needs a good legal spanking. There are enough protections built into Apache, for example, to quickly stop the sort of shenanigans you suggest. Even should the IP disappear a backtrace on the route the file is taking from Point A to Point Z would also lead back to the originating server. Should there be a baddie (man in the middle, say) it can be discovered and dealt with that way.
What I'm saying is that one time use URLs have a short life span and with the increasing shortage of free IPv4 URLs they'll get shorter. The other problem with one time use URLs is that they are also taken as the symptom of an attack either underway or planned. That's one of the reasons I used "fraudulent" earlier. Not that the file itself is infringing but that the method used is a warning sign of far more than just allegedly infringing files.
In fact one of the sites I run does exactly that not because of files but other issues.
Keeping transaction records in a MySQL database, properly designed, compresses the transaction down to a few bytes. The transaction record itself is small and text rather than large and digital as is the case with a MP3 file or movie or photograph. That transaction is linked to the file and there it is. Done.
As for the time and energy that may be needed for EMI or any other major label, well, that's part of the cost of doing business. Always has been where IP is concerned so I won't lose any sleep over it and nor should anyone else despite what apologists like OOTB say.
The key thing in the Common Law is that it takes a number of rulings and precedents to clearly establish a response to a given issue. Little or none if it occurs "overnight". When you say "But that doesn't allow the judge to concoct this data retention and retroactive deletion requirement out of thin air like he did. If sideloading is impossible for copyright owners to police, it's Congress' job to address it," you are 90% wrong. The vast majority of the Common Law is decided by and defined by courts and juries. Civil codes or Statue Law, while present in most jurisdictions, form a tiny part of the Common Law with rulings and precedents stretching back to the says of King Alfred The Great who set the system up. Where Statue Law is insufficient or lacking legally then a judge is expected to, guided by precedent, rule in the fashion this judge has. An Appeals Court overturning this ruling automatically isn't expected simply because of the novelty of the ruling. Disabling a link to an allegedly infringing file is one of the normal responses now to a take down notice. The file remains, however, until the dispute is resolved one way or another until the dispute is settled. That is expected under the DCMA, if I understand it correctly.
As for record keeping while it may be novel in this context it's hardly unheard of in the real world of running web sites, at least good ones that allow user participation. It's become, over time, the normal way of doing business. Site builders like Jommla!, Drupal and WordPress set up their databases doing just that.
Nor does it come out of thin air. EMI had been demanding this or a similar ruling from the start. On the surface they got it which may appear to be a win for them but I think they'll live to regret that they ever put this card in play as the quality of the records will improve and may do more to prove a non-infringing use by the person who up/side/standing-on-my-head loading.
As to your question about privacy, please keep in mind that privacy is not the same as anonymity. The context you use it in indicates, to me, that confusion. If a file locker requires registration then there is plainly no anonymity of a transaction in that the user must be logged in in order to upload or side load. I'd guess that to the extent strong privacy laws exist in the United States that State laws would prevail as a result of this ruling.
I'd also agree that ultimately Congress and various States will have to take this matter up to address some of the issues you bring up though I'm also sure that in the broad ocean of Common Law the answers already exist. From their records I don't expect much from the legislative process at this time because all they tend to do is view things in the *AAs extremist views which could eliminate the gains in this ruling rather than clarify anything. "Be careful what you pray for."
It's equally true that technology itself will move in to correct some of what you see as flaws. Servers such as Apache have a greater ability to identify and deal with ephemeral IP addresses for their own security rather than anything the *AAs want to make use of. IPv6 will mean a complete rethink on the IP maximalist side of things as a direct result of how it's structured and the security features built into it.
Keep in mind, too, that there has been a general acceptance by the courts that an IP address does not lead to identification of a human being at either end of the transaction. So the record keeping the ruling requires, which is only a minor change in how many sites operate now, may not interfere with privacy though again keep in mind that privacy and anonymity are two entirely different things.
Though the ruling is far from perfect it does mark a giant step forward, in my opinion from the situation that exists now and may reduce the constant abuse of process the MAFIAA, as you call them, indulge in. Nor do I see anything which would cause an appellate court to overturn the entire ruling. Once again, the setting of a potential precedent and that the novelty of parts of the ruling by themselves aren't grounds unless they have drastically changed or, more likely, ignored the Statue and Common Law as it stood before the ruling was made. If either had been the case the MAFIAAs lawyers would be screaming blue murder by now and they don't appear to be by all reports.
