We now live in a world where the only citizens are companies (with more rights the richer they get) and humans are commodities, where no one truly owns anything, and everyone is a criminal under some law or other.
Let me get this straight. They want to enforce DRM on self-replicating devices?
They failed on general computing, and now they try to enforce. DRM. On. Self-replicating. Devices. It's like trying to stop humans from reproducing.
What are they gonna do, closed ecosystems where you can only buy plans for digitally-signed prints? What's the point, it's not 3D printers if they can't print what you design! "Only what you design" kills collaboration. Okay, then there will be limits on collaboration. Which limits? Number of seats that can collaborate? How would it be calculated? Like changing the region of a DVD? How to plug the fact that general-purpose computers will be used to design the prints, sell a special-purpose computer? It had better be orders of magnitude better and cheaper than hobbyist gear, if it's crippled enough to have a meaningful copy-protection mechanism.
DRM is too expensive to work, and technically impossible to enforce.
I pointed out that the linked article from the linked article raised a point about the digitization of movies. Well, the guys this article is about did it better. Just get what people are actually using, and treat that as good enough.
"But wait!", some guy might say. "What about the HAL is IBM clue in 2001 and shit? We couldn't have ever seen that if we had thrown out the original film before we got HD tech!"
Yeah, I wanted to address that yesterday, but was too stoned to formulate it correctly. Maybe it'll be better today, I'm since I'm stoned and also drunk all at once.
The fact of the matter is that Stanley managed to keep those films until we could digitize them in HD that was good enough to read that clue about author intent. Maybe they had been digitized well enough for HD at the time they were mass-marketed on DVD, that doesn't matter: what does matter, is, the original film was preserved well enough to deliver that clue to good-enough consumer displays. Finally, for film, you can always devise a tech that will scan them more precisely, but there will be some time when the next tech will only record the degradation since the last digitization.
At that point, we'll have lost our physical connection to the movies on film. And the movies on digital will be, by that time, so accurate and precise, that current digital HD cameras will be considered blurry as shit. We'll have lost all the pixels that could have been recorded in the first-shot digital films, if they had had equipment that did not exit at that time.
Does that matter all that much? Somewhat. Sometimes, author intent is conveyed in very small details, like the two times IBM appears from HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey. It's important to keep. But then, digital cameras mean that directors have to capture their intent within the physically captured pixel bitmaps, else it's lost forever. This is a good thing.
Because a limited format means that artist have to express their whole intent within the limitations of that format. It does at least give us a response to those who say that perpetual copyright is necessary to preserve original cultural artifacts forever for future re-scanning.
Re: Re: Ateention OTTB -- YOU GOT IT "SHADOW DRAGON":
Oooh I get it! You don't know shit about evolution, or what it means to be a social animal yourself.
See, the fact that there are six or seven billion humans is lost on you, because you can't grasp what those numbers mean. You can't understand what Hamilton's inclusive fitness criterion means about evolution. You don't understand how honed the human instinct for cooperation is. You're so sociopathic you can't understand how comes it's evolutionarily better to cooperate than compete, and you're too dim to go read that it's been definitively proven.
tl;dr : You're either an idiot, a sociopath or both. You're welcome to prove it every day all over again, as TechDirt is against censorship.
Meanwhile in China...
The Arbiters and Judges and Debt Creditors are all the same people.
What the fuck, how does that work? Wait, it can't. Next question : what does happen? There must be stories in that, that make the idiocies we read about here seem the result of thoughtful consideration.
Or is it all like when that cunt from the DHS or other jackboots U.S. agency pocketed a yacht for a typo in a customs form? And when the TPB censorship orders were issued by a textbook-corrupt judge in the Netherlands?
This story is set in the time when France had colonies in Africa.
There were once two salesmen at the French shoes company, who were sent to Brazzaville. Then after a week, their manager calls them, and the first said "There is no market for shoes here : everyone runs bare-footed!" and then the manager called the second salesman, who said : "Send reinforcements, I'm having too much work here : everyone needs shoes!"
Seriously, that's insane. Host the service redundantly in seven ex-USSR countries with too much murder problems to even try to enforce copyright and such, then have it delivered through Akamai or something for performance in the US.
