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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 154 responses total. |
sholmes
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response 4 of 154:
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Apr 4 17:03 UTC 2003 |
I have been meaning to ask this for a long time now .. I use kazaa .. will
it put me in any trouble ?
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jaklumen
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response 5 of 154:
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Apr 4 21:09 UTC 2003 |
*shrug* From all the long discussion, that's really difficult to say,
although it looks like the RIAA will try anything it can.
resp:2 yes, two heavyweights going into the ring.. this could be
interesting.
Really, the trend that I seem to consistently see is that the
teenagers and young adults are doing the heavy p2p file sharing, and
the middle-aged adults are the ones who are still buying music. I
really don't see too many exceptions.
I am among the pirates. I can't afford to buy many CDs nowadays and
really not at today's prices. I don't figure to be a large threat--
most of my clips are more than 3 years old, quite a few are much older
than that, and I know a few are out of publication as far as I know.
That's not meant to be a justification, but my tastes are pretty
electic and not at all in line with what is currently considered
mainstream, period. They're not unusual-- most were popular at one
point-- but they don't fit into neat patterns.
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krj
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response 6 of 154:
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Apr 6 04:34 UTC 2003 |
The Detroit Free Press ran an article in which they attempted to
calculate the value of the damages being demanded of the Michigan
Tech student sued by the RIAA (resp:1):
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/newman5_20030405.htm
"Recording Industry has warning: File-sharers have to face the music"
Slashdot writers claim that the Freep columnist botched the math:
the correct value, they say, is 97.8 Billion dollars.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/05/1931233
A quote from an RIAA spokesman indicates that the RIAA remains
totally clueless about the technology involved:
"I wouldn't think there was a university in the country that
wouldn't notice this kind of activity on their servers." --
Matthew Oppenheim, RIAA senior vice president for business and
legal affairs.
This comes back to something I wrote in one of the earliest items
in this "napster" series; I argued that copyright law was never
intended to apply to the behavior of private individuals, but rather
was business law.
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goose
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response 7 of 154:
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Apr 6 16:03 UTC 2003 |
According to /. this student wasn't even sharing files, just created a program
to index files on a network....the RIAA is full of idiots.
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gull
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response 8 of 154:
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Apr 7 15:53 UTC 2003 |
All they have to do is select the right idiots for the jury to get a
legal precident set, though.
I did the math and I got about $90 billion, too -- I think Heather
Newman botched her math. Either way, it's ridiculous.
The RIAA is trying to make an example of these students, obviously.
They figure people will see what's happening to them, say "oh, shit",
and get rid of their file sharing software for fear of being sued next.
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gull
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response 9 of 154:
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Apr 7 15:57 UTC 2003 |
Incidentally, when I was at Tech the most common way to find movies and
songs on the dorm network was just to take a walk through Network
Neighborhood. It wasn't always a beautiful day in the Neighborhood --
MS Windows networking is incredibly unstable when you have a several
hundred machines on one subnet -- but you usually found some pretty good
caches of stuff. I wonder if the University could be sued for running a
WINS server, since it facilitated this kind of thing?
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scott
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response 10 of 154:
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Apr 7 16:26 UTC 2003 |
Oh, the same Heather Newman who guests on Todd Mundt for tech stuff? She
doesn't come across as especially bright. I remember her telling Todd that
Windows 2000 was much faster than Windows 95 - the MS party line, but
laughable to anybody who knows anything about OS bloat.
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polygon
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response 11 of 154:
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Apr 7 16:51 UTC 2003 |
Re 8. A jury verdict may be a precedent operationally, but juries do not
have the power to set legal precedent.
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gull
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response 12 of 154:
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Apr 7 20:25 UTC 2003 |
Re #10: She's one of the two tech columnists the Free Press has. I
think the other one is better. I don't think I can comment on her
intelligence, but her knowledge seems lacking sometimes.
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gull
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response 13 of 154:
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Apr 7 20:26 UTC 2003 |
(Incidentally, I'm not sure how it compares to Windows 98, but Windows
2000 is definately faster than NT 4.0, which is what it was intended to
replace.)
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scott
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response 14 of 154:
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Apr 7 21:47 UTC 2003 |
Yeah, but on the same hardware was 95? There's a reason 2000 requires much
bigger/faster hardware.
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gull
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response 15 of 154:
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Apr 8 01:30 UTC 2003 |
I didn't say it was faster than 95. My experience is that it's faster
than NT 4 on the same hardware, though.
95 is pretty fast until it chews itself up, which it does with amazing
regularity.
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dbratman
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response 16 of 154:
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Apr 8 07:08 UTC 2003 |
I just bought (yes, legally) a software program from MS. On the CD-ROM
is printed this pathetically hopeful notice: "Do Not Make Illegal
Copies of This Disc."
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gull
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response 17 of 154:
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Apr 8 15:18 UTC 2003 |
"Do Not Make Illegal Copies Of This Product From An Illegal Monopoly."
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gull
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response 18 of 154:
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Apr 8 20:26 UTC 2003 |
The Free Press printed a correction today that Heather Newman's column
should have said 'billion', not 'trillion'.