We are talking about the same industry that can't figure out whether or not the file infringes in their sense of the word or if one of their promotional or A&R people uploaded the song as part of a promotional campaign. Right?
Of course, I'd expect you to volunteer to help them out being that they're almost bankrupt from having to use Google or Bing once or twice a day to see what they can find. Or not find. The cost is right up there with a manned mission to Mars, isn't it? So they obviously need volunteer help before they end up on skid road.
It appears to be less common in the States for costs to be awarded in cases of what we'd consider an egregious abuse of process in civil proceedings like this one. Canadian judges have far less tolerance for this kind of legal bully boy activity that it appears American judges do.
It may be why, despite many threats to sue in Canada, the *AA's and their Canadian branch plant haven't done it to anywhere near the degree that they have in the States. Even in Quebec and it's French inherited civil code.
Make no mistake about it. This has been an attempt to legally bully by EMI. If we can't beat them in court we'll happily bankrupt them keeping them here just because we're bigger than they are and we can. It seems to have been successful.
All in all I'd rather watch Game of Thrones and see flashes of cast nudity rather than anything including nudity of Eric Kessler. ;-)
Now that that's out of the way bob or no bob if the entertainment vendor won't make what they have available simply, easily and at the lowest cost possible including streaming and torrenting then fans of the show shut out for whatever reason will...ahhhhh...pirate. Even if they'd much sooner pay if they only could.
Fad or no fad if HBO is not doing faddish things like streaming or, even, torrenting the show they're losing money they'd otherwise be bringing in.
This is known as cutting off your nose to spite your face.
What's so unbelievably funny about all of this IP drivel is that it wasn't until the 1960s that the United States recognized foreign copyrights. (Note to trolls: Don't give me the everyone else was doing it too because they weren't.)
Directly or indirectly when the Industrial Revolution got going American companies happily ignored foreign and even domestic patents until they started to assemble some of their own. THEN they became true believers.
(I can see it now, the US COC under a tent holding an foursquare IP revival meeting in Hollywood and on Wall Street using the same technique so successfully used by folks like Billy Sunday.
At least Sunday believed what he was preaching where I can see the US Chamber of Comics nodding and winking to the "IP Insiders" in the front set of pews while preaching what they know is utter bull manure to the great unwashed in the back pews which includes most congress critters.)
The mere fact that there appears to be growing resistance to TPP around the Pacific Rim and the American concept of IP indicates that the commercially based American empire may be well beyond its best before date. That's also illustrated by the illusion that you can negotiate any kind of Pacific Rim trade deal without China at the table these days is too funny by half.
Then there's ACTA wobbling its way slowly towards oblivion. If the EU and its members back out then that's finished and gone, thank God.
"Within a few years, MS-DOS/Windows dominated. 2 reasons: effective business marketing strategy, and allowing anyone to develop (in fact bundling BASIC). In fact the latter fed into the former, as business would be able to roll their own programs."
Let's do keep in mind that when the IBM PC came out MS was still, relatively speaking, a small company. The story about how DOS ended up on the PC rather than CP/M is well known but it wasn't IBM's first choice. MS probably would have provided BASIC for it anyway as they did with numerous other PCs at the time. The business marketing came from IBM, not MS, because business knew IBM and trusted it. Most purchasers in medium and big business had never heard of Microsoft when the first IBM PC came out.
Fast forward to Windows 3.1. MS had enough money and clout by that time to persuade computer makers to preinstall Windows which, for all practical purposes, blocked other OSs being installed by businesses particularly after the first edition of MS Office came out. (Over simplified, before someone points that out.) As much as anything that led to virtual monopoly that MS has enjoyed on the desktop ever since and led to the 5000 pound mutant gorilla tossing its weight around along with various bits of office furniture.
MS was late to the smartphone market and when they did arrive it was with a fourth rate product even if a number of pundits at the time insisted that it would soon dominate. It didn't nor could it persuade enough enough smart phone makers to preinstall it and cellular telcos greeted it with an enormous yawn. Buyer focus was on the iPhone and Blackberry.
MS on smart phones is a poor 4th after iPhone, Android and Blackberry and sales are declining even faster than Blackberry's are. If Blackberry's new OS is a huge improvement over what they currently have, which it appears to be, then I suspect MS will remain in 4th place.
You'd think MS would know better than to try the "walled garden" thing after their run in with US anti-trust laws and the EU hammering them and still very suspicious of them. Apple's excuse is their hardware is special, same excuse they have for the Mac and people seem to buy that. MS is wanting Win8(RT) to be general purpose so it can be installed on almost any smartphone that excuse isn't there.