One very effective way to increase the value of creative content is to flat-out ignore copyright.
Because, in very simple economic terms, copyright means friction. Seeking a license for a character just to scribble a comic? That's friction, and it can stop products from being made.
So, if you remove friction, every use of your work advertises it. Plagiarism, transformation, mass-sharing - it's all advertisement FOR YOU. FOR FREE.
My friend who paints, and sells his works in the order of tens of thousands of euro/dollars, once found out that some guy happens to sell cheap mass-printings of his works. I told him that's his fault for not serving that market, and that he should have sold those himself. Now he's doing Just That, and now his works are better-known, which increases his name recognition, thus : value. Pirates copies made his artist name worth more, because more people had copies of the content. And now he serves that market, and gets more money.
Nothing changed from the market's point of view compared to when pirate copies were made, except it's easier to find his official prints than to find a shifty street vendor. That's one more efficiency for the market to buy his things.
This to say, it's exactly the definition of a price discrimination : the painted canvas is very expensive, then the numbered novelty copies such as enameled metal posters are cheaper, then there was no plan to make cheap paper posters, because Real Artists only sell to snooty art galleries, amirite, until some guy figured out that content is free and posters are money, forcing him to actually serve the markets that were begging to throw their money at him.
His mistakes : 1. trying to sell no copy for under a grand and 2. painting before he'd have material copies to sell at all price points in the shortest possible time, to undercut anyone trying to sell cheaper/faster-produced copies of his art.
Those French politicos are trying to buy the votes and lobby money from people who don't understand technology, humanity, economics, evolution and generally progress. The stereotypical Old. They're irrelevant to reality, because they're going to lose. They're trying to stop an ineluctably advancing all-crushing wall of ice.
It communicates my interest in that creative output.
It publishes one more redundant copy on the distribution network from which I get it.
It lets the artists show me their work.
It raises my awareness of the content, ideas, whatever.
It lets people talented enough to re-use it in their creative endeavors do so.
I give it my attention. There is a limit of about 18 man-hours per day of it that I can spend on enjoying art. There is a limit of about 7 billion times that much attention in the world. So that's an advantage for the creator, in mind-share.
It lets me show it to other people in person.
It lets me show it to other people on the other side of the world, just by sharing the link.
Who are you to prevent humans from telling jokes to one another? What if I hear a great joke and print it on a billboard to make lots of people laugh? What if I compile all the jokes I heard in a file and distribute that? SEEDING DISCOGRAPHIES IS THE SAME THING BUT MORE EFFICIENT.
ALL movies have to make their COST back in EARNINGS in TWO DAYS and EVERY one that got a sequel DID SO. Thus, there is no reason to protect them with copyright.
Music? GO PLAY LIVE, GET PAID. Images? Well, a really nice printout of your digital painting, hand-signed and well-framed, is exactly as valuable as the same image painted on canvas. Thus, it's worth your name value divided by the order or magnitude of the amount of copies you print in that form. Which means, more copies mean more name recognition mean more value to your official, signed works mean MORE MONEY FOR YOU.
Everything that tries to block human communication is a crime against humanity, and counter-productive.
Well, everything that article finds wrong in Uber and AirBnB could be addressed with openness and transparency. Those companies try to become billion-dollar-businesses instead of offering the most honest services technically possible.
Fare prices can vary? The fare price should be displayed at the time you book it, so if there are several Ubercabs near you, you order the cheapest.
Accountability? Log everything in the client and the cab's devices, and there are known ways to prevent/detect/correct data tampering. Then users should be able to comment and rate the cab they used.
Same for renting rooms. Rate, photos, comments, you should see a maximum of information about the service before you buy it.
But those features are good for the customer, and bad for the middleman, who tries to gross as much money as possible. So they're not really serving the public well, because if, say, a driver eats every twelfth passenger, then Uber might decide to hide that, to keep it open for business.
That's why those services can't work as companies, only as Free/Libre/Open things that live on the Internet. They're not just comunities, nor just software. It's the use that makes them. Maybe the right word is network. Just a network, with a special purpose : cache information between people buying and selling one service.
Yeah, but for how long? How much longer will copyright be defended? How long will reality have to prove that it's always bad to prevent humans from communicating?
