response 106 of 163:

Feb 25 15:03 UTC 2003

RE#104 - Yeah.

response 108 of 163:

Feb 25 18:28 UTC 2003

  re #106:  the grocery store a few blocks from my house rents DVDs for 
  $0.79 during the week (Monday through Thursday nights.)  If I'm looking
  for something a little less mainstream than their selection, I can find
  it for at most $3.00 at a full-service video store.  Considering the 
  cost of blank DVDs I just can't imagine that it's cheaper and/or easier
  for students to copy them than to rent them. 

  Even if we're talking about not fully duplicating the DVD but just
  swapping a lower-quality video encoded as, say, DIVX, I still find it
  hard to believe that finding and downloading a full-length film on the
  Internet is easier and cheaper than renting it at a nearby video store
  unless the person doing this places no dollar value on their free time.

response 110 of 163:

Feb 25 21:09 UTC 2003

Videotapes were time-consuming to copy, though, and once you were done you
couldn't use your copy to give someone else a copy without serious quality
problems.

I suspect that what's happened is all the DVDs on in the on-campus video
store have become avaliable as DIVX files on the campus LAN.  A trip around
Michigan Tech's LAN with Network Neighborhood would net you all kinds of
audio and video files while I was there, and that was a couple years ago. 
I'm sure the selection has only gotten bigger since then.

I'm reminded of a friend of mine who joked that he was doing Blockbuster a
service by making off-site backups of all their Playstation games. ;)

response 112 of 163:

Feb 26 05:27 UTC 2003

USA Today has a puff piece on the Rhapsody authorized download
service.  It includes some customer numbers on the major 
authorized services:
 
  "Sony and Universal's Pressplay, and Rhapsody, have about 50,000
   subscribers each, and MusicNet, owned by Warner, EMI and BMG Music,
   has 10,000, says Phil Leigh of research firm Raymond James.
   The numbers are low, he says, because few people are aware of 
   paid alternatives to pirate swap sites.
 
  "That could change Wednesday, when a revamped MusicNet will 
   be launched on America Online and marketed to its 35 million
   members..."    ((most of whom still use dialups  -- KRJ))
 
http://www.usatoday.com/life/2003-02-25-rhapsody_x.htm
 
Also widely reported is that Roxio (the makers of Easy CD Creator)
are planning to relaunch the Napster brand as an authorized pay
download site later this year.   The business plan, from one of
the stories I read, seems to be depend on the courts killing 
Kazaa; they realize that selling downloads will be tough while 
free ones are used by millions.  (But killing Kazaa is going to 
take years of international legislation.  And then there's 
Gnutella, and eDonkey, and heaven knows what else...)

response 114 of 163:

Feb 26 21:31 UTC 2003

From Declan McCullagh on Cnet:  A congressional committee calls for 
file sharing at Universities to be treated as a serious Federal 
crime.  (It is already defined as such under the NET act, which 
nobody seems to want to use to prosecute users, as the law is 
intended.)  One congressman makes an analogy to assault and murder.
 
The general demand is that the Universities stop their students from
running file sharing.
 
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-986143.html?tag=fd_top

response 116 of 163:

Feb 27 00:24 UTC 2003

  Just wait until the "assault and murder" P2P clients are released and
  then we'll really see some legislative panic!

response 118 of 163:

Feb 27 00:43 UTC 2003

I wonder if Congressmen have any idea of the technical challenges
involved.  Attempts to block instant messenging in corporate
environments are instructive -- they've merely resulted in instant
messaging clients that create network traffic that looks very much like
web browsing, to firewalls.

response 120 of 163:

Mar 1 15:50 UTC 2003

Here's a fun new essay, from a print media guy's perspective, about
the reactions of the music and movie business in the face of the 
Internet driving the value of *all* media towards zero.
 
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/columns/medialife/n_8384/ind
ex.html
"Stop, Thief!"  by Michael Wolff
 
   "For one thing, it is very strange to have entertainment executives--
    generally regarded as among the most amoral, conniving and venal 
    of all businessmen -- taking the high ground.  And yet here they are
    delivering heartfelt defenses of artists, and even art itself--they
    see the very essend of the nation's cultural patrimony at risk.
    And you really don't sense a phony or opportunistic note.  
    Rather these guys actually seem to be losing sleep over this.
    It's right and wrong they're arguing about here.  Good character
    versus a virtual barbarian deluge.  They believe, with feeling,
    that bad or sadly misguided people do this digital pilfering...
 
   "The other odd thing is that these guys who have built their careers
    and their industry on trying to give an audience exactly what it 
    wants -- no matter how low and valueless and embarrassing -- are 
    now standing with a high-church rectitude against the meretricious
    desires of this same group.  It is a bizarrely out-of-character
    role: holding the line.  Censuring the public.   *Suing* the public!
    Indeed, branding the great American mass-media audience as a 
    craven and outlaw group."
 
    ...
 
   "...*everybody* can't be an outlaw.  If everybody does it, it's 
    normal rather than aberrant behavior.  It's not so much the consumer
    who is on the wrong side of the law, but the entertainment industry
    that's on the wrong side of economic laws."

response 122 of 163:

Mar 4 14:31 UTC 2003

Some are.  We haven't tried, for the most part, where I work.  Some
places view it as either a major time-waster, or as a threat to
security.  Not only have many IM packages turned out to have significant
security holes, IM traffic is much harder to log than email.  That can
lead to legal exposures or risks of people leaking trade secrets undetected.

response 124 of 163:

Mar 5 01:34 UTC 2003

Keystroke loggers do not discriminate.  Logging everything is more 
insecure than not logging important conversations.  Besides, a keystroke 
logger will only record the outgoing half of the conversation.

response 126 of 163:

Mar 6 15:26 UTC 2003

Are there any current IM clients that actually do encryption?  I thought
they were mostly using plaintext.

response 128 of 163:

Mar 8 15:11 UTC 2003

I'm entering this discussion late in the game, and haven't looked at any of
the earlier incarnations in some time, but I am surprised that the recording
industry isn't trying to take advantage of the positive aspects of
file-trading, rather than trying to kill it off altogether.  Using the radio
analogy, it seems to me that a workable solution would be to concentrate not
on the trading of files per se, but on the trading of high-quality stereo
files suitable for CD burning and avoidance of purchasing high-quality
commercial copies.  I don't know about the current service providers, but
Napster always claimed that they were providing users with the ability to "try
before you buy".  Not that I necessarily *believe* that, but if the industry
had called their bluff, and negotiated a deal whereby files could be traded
only if they were of sufficiently low quality (perhaps even requiring that
they be monaural) to make them unsuitable for CD burning, while being of just
high enough quality to give a fair idea of the content, the industry could
have gained another avenue to promote its products.  After all, amazon.com
as well as several other music marketplaces already have marginal-quality
monaural excerpts on selected tracks for CDs they offer for sale.

response 130 of 163:

Mar 10 03:28 UTC 2003

Remember, this is the same industry that thought it should be illegal to
buy blank cassette tapes.