The walled garden approach is worse than dumb it's self defeating.
Lennon's remark about that was that he found that distressing that the Beatles in that period WERE actually bigger than Jesus as far as "fan" base went and the kerfuffle afterwards in the United States just made them bigger.
While getting downloads seems from Amazon impossible and elsewhere getting shiny plastic disks is still more than possible.
As has been mentioned Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Yoko Ono control the catalogue now. I believe that George Harrison's wife has equal say.
They are their own gatekeepers. In part because they were sick and tired of getting exploited by likes of Northern Songs Ltd, their publisher while the band was still together and then the feeling of betrayal when Michael Jackson put the big neon "Unbelievable Sale on Beatles Material" sign up when Jackson had control of the catalogue. Remember the Nike commercial?
The other, perhaps more practical, reason is that it's easier just to say NO up front than to have to deal with the deluge requests if they left open much in the way of a possible yes to requests. The Stones and The Who protect their back catalogues almost as jealously as do a few other bands from the period and other artists and bands right up to today. Things will loosen up once the remaining band members die or decide that a few more projects are worth letting through the barrier as long as they get the final say of how their stuff was used before release.
Beatles songs have been rigorously protected for years, at least Michael Jackson bought the catalogue and put up a On Sale sign until Paul, George, Ringo and Yoko tore various strips off him.
I've never been sure it was because the band didn't want to be known as sell outs, though that was John's explanation or that they just didn't want to keep saying no to the thousands of requests to use the songs for everything from charities, to Cheezies, to companies they certainly didn't want to be identified with.
Given the reaction to Nike using a Beatles' song which was hostile to say the least we won't hear commercials using any of the for a while.
Now this seems to be the sort of thing that the band would approve of, as it did get to use the song they wanted because if Paul, Yoko or Ringo had said "no" that would haven been the end of it.
The Beatles weren't just a huge part of the 1960s they were an enormous part of it. They remain a huge part of music today, even if the parts were less than the sum of the whole after they broke up.
Between Dylan and The Beatles rock'n'roll and all popular music forms in the West and elsewhere were changed irrevocably. Musicians were no longer tied to outside songwriters but were expected to write their own stuff, experimentation was encouraged and the Beatles, at least, proved you could experiment and be a bit arty without going to the painful extremes of most of the "art rockers" of the 1970s.
Just as importantly musicians were expect to know how to play their instruments which caused some bands, The Beach Boys for one to have to learn their instruments which they did.
It was also expected that a live show would be live and not merely lip synched over a prerecorded musical track. (Add Autotune to that and we're back to elaborate Ed Sullivan Show performances these days.)
It even appears that Mad Men got a discount on the fees to use the music. Which doesn't excuse all the hoops the show had to jump through to get what they wanted on the air.
I don't think it's possible to lock up The Beatles behind a walled garden or to do the same for Elvis, The Stones, Hendrix, Clapton and many others from that period and pathfinders in music up to the present day. Not culturally at least. (Mr RIAA, I'm not paying royalties to you every time I "sing" "For No One" in my brain!!!)
It should be easier for programs like Mad Men to use that sort of material easily particularly as Mad Men can hardly be termed exploitative which is one of the reasons Lennon and now Yoko guard uses so much.
There are compilations and re-releases of Beatles material out there but nothing themed as someone has noted. I'm just wondering, given how dynamic the band was just what themes you'd suggest. A sampling of "post commercial pop" Beatles would be as easy as Rubber Soul and Sgt Pepper. Though as hard as it is to grasp it now The Beatles defined what was commercially acceptable along with Dylan and The Rolling Stones.
The simplest solution at the time was to simply ignore the stupidity of the export controls as writing 128 bit encryption software at the time wasn't all that difficult for practitioners in the field to do.
The other solution was to just sit back and ignore it. I had no trouble downloading the 128 bit encryption software from out side of the United States and I doubt many others did. It's all very well and good for the US to ban export of these kinds of technology but the reality is that once it was released "into the wild" it was around the planet in seconds.
The other bit of madness was to write an ActiveX control so that a browser, well IE, could access sites secured by SEED. Given that of all MS Internet technology perhaps only Outlook Express has more holes in it than ActiveX does. if the desire was for a secure transaction then using just about anything including two tin cans and a string would have been better than ActiveX. At least a pair of tin cans and a string are harder to use as attack vectors than ActiveX is.