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krj
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response 19 of 154:
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Apr 10 05:39 UTC 2003 |
Did you like the 80s band The Smithereens? Do you want to be a
patron of the arts? Then Smithereens bandleader Pat DiNizio has
an offer for you!
DiNizio is seeking 100 subscribers, at $1200 each, for a series of
limited edition CD releases. Subscribers will get quantities to
share with families and friends.
Each patron will also get a private house concert by DiNizio to
benefit a favorite charity.
In the article, DiNizio says this is an attempt to build a new
business model for the current file-sharing environment.
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=185906
6
http://www.patdinizio.com/
DiNizio's own website goes on at length about his new business model.
(I'm not willing to go to $1200 for anybody, but I can see this
tempting me if the numbers shift -- say $100 from 1000 people.
But divided among members of a band, it's not that much, is it?)
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slynne
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response 20 of 154:
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Apr 10 14:47 UTC 2003 |
someone should help Mr. Pat Dinizio with the formatting on his web
page.
It sounds like a cool idea though. I hope it works out for him.
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orinoco
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response 21 of 154:
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Apr 10 19:42 UTC 2003 |
I seem to remember a similar story a few years back. Momus got sued for
making fun of Wendy Carlos and asked people to help subsidize his court costs.
Wasn't the reward having a track on his next album named after you?
I'm curious whether that $1200 would count as tax-deductible, since it's going
to fund a concert whose proceeds go to charity. If it does, then this seems
like a win/win situation for the donors: the same tax writeoff they'd get by
donating the $1200 straight to charity, plus entertainment and a whole
shitload of CDs. (The ideal scenario, I guess, would be if the $1200 was
tax-deductible _and_ the house concert netted more than a $1200 profit to give
away. Then the donor, the band _and_ the charity all come out better off.
I have no idea if that's realistic or not, but it's probably not. If you can
fit 50 people in your living room, you'd still need to make $240 off of each
of them to "break even.")
But I digress. It's a cool idea regardless, and I would definitely like to
see it work, if only out of curiousity. It would be interesting to see how
it would change the music business if this sort of scheme caught on.
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mcnally
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response 22 of 154:
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Apr 10 20:14 UTC 2003 |
50 x 240 = 12,000
50 x 24 = 1,200
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gull
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response 23 of 154:
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Apr 11 13:34 UTC 2003 |
A federal judge has dismissed Ben Edelman's application for permission
to reverse-engineer the list of blocked websites from N2H2's filtering
software. The software is often used to comply with government
requirements that libraries filter Internet content, and Ben (a Harvard
Law student and online activist) had wanted to investigate its accuracy.
N2H2 claimed this would violate their rights under the DMCA, and U.S.
District Judge Richard Sterns upheld their claim, saying "There is no
plausibly protected constitutional interest Edelman can assert that
outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted material from an
invasive and destructive trespass."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30196.html
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jazz
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response 24 of 154:
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Apr 11 14:00 UTC 2003 |
That's scary on two levels.
One, clean-room reverse engineering should be legal, period.
Two, there's a clear constitutional interest. Freedom of speech
*might* be being infringed, but nobody knows.
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krj
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response 25 of 154:
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Apr 11 17:30 UTC 2003 |
Right, the intersection of this ruling on the DMCA and the rules on
library/school internet filtering goes like this:
1) Schools and libraries are required to install this product to
restrict what may be read on the internet.
2) It is illegal to determine what you are not being allowed to read.
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krj
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response 26 of 154:
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Apr 11 18:09 UTC 2003 |
Back to music: News items flying everywhere report that
Apple (the computer company, not the Beatles' corporation)
is negotiating to buy Universal Music Group, the world's largest
record company. The rumored price would be $6 billion.
Universal is currently owned by the giant conglomerate Vivendi,
which is choking on the debt it piled up in its 1990s acquisition
spree. Vivendi is trying to sell off its entertainment assets,
and reports have been that there has been little serious interest
in buying its music division because investors see little
future in the business of selling music CDs.
Apple may see its future in music: it already makes the iPod,
generally regarded as the best MP3 player on the market, and
it is bringing an online music delivery system to market sometime
soon; there has been much speculation that Apple might manage to do
it better than the MusicNet and Pressplay offerings from the
established recording industry. Owning a huge music division
could give Apple a good base of desirable music to feed this
growing music operation.
One article says that Universal accounts for about 25% of
CD sales. Major label imprints of Universal include:
MCA, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Def Jam, Lost Highway,
and also possibly the largest remaining big-label classical
music operation, with Philips, Deutsche Grammophon, Decca.
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mcnally
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response 27 of 154:
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Apr 11 18:32 UTC 2003 |
re #23: "invasive and destructive trespass"?
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other
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response 28 of 154:
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Apr 11 20:06 UTC 2003 |
Hopefully, he'll appeal. The constitutional implications are one
important area, but reverse-engineering is vital to innovation, and when
combined with due diligence regarding patents, poses no risk of
infringement.
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