And that's as much for Uber as for the morons trying to prevent it from working/existing.
What regulations? What fines? You can't prevent people from doing things. It would work like this: When you need a taxi, you flash a QR code that directs your smartphone browser to a webpage (which forwards the content, that's actually on TOR or FreeNet or something) that locates you and tells you how far the nearest free taxi is, so you can order it to come pick you up.
But that's not going to sustain Uber. It's just going to help people do more things more efficiently. What's that again? Oh, right, the definition of progress.
The State won't let Uber do their things, so what, do them without Uber. DIRECT, distributed, encrypted, onion-routed, mesh-networked P2P between clients and merchants. The regulations prevent Uber from doing business as middleman, but they don't prevent people from building the service such that the System just can't shut it down.
Also, what's preventing Uber from raising VC to buy the abolishment of those regulations? It's not like the prices are unknown. If they want to play within the system, they need to buy the rules. It's in the rules. So, play by the rules or change the game.
Yeah, so, I'm right. Trying to prevent the use of naturally evolved advantageous traits is crippling to the part of the species that does so, and thus, they may get easily eaten by the part of the species that do not forbid the use of advantageous traits.
Clearer? Progress is not made by trying to prevent people from doing things that benefit other people. Progress is made by people who enable more people to do more things.
On the post: Rejection Of The Pirate Bay Founders' Appeal Sets Dangerous Precedent On Liability & Free Expression
Re:
So how does economics work, again?
On the post: Rejection Of The Pirate Bay Founders' Appeal Sets Dangerous Precedent On Liability & Free Expression
Re: As always, amazing conflation of "free speech" with FREE CONTENT.
On the post: Rejection Of The Pirate Bay Founders' Appeal Sets Dangerous Precedent On Liability & Free Expression
Re: Sad day indeed...
On the post: Rejection Of The Pirate Bay Founders' Appeal Sets Dangerous Precedent On Liability & Free Expression
Re:
On the post: Get Ready For DRM On Physical Goods
ROTFLMAO
They failed on general computing, and now they try to enforce. DRM. On. Self-replicating. Devices. It's like trying to stop humans from reproducing.
What are they gonna do, closed ecosystems where you can only buy plans for digitally-signed prints? What's the point, it's not 3D printers if they can't print what you design! "Only what you design" kills collaboration. Okay, then there will be limits on collaboration. Which limits? Number of seats that can collaborate? How would it be calculated? Like changing the region of a DVD? How to plug the fact that general-purpose computers will be used to design the prints, sell a special-purpose computer? It had better be orders of magnitude better and cheaper than hobbyist gear, if it's crippled enough to have a meaningful copy-protection mechanism.
DRM is too expensive to work, and technically impossible to enforce.
On the post: Indian Studio Uploads Pirated Version Of Its Film To Its Official Youtube Account
That's what we said yesterday
I pointed out that the linked article from the linked article raised a point about the digitization of movies. Well, the guys this article is about did it better. Just get what people are actually using, and treat that as good enough.
"But wait!", some guy might say. "What about the HAL is IBM clue in 2001 and shit? We couldn't have ever seen that if we had thrown out the original film before we got HD tech!"
Yeah, I wanted to address that yesterday, but was too stoned to formulate it correctly. Maybe it'll be better today, I'm since I'm stoned and also drunk all at once.
The fact of the matter is that Stanley managed to keep those films until we could digitize them in HD that was good enough to read that clue about author intent. Maybe they had been digitized well enough for HD at the time they were mass-marketed on DVD, that doesn't matter: what does matter, is, the original film was preserved well enough to deliver that clue to good-enough consumer displays. Finally, for film, you can always devise a tech that will scan them more precisely, but there will be some time when the next tech will only record the degradation since the last digitization.
At that point, we'll have lost our physical connection to the movies on film. And the movies on digital will be, by that time, so accurate and precise, that current digital HD cameras will be considered blurry as shit. We'll have lost all the pixels that could have been recorded in the first-shot digital films, if they had had equipment that did not exit at that time.