OK, so now you have South Korea, a country wanting to be knows for it's technology prowess and abilities that's a Windows monoculture by design. At least the design of one government department.
The problem in the smart phone era is that Windows on smart phones is so rare as to be nearly invisible. Korea always had a choice. the picked one a 12 year old script kiddie could have come up with between sips of some energy drink and bites of the lastest designer sandwiches from 7-11.
In fairness to MS, well a little fairness, the bureaucrats who made the decision(s) that brought South Korea here probably know as much about encrytion as they do about the Internet, Web and how their computers work. They understand the On/Off switch.
Sorry but what's happened is nothing close to socialism. It's typical bureaucratic stupidity but in no way socialist.
As it is it's hard to define South Korea's economy as capitalist in any sense Ayn Rand would approve of. Nor is it socialism in any sense than a Swede would understand it. It closely models the Japanese economy which is dominated by immense companies such as Hitachi, Sony etc rather than what we're familiar with in Europe or North America or Australia and New Zealand. Perhaps inwardly mercantile might describe it best.
The same type of people complained that the penny post made people lonelier because now just anyone..ANYONE...could post a letter first thing in the morning and get an answer back in the afternoon. If you lived in London, the largest city in the world at the time, you were favoured with 4 deliveries a day so you could exchange written "communications" that often as long as both addresses were London addresses. All of this made people lonely. It just HAD to.
And all these stories about romances and marriages, of all things, via the post couldn't be true. How can you find true love there? Don't you know that the girl on the other end of that exchange is a charwoman, M'Lord? You just can't go about romancing the lowest of the low as if she's your equal!
Turns out his Lordship had been when they tied the knot a few days later and the resulting partnership not only survived but it was made in heaven. (No mention was ever made about the possibility these two people actually got to know each other deeply in the exchange of letters. So much so that things like social conventions of the time, how they looked, and age became the trivialities they mostly are became...well, trivial. Welcome to the world's first social network(s).
How people choose to communicate is less important that the fact that they are communicating. It doesn't matter whether it's by mail, in the coffee shop, bar, Facebook, LinkedIn or where ever. They're communicating. That alone makes the vast majority of us less lonely not more lonely. Even trolls.
No matter how hard one tries one can't shoehorn the life post Web and broad scale use of the Internet and Web into what came before it. Any more that one couldn't shoehorn life before telegraph, radio, telephone and television with what had come before and judge things like happiness and loneliness by what came before.
With each new introduction in communications technology there have been those insist on what came before was far preferable socially than what it's like now. In each case they've misunderstood, often deliberately, what these changes actually do accomplish in their link to some kind of past utopia that only they can remember.
Many of these people, today, seem to be IP extremists, those married to the past as if God given and the only way to live. (God him/her/them/self strongly disagrees but they aren't listening to any deities at the moment.) Not all are but they still have a personal axe to grind when facing different methods and norms of interpersonal relations.
I guess my partner and I were doing it all wrong all those years before we decided to "shack up" rather and remain "IRC up'd"! Even if we were we're happy, deeply in love and isn't that what it's supposed to be?
On the post: Judge Ridicules Oracle's Risky Choice To Forego Statutory Damages And Seek Bigger Payout
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As for actual damages, if Oracle can establish any, one of our AC's has pointed out the breadth of Google's business as one reason this may be almost impossible to do so I'll add another one which is the nearly equal breadth of Oracle's business. It's hard to imagine what if any profit some part of Google's business made from that and what part of Oracle's operations would have been impacted and to what degree.
Seems like the ideal place to "take the money and run" the shut up about it all. Perhaps Boies got infected with "SCOX Self Importance Complex Disease" from hanging around with Darryl McBride for so long.
On the post: MP3Tunes Ruling Protects DMCA Safe Harbors
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"Can you imagine how much it would cost if each copyright holder in the world had to hire enough staff to check every file locker, every p2p site, all the millions of torrents and every search engine daily to track down violators?"
There, FIFY.
Not that it makes any more sense but might as well take it all in. They don't HAVE to now. They CHOOSE to. There IS a difference.
The *AAs have hired people to do just that for all the good it's done them I doubt that "piracy" has declined all that much. It's like looking for prions and much less useful to society as a whole. Nor has it added a penny to the productivity of the rights holders when the money spent on tracking down the monster under the bed than busting grannies and 14 year olds.
I don't know how much longer they can withstand all this before the costs of lawyers, shady investigative firms who seem to find "pirates" in the atoms of water, buying legislators and governments around the planet, propping up ACTA and TPP and ever increasing profits drive them into the poor house and eventual bankruptcy. Or worse some sort of Dickensian workhouse to pay off their debts while they exist on gruel instead of caviar.
