DISQUS

If I got on a plane and started "reading" Playboy, held out in front of me in such a way that the passengers on both sides of me could see it, what would happen?

How is a laptop any different?

Obama's IP reform statements say very little about copyright, and a lot about reforming the patent system. Of course, for a candidate, that's very easy, because its a system that everyone knows is broken.

Add in: all DRM schemes to date were cracked by independent programmers. Let's suppose we lost the DMCA, and Creative realized they could legally reverse engineer FairPlay, and port all iTunes Store content to their Zen devices.

They would have a very strong incentive to do this.

But that doesn't mean they would. We've seen plenty of instances in which tech companies cave to content industry demands.

There's something fundamentally wrong here.

When we seek to evaluate the safety and quality of a car, we look to engineers, because engineers have the expertise to make such an evaluation. The people who build cars, oddly enough, are also engineers.

When we seek to evaluate the safety quality of a drug, we look to biologists and doctors, because biologists and doctors have the expertise to make such an evaluation. The people who develop new drugs, oddly enough, have very similar backgrounds to doctors.

Likewise for architecture. Likewise for software. Likewise for writing (editors tend to be writers).

But when we want to create an objective rating system for media, we turn to... social scientists?

Wait a second... why should we give the gaming industry a free pass on data abuse when we slam their competitors in the music and movie industries for the same thing?

So, in the interest of fairness, I'd like to point out, that the number of pirated copies is STILL not a proxy for lost sales.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080320-p...

Nonbinding motions are used to send messages. The message is obvious enough. It's a warning: go solve the problem yourselves before we need to pursue a binding solution.

Anyone else find it funny that everyone knows The Media is Liberal, even though The Radio is Conservative?

And how is it that Fairness proponents always pick vague ideological points to use as examples? Has it ever occurred to them that strict enforcement of such a doctrine would require equal time for the pro and anti positions on topics that are traditionally noncontroversial, such as anorexia. Do we really want to turn on the radio and hear a Pro-ana viewpoint? Do we really want 12-year-old girls to hear that?

Obama and McCain are in very different positions than the rest of us, since it makes absolutely no difference what they really want to do. One of them will be in charge of the intelligence system, and they'll be able to modify the system as they choose.

So for Obama, it's easy to say screw it, I'll do what's politically viable this time so I can get in that office and clean it up the right way later. Likewise for the Democratic congress.

But we don't have that luxury. So, until they actually acquire these offices and make the appropriate reforms, all I can say is "Bad Democrats."

While forcible attempts to kill file sharing as doomed to failure, that doesn't mean the phenomenon won't die off of its own defects. These P2P networks are littered with viruses, spyware, etc. That risk drives a lot of people, technical and nontechnical users alike, away from P2P.

This could be especially effective because the nature of the virus is changing. It used to be that to get a virus you'd have to download an executable, run it, and it would wipe your harddrive. That's not true anymore. Modern malware is about making money. So we'll see more ID theft, more spying on your email and bank account, and while worms that jump from machine to machine on their own seem to be a thing of the past, that doesn't mean a bug in P2P software (which tends to be pretty sketchy) couldn't be used in such a way.

Is that enough to scare people off of P2P?

Well, depending on how bad the situation gets, yes.

I agree with Enigma. Net neutrality doesn't seem to interfere with something like this. Even if this future healthcare system had to provide realtime data to hospitals, including imagery, the odds of it clogging the tubes are... pretty nonexistence. And since the tubes are not currently clogged, there doesn't seem to be a problem that would require prioritizing data.

But let's suppose such a system is so large and so demanding, it couldn't really coexist with all the other traffic. In a world without neutrality, Big Telecom can charge these services for high speed connections, prioritize them, and fail to deliver on another innovative platform's high speed connection package. This seems... acceptable, except that nobody really gets what they're paying for.

With network neutrality, the ISP would have to expand their bandwidth. Update routers, lay down cable, invest millions of dollars, but the key word is invest. Keep in mind, this future medical technology uses bandwidth and Internet connections, which means they're being paid for.

In other words, with net neutrality, in this weird, semi-plausible instance, the worst case scenario is that Big Telecom has to invest in new infrastructure to handle growing traffic, knowing full well people will pay for all that traffic.

That's hardly problematic.

This is a good start, but it's only going to work if it's done right. It never ceases to amaze me how many people are convinced that .org sites are more credible, that there's some sort of vetting process before you can get one.

Yes, but how many of those passwords were made up on the spot?

Let's be reasonable, evolution has equipped man with a natural capacity for lying to beautiful women.

Increased wages from protectionism can't be good either way, especially as large corporations start shipping offices overseas where they can get cheaper labor.

Eminent Domain has such a bad reputation in STL that I've seen new properties advertise that they were acquired without the use of eminent domain. It's very reminiscent of the way music sellers can gain a lot of support just for being DRM-free. In a sense, the "fair" businesses can gain respect from consumers by toting consumer rights.

We're assuming that the entire market will be flooded with 256kbps songs from iTunes. As long as CD's are still for sale, there will be so many seeds that what iTunes does or does not do as a deterrent will not affect the availability of illegal downloads.

What it can do, however, is draw people to its store and away from P2P, which isn't entirely free if you try to put a price on viruses and spyware.

At best, the identifier might convince some quantity of users to uncheck the "share my music" box in their P2P client.

At worst, it will be used by the RIAA as evidence that not only the person hosting the songs is at fault, but so is everyone who's name is imbedded in those files. This isn't quite as easy as it sounds, because in order to get those names it would have to DOWNLOAD all the files. Many of those files would contain no information, some of them may be altered, which would require some effort to determine, and some would only provide evidence of one act of infringement. The RIAA tends to go after the high quantity offenders, so this all seems fairly impractical.