Does that matter all that much? Somewhat. Sometimes, author intent is conveyed in very small details, like the two times IBM appears from HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey. It's important to keep. But then, digital cameras mean that directors have to capture their intent within the physically captured pixel bitmaps, else it's lost forever. This is a good thing.
Because a limited format means that artist have to express their whole intent within the limitations of that format. It does at least give us a response to those who say that perpetual copyright is necessary to preserve original cultural artifacts forever for future re-scanning.
On the post: Music Industry Data: Sales Up, Piracy Down... But It's Not Because Of Any 'Anti-Piracy' Efforts
Re: Re: Ateention OTTB -- YOU GOT IT "SHADOW DRAGON":
See, the fact that there are six or seven billion humans is lost on you, because you can't grasp what those numbers mean. You can't understand what Hamilton's inclusive fitness criterion means about evolution. You don't understand how honed the human instinct for cooperation is. You're so sociopathic you can't understand how comes it's evolutionarily better to cooperate than compete, and you're too dim to go read that it's been definitively proven.
tl;dr : You're either an idiot, a sociopath or both. You're welcome to prove it every day all over again, as TechDirt is against censorship.
On the post: Anatomy Of A Boondoggle: How The US Broadband Plan Led To WV Buying $20,000 Routers For A One Room Library
Re:
On the post: Cablevision Files Antitrust Suit Against Viacom For Forced Bundling Of Crappy TV Channels
Re: Re:
I'm going to go seek for a blog on that subject, hopefully I'll find one as interesting as TechDirt.
On the post: Chinese Junk Patents Flood Into Australia, Allowing Chinese Companies To Strategically Block Innovation
Re: Re: Re:
What the fuck, how does that work? Wait, it can't. Next question : what does happen? There must be stories in that, that make the idiocies we read about here seem the result of thoughtful consideration.
Or is it all like when that cunt from the DHS or other jackboots U.S. agency pocketed a yacht for a typo in a customs form? And when the TPB censorship orders were issued by a textbook-corrupt judge in the Netherlands?
On the post: Indian Music Industry Exec Says The Unthinkable: 'Internet Piracy Is A Good Thing'
The Shoes Peddler Parable
There were once two salesmen at the French shoes company, who were sent to Brazzaville. Then after a week, their manager calls them, and the first said "There is no market for shoes here : everyone runs bare-footed!" and then the manager called the second salesman, who said : "Send reinforcements, I'm having too much work here : everyone needs shoes!"
On the post: Why Does The Entertainment Industry Insist That It Can Veto Any Innovation It Doesn't Like?
Why are they doing that inside the US?
On the post: Chinese Junk Patents Flood Into Australia, Allowing Chinese Companies To Strategically Block Innovation
Re:
On the post: French Politicians Worry That Free Creative Commons Works Devalue 'Legal' Offers
Because, in very simple economic terms, copyright means friction. Seeking a license for a character just to scribble a comic? That's friction, and it can stop products from being made.
So, if you remove friction, every use of your work advertises it. Plagiarism, transformation, mass-sharing - it's all advertisement FOR YOU. FOR FREE.
My friend who paints, and sells his works in the order of tens of thousands of euro/dollars, once found out that some guy happens to sell cheap mass-printings of his works. I told him that's his fault for not serving that market, and that he should have sold those himself. Now he's doing Just That, and now his works are better-known, which increases his name recognition, thus : value. Pirates copies made his artist name worth more, because more people had copies of the content. And now he serves that market, and gets more money.
Nothing changed from the market's point of view compared to when pirate copies were made, except it's easier to find his official prints than to find a shifty street vendor. That's one more efficiency for the market to buy his things.
This to say, it's exactly the definition of a price discrimination : the painted canvas is very expensive, then the numbered novelty copies such as enameled metal posters are cheaper, then there was no plan to make cheap paper posters, because Real Artists only sell to snooty art galleries, amirite, until some guy figured out that content is free and posters are money, forcing him to actually serve the markets that were begging to throw their money at him.
His mistakes : 1. trying to sell no copy for under a grand and 2. painting before he'd have material copies to sell at all price points in the shortest possible time, to undercut anyone trying to sell cheaper/faster-produced copies of his art.