Oh, and the high judgements are a result of Statue Law and bought off legislators not, in almost all cases, the validity of their case or evidence of real damages caused.
Cry me a river of crocodile tears.
On the post: MP3Tunes Ruling Protects DMCA Safe Harbors
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My understanding is that in a counter notice the locker is only required to "delete" the link to the allegedly infringing file and not the file itself. If the counter notice is successful then the locker is expected to restore the file link.
As for records of who side/up loaded to a site and when the server and the database where this information is kept will already be storing this information in a properly designed site. Otherwise you're stuck with a bunch of hand coded HTML links and if something goes wrong no one knows where anything really is because the design has invited disaster. So you just turn off or rehome the link/file with an appropriate message. There's no chaos except for the normal WTF when the person who side loaded the file. Ideally that would never happen but we're human and far from ideal.
It's a good ruling all the way around and while I'm sure it will go to appeal, IF an appeal court will hear it, it appears to be on solid ground no matter what OOTB may think. Nor do I see file lockers being made untouchable by this ruling because MP3tunes respond appropriately when they received them much as YouTube does.
Should a range of IPs be fraudulently used to sideload the file/link then there's a registrar who needs a good legal spanking. There are enough protections built into Apache, for example, to quickly stop the sort of shenanigans you suggest. Even should the IP disappear a backtrace on the route the file is taking from Point A to Point Z would also lead back to the originating server. Should there be a baddie (man in the middle, say) it can be discovered and dealt with that way.
What I'm saying is that one time use URLs have a short life span and with the increasing shortage of free IPv4 URLs they'll get shorter. The other problem with one time use URLs is that they are also taken as the symptom of an attack either underway or planned. That's one of the reasons I used "fraudulent" earlier. Not that the file itself is infringing but that the method used is a warning sign of far more than just allegedly infringing files.
In fact one of the sites I run does exactly that not because of files but other issues.
Keeping transaction records in a MySQL database, properly designed, compresses the transaction down to a few bytes. The transaction record itself is small and text rather than large and digital as is the case with a MP3 file or movie or photograph. That transaction is linked to the file and there it is. Done.
As for the time and energy that may be needed for EMI or any other major label, well, that's part of the cost of doing business. Always has been where IP is concerned so I won't lose any sleep over it and nor should anyone else despite what apologists like OOTB say.
The key thing in the Common Law is that it takes a number of rulings and precedents to clearly establish a response to a given issue. Little or none if it occurs "overnight". When you say "But that doesn't allow the judge to concoct this data retention and retroactive deletion requirement out of thin air like he did. If sideloading is impossible for copyright owners to police, it's Congress' job to address it," you are 90% wrong. The vast majority of the Common Law is decided by and defined by courts and juries. Civil codes or Statue Law, while present in most jurisdictions, form a tiny part of the Common Law with rulings and precedents stretching back to the says of King Alfred The Great who set the system up. Where Statue Law is insufficient or lacking legally then a judge is expected to, guided by precedent, rule in the fashion this judge has. An Appeals Court overturning this ruling automatically isn't expected simply because of the novelty of the ruling. Disabling a link to an allegedly infringing file is one of the normal responses now to a take down notice. The file remains, however, until the dispute is resolved one way or another until the dispute is settled. That is expected under the DCMA, if I understand it correctly.
As for record keeping while it may be novel in this context it's hardly unheard of in the real world of running web sites, at least good ones that allow user participation. It's become, over time, the normal way of doing business. Site builders like Jommla!, Drupal and WordPress set up their databases doing just that.
Nor does it come out of thin air. EMI had been demanding this or a similar ruling from the start. On the surface they got it which may appear to be a win for them but I think they'll live to regret that they ever put this card in play as the quality of the records will improve and may do more to prove a non-infringing use by the person who up/side/standing-on-my-head loading.
As to your question about privacy, please keep in mind that privacy is not the same as anonymity. The context you use it in indicates, to me, that confusion. If a file locker requires registration then there is plainly no anonymity of a transaction in that the user must be logged in in order to upload or side load. I'd guess that to the extent strong privacy laws exist in the United States that State laws would prevail as a result of this ruling.
I'd also agree that ultimately Congress and various States will have to take this matter up to address some of the issues you bring up though I'm also sure that in the broad ocean of Common Law the answers already exist. From their records I don't expect much from the legislative process at this time because all they tend to do is view things in the *AAs extremist views which could eliminate the gains in this ruling rather than clarify anything. "Be careful what you pray for."
It's equally true that technology itself will move in to correct some of what you see as flaws. Servers such as Apache have a greater ability to identify and deal with ephemeral IP addresses for their own security rather than anything the *AAs want to make use of. IPv6 will mean a complete rethink on the IP maximalist side of things as a direct result of how it's structured and the security features built into it.
Keep in mind, too, that there has been a general acceptance by the courts that an IP address does not lead to identification of a human being at either end of the transaction. So the record keeping the ruling requires, which is only a minor change in how many sites operate now, may not interfere with privacy though again keep in mind that privacy and anonymity are two entirely different things.
Though the ruling is far from perfect it does mark a giant step forward, in my opinion from the situation that exists now and may reduce the constant abuse of process the MAFIAA, as you call them, indulge in. Nor do I see anything which would cause an appellate court to overturn the entire ruling. Once again, the setting of a potential precedent and that the novelty of parts of the ruling by themselves aren't grounds unless they have drastically changed or, more likely, ignored the Statue and Common Law as it stood before the ruling was made. If either had been the case the MAFIAAs lawyers would be screaming blue murder by now and they don't appear to be by all reports.
On the post: MP3Tunes Ruling Protects DMCA Safe Harbors
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Of course, I'd expect you to volunteer to help them out being that they're almost bankrupt from having to use Google or Bing once or twice a day to see what they can find. Or not find. The cost is right up there with a manned mission to Mars, isn't it? So they obviously need volunteer help before they end up on skid road.
On the post: MP3Tunes Ruling Protects DMCA Safe Harbors
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On the post: EMI Kills Off More Innovation: MP3Tunes Declares Bankruptcy Due To 'Withering' Legal Costs
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It may be why, despite many threats to sue in Canada, the *AA's and their Canadian branch plant haven't done it to anywhere near the degree that they have in the States. Even in Quebec and it's French inherited civil code.
Make no mistake about it. This has been an attempt to legally bully by EMI. If we can't beat them in court we'll happily bankrupt them keeping them here just because we're bigger than they are and we can. It seems to have been successful.
On the post: Game Of Thrones On Track To Be Most Pirated Show Of 2012; Pirates Still Asking HBO For Legitimate Options
Now that that's out of the way bob or no bob if the entertainment vendor won't make what they have available simply, easily and at the lowest cost possible including streaming and torrenting then fans of the show shut out for whatever reason will...ahhhhh...pirate. Even if they'd much sooner pay if they only could.
Fad or no fad if HBO is not doing faddish things like streaming or, even, torrenting the show they're losing money they'd otherwise be bringing in.
This is known as cutting off your nose to spite your face.
On the post: Game Of Thrones On Track To Be Most Pirated Show Of 2012; Pirates Still Asking HBO For Legitimate Options
Re: Re: Scientific Proof of the success of paywalls!
Game of Thrones shirts go on sale at the end of Season Two at only $300 a pop. You don't really need that new suit for work, do you? ;-)
On the post: SOPA Supporters Urge White House To Use Secretive TPP Process To Insert Draconian New IP Laws
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Directly or indirectly when the Industrial Revolution got going American companies happily ignored foreign and even domestic patents until they started to assemble some of their own. THEN they became true believers.
(I can see it now, the US COC under a tent holding an foursquare IP revival meeting in Hollywood and on Wall Street using the same technique so successfully used by folks like Billy Sunday.
At least Sunday believed what he was preaching where I can see the US Chamber of Comics nodding and winking to the "IP Insiders" in the front set of pews while preaching what they know is utter bull manure to the great unwashed in the back pews which includes most congress critters.)
The mere fact that there appears to be growing resistance to TPP around the Pacific Rim and the American concept of IP indicates that the commercially based American empire may be well beyond its best before date. That's also illustrated by the illusion that you can negotiate any kind of Pacific Rim trade deal without China at the table these days is too funny by half.
Then there's ACTA wobbling its way slowly towards oblivion. If the EU and its members back out then that's finished and gone, thank God.
On the post: SOPA Supporters Urge White House To Use Secretive TPP Process To Insert Draconian New IP Laws
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On the post: Iran's Internet Filters Filter Out Leader's Screed Against Getting Around Filters
LOL doesn't describe this!
From the followup post to this they are due for an epiphany, too, and won't have it for the same reasons.
Just, too, too funny!