Those French politicos are trying to buy the votes and lobby money from people who don't understand technology, humanity, economics, evolution and generally progress. The stereotypical Old. They're irrelevant to reality, because they're going to lose. They're trying to stop an ineluctably advancing all-crushing wall of ice.
On the post: Early Lessons From New Zealand's 'Three Strikes' Punishments
Re: Re: Re:
It communicates my interest in that creative output.
It publishes one more redundant copy on the distribution network from which I get it.
It lets the artists show me their work.
It raises my awareness of the content, ideas, whatever.
It lets people talented enough to re-use it in their creative endeavors do so.
I give it my attention. There is a limit of about 18 man-hours per day of it that I can spend on enjoying art. There is a limit of about 7 billion times that much attention in the world. So that's an advantage for the creator, in mind-share.
It lets me show it to other people in person.
It lets me show it to other people on the other side of the world, just by sharing the link.
Who are you to prevent humans from telling jokes to one another? What if I hear a great joke and print it on a billboard to make lots of people laugh? What if I compile all the jokes I heard in a file and distribute that? SEEDING DISCOGRAPHIES IS THE SAME THING BUT MORE EFFICIENT.
ALL movies have to make their COST back in EARNINGS in TWO DAYS and EVERY one that got a sequel DID SO. Thus, there is no reason to protect them with copyright.
Music? GO PLAY LIVE, GET PAID. Images? Well, a really nice printout of your digital painting, hand-signed and well-framed, is exactly as valuable as the same image painted on canvas. Thus, it's worth your name value divided by the order or magnitude of the amount of copies you print in that form. Which means, more copies mean more name recognition mean more value to your official, signed works mean MORE MONEY FOR YOU.
Everything that tries to block human communication is a crime against humanity, and counter-productive.
On the post: Uber's CEO: Innovators Shouldn't Have To Ask For Permission Or Forgiveness
Re: Established power, or?
Fare prices can vary? The fare price should be displayed at the time you book it, so if there are several Ubercabs near you, you order the cheapest.
Accountability? Log everything in the client and the cab's devices, and there are known ways to prevent/detect/correct data tampering. Then users should be able to comment and rate the cab they used.
Same for renting rooms. Rate, photos, comments, you should see a maximum of information about the service before you buy it.
But those features are good for the customer, and bad for the middleman, who tries to gross as much money as possible. So they're not really serving the public well, because if, say, a driver eats every twelfth passenger, then Uber might decide to hide that, to keep it open for business.
That's why those services can't work as companies, only as Free/Libre/Open things that live on the Internet. They're not just comunities, nor just software. It's the use that makes them. Maybe the right word is network. Just a network, with a special purpose : cache information between people buying and selling one service.
On the post: Early Lessons From New Zealand's 'Three Strikes' Punishments
Re:
On the post: Uber's CEO: Innovators Shouldn't Have To Ask For Permission Or Forgiveness
Re:
A completely Open and Free peer-to-peer mesh network of all devices able to transmit data.
On the post: Uber's CEO: Innovators Shouldn't Have To Ask For Permission Or Forgiveness
Greed isn't sustainable
What regulations? What fines? You can't prevent people from doing things. It would work like this: When you need a taxi, you flash a QR code that directs your smartphone browser to a webpage (which forwards the content, that's actually on TOR or FreeNet or something) that locates you and tells you how far the nearest free taxi is, so you can order it to come pick you up.
But that's not going to sustain Uber. It's just going to help people do more things more efficiently. What's that again? Oh, right, the definition of progress.
The State won't let Uber do their things, so what, do them without Uber. DIRECT, distributed, encrypted, onion-routed, mesh-networked P2P between clients and merchants. The regulations prevent Uber from doing business as middleman, but they don't prevent people from building the service such that the System just can't shut it down.
Also, what's preventing Uber from raising VC to buy the abolishment of those regulations? It's not like the prices are unknown. If they want to play within the system, they need to buy the rules. It's in the rules. So, play by the rules or change the game.
On the post: Amazon, Publishers Sued For Antitrust Violations Over DRM By Angry Indie Bookstores
Re: Re: Re:
Clearer? Progress is not made by trying to prevent people from doing things that benefit other people. Progress is made by people who enable more people to do more things.
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