On the post: Old Habits Or New Envy? Microsoft Bans 3rd Party Browsers On Windows RT
Let's do keep in mind that when the IBM PC came out MS was still, relatively speaking, a small company. The story about how DOS ended up on the PC rather than CP/M is well known but it wasn't IBM's first choice. MS probably would have provided BASIC for it anyway as they did with numerous other PCs at the time. The business marketing came from IBM, not MS, because business knew IBM and trusted it. Most purchasers in medium and big business had never heard of Microsoft when the first IBM PC came out.
Fast forward to Windows 3.1. MS had enough money and clout by that time to persuade computer makers to preinstall Windows which, for all practical purposes, blocked other OSs being installed by businesses particularly after the first edition of MS Office came out. (Over simplified, before someone points that out.) As much as anything that led to virtual monopoly that MS has enjoyed on the desktop ever since and led to the 5000 pound mutant gorilla tossing its weight around along with various bits of office furniture.
MS was late to the smartphone market and when they did arrive it was with a fourth rate product even if a number of pundits at the time insisted that it would soon dominate. It didn't nor could it persuade enough enough smart phone makers to preinstall it and cellular telcos greeted it with an enormous yawn. Buyer focus was on the iPhone and Blackberry.
MS on smart phones is a poor 4th after iPhone, Android and Blackberry and sales are declining even faster than Blackberry's are. If Blackberry's new OS is a huge improvement over what they currently have, which it appears to be, then I suspect MS will remain in 4th place.
You'd think MS would know better than to try the "walled garden" thing after their run in with US anti-trust laws and the EU hammering them and still very suspicious of them. Apple's excuse is their hardware is special, same excuse they have for the Mac and people seem to buy that. MS is wanting Win8(RT) to be general purpose so it can be installed on almost any smartphone that excuse isn't there.
The walled garden approach is worse than dumb it's self defeating.
On the post: The Ridiculous Hoops Mad Men Had To Jump Through To Use Part Of A Beatles Song
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On the post: The Ridiculous Hoops Mad Men Had To Jump Through To Use Part Of A Beatles Song
Re: Here, There and Everywhere?
As has been mentioned Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Yoko Ono control the catalogue now. I believe that George Harrison's wife has equal say.
They are their own gatekeepers. In part because they were sick and tired of getting exploited by likes of Northern Songs Ltd, their publisher while the band was still together and then the feeling of betrayal when Michael Jackson put the big neon "Unbelievable Sale on Beatles Material" sign up when Jackson had control of the catalogue. Remember the Nike commercial?
The other, perhaps more practical, reason is that it's easier just to say NO up front than to have to deal with the deluge requests if they left open much in the way of a possible yes to requests. The Stones and The Who protect their back catalogues almost as jealously as do a few other bands from the period and other artists and bands right up to today. Things will loosen up once the remaining band members die or decide that a few more projects are worth letting through the barrier as long as they get the final say of how their stuff was used before release.
On the post: The Ridiculous Hoops Mad Men Had To Jump Through To Use Part Of A Beatles Song
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I've never been sure it was because the band didn't want to be known as sell outs, though that was John's explanation or that they just didn't want to keep saying no to the thousands of requests to use the songs for everything from charities, to Cheezies, to companies they certainly didn't want to be identified with.
Given the reaction to Nike using a Beatles' song which was hostile to say the least we won't hear commercials using any of the for a while.
Now this seems to be the sort of thing that the band would approve of, as it did get to use the song they wanted because if Paul, Yoko or Ringo had said "no" that would haven been the end of it.
The Beatles weren't just a huge part of the 1960s they were an enormous part of it. They remain a huge part of music today, even if the parts were less than the sum of the whole after they broke up.
Between Dylan and The Beatles rock'n'roll and all popular music forms in the West and elsewhere were changed irrevocably. Musicians were no longer tied to outside songwriters but were expected to write their own stuff, experimentation was encouraged and the Beatles, at least, proved you could experiment and be a bit arty without going to the painful extremes of most of the "art rockers" of the 1970s.
Just as importantly musicians were expect to know how to play their instruments which caused some bands, The Beach Boys for one to have to learn their instruments which they did.
It was also expected that a live show would be live and not merely lip synched over a prerecorded musical track. (Add Autotune to that and we're back to elaborate Ed Sullivan Show performances these days.)
It even appears that Mad Men got a discount on the fees to use the music. Which doesn't excuse all the hoops the show had to jump through to get what they wanted on the air.
I don't think it's possible to lock up The Beatles behind a walled garden or to do the same for Elvis, The Stones, Hendrix, Clapton and many others from that period and pathfinders in music up to the present day. Not culturally at least. (Mr RIAA, I'm not paying royalties to you every time I "sing" "For No One" in my brain!!!)
It should be easier for programs like Mad Men to use that sort of material easily particularly as Mad Men can hardly be termed exploitative which is one of the reasons Lennon and now Yoko guard uses so much.
There are compilations and re-releases of Beatles material out there but nothing themed as someone has noted. I'm just wondering, given how dynamic the band was just what themes you'd suggest. A sampling of "post commercial pop" Beatles would be as easy as Rubber Soul and Sgt Pepper. Though as hard as it is to grasp it now The Beatles defined what was commercially acceptable along with Dylan and The Rolling Stones.
On the post: South Korea Still Paying The Price For Embracing Internet Explorer A Decade Ago
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The other solution was to just sit back and ignore it. I had no trouble downloading the 128 bit encryption software from out side of the United States and I doubt many others did. It's all very well and good for the US to ban export of these kinds of technology but the reality is that once it was released "into the wild" it was around the planet in seconds.
The other bit of madness was to write an ActiveX control so that a browser, well IE, could access sites secured by SEED. Given that of all MS Internet technology perhaps only Outlook Express has more holes in it than ActiveX does. if the desire was for a secure transaction then using just about anything including two tin cans and a string would have been better than ActiveX. At least a pair of tin cans and a string are harder to use as attack vectors than ActiveX is.
OK, so now you have South Korea, a country wanting to be knows for it's technology prowess and abilities that's a Windows monoculture by design. At least the design of one government department.
The problem in the smart phone era is that Windows on smart phones is so rare as to be nearly invisible. Korea always had a choice. the picked one a 12 year old script kiddie could have come up with between sips of some energy drink and bites of the lastest designer sandwiches from 7-11.
In fairness to MS, well a little fairness, the bureaucrats who made the decision(s) that brought South Korea here probably know as much about encrytion as they do about the Internet, Web and how their computers work. They understand the On/Off switch.
On the post: South Korea Still Paying The Price For Embracing Internet Explorer A Decade Ago
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On the post: South Korea Still Paying The Price For Embracing Internet Explorer A Decade Ago
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2) Citation please.
On the post: South Korea Still Paying The Price For Embracing Internet Explorer A Decade Ago
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As it is it's hard to define South Korea's economy as capitalist in any sense Ayn Rand would approve of. Nor is it socialism in any sense than a Swede would understand it. It closely models the Japanese economy which is dominated by immense companies such as Hitachi, Sony etc rather than what we're familiar with in Europe or North America or Australia and New Zealand. Perhaps inwardly mercantile might describe it best.
On the post: Yeah, It Turns Out That Technology Doesn't Make Us Lonely
And all these stories about romances and marriages, of all things, via the post couldn't be true. How can you find true love there? Don't you know that the girl on the other end of that exchange is a charwoman, M'Lord? You just can't go about romancing the lowest of the low as if she's your equal!
Turns out his Lordship had been when they tied the knot a few days later and the resulting partnership not only survived but it was made in heaven. (No mention was ever made about the possibility these two people actually got to know each other deeply in the exchange of letters. So much so that things like social conventions of the time, how they looked, and age became the trivialities they mostly are became...well, trivial. Welcome to the world's first social network(s).
How people choose to communicate is less important that the fact that they are communicating. It doesn't matter whether it's by mail, in the coffee shop, bar, Facebook, LinkedIn or where ever. They're communicating. That alone makes the vast majority of us less lonely not more lonely. Even trolls.
No matter how hard one tries one can't shoehorn the life post Web and broad scale use of the Internet and Web into what came before it. Any more that one couldn't shoehorn life before telegraph, radio, telephone and television with what had come before and judge things like happiness and loneliness by what came before.
With each new introduction in communications technology there have been those insist on what came before was far preferable socially than what it's like now. In each case they've misunderstood, often deliberately, what these changes actually do accomplish in their link to some kind of past utopia that only they can remember.
Many of these people, today, seem to be IP extremists, those married to the past as if God given and the only way to live. (God him/her/them/self strongly disagrees but they aren't listening to any deities at the moment.) Not all are but they still have a personal axe to grind when facing different methods and norms of interpersonal relations.
I guess my partner and I were doing it all wrong all those years before we decided to "shack up" rather and remain "IRC up'd"! Even if we were we're happy, deeply in love and isn't that what it's supposed to be?
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