Steinman won't pay it.
Internet, we hardly knew ye.
- Thread starter GasBandit
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This may be the most awesome thing I've ever seen.
Photo of the Day: Members of the Polish opposition party Palikot’s Movement held up Guy Fawkes masks inthe Sejm today to protest their government’s recent passage of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
*reads the wiki*
I'd vote for 'em!
And now on top of all the above shenanigans, now we have to worry about Google tracking everything* we do on the Internet starting Mar 1? I'm starting to get really concerned, here.
--Patrick
*Yes, everything.
--Patrick
*Yes, everything.
It's...difficult. It's a bit like buying food that doesn't trace back to Monsanto, or that doesn't have gluten in it...certainly do-able, but very difficult. I could swear off Google entirely...but get infestigated* by the Google ads when I visit this site.
--Patrick
*I just made that up.
--Patrick
*I just made that up.
Or you know, you can just delete your cookies automatically when you close firefox!
Google's got nothing on me: http://www.google.com/settings/ads/...k0NC_l4fciY8jULnMfCjnZ4YOPzZbAoM1an-QUg&hl=en
The more I read this the more I feel like an idiot. I get the sinking feeling in my stomach that SOPA/PIPA were just a smoke screen to allow ACTA to get farther through without protest, since it basically enacts many of the same policies on a international level, rather then a national one.
GasBandit
Staff member
There was a conspiracy keanu meme picture today that said that exactly.
Here's a novel concept, getting royalties even from pirated content. According to this report, that's exactly what's happening with iTunes Match. Each time an iTunes Match customer plays a track, the artist gets a cut. No matter where it originally came from.
We are already paying such a surcharge for recording media. Right now it's CD-Rs, but they keep pushing bills for all memory and digital storage - so even if you use the CD-R for backup, the recording industry gets a cut as though you were using it for copyrighted music.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
And, of course, the artists never see a dime - this all goes back into the recording lobby to further their cause. It doesn't do a thing for the artists.
http://www.ittechpages.com/tech/tax-recordable-cds-223.html
Records and radio and TV didn't decimate the live performance industry. Cassette tapes didn't decimate the recording industry. Neither did CD-R, computers, or the internet.
It's not about saving the industry, and it never has been - it's about making as much money off the same properties as possible, money that doesn't go to the artist, but instead to the industry groups and recording studios.
Necronic
Staff member
All that said, Jazz is the devil's music and it is degrading our youth's morals and subverting our proud culture. We should probably stop it.
Edit: Ok, on topic. Darrel Issa is fighting against this. This confuses and beffudles me. That guy is arguably the single most blatantly corrupt politician in the US.
Edit2: Could someone explain to me what's so bad about the ACTA thing? Its so broad I'm having a hard time understadning the remifications (if any considering that it's an international treaty.)
Edit: Ok, on topic. Darrel Issa is fighting against this. This confuses and beffudles me. That guy is arguably the single most blatantly corrupt politician in the US.
Edit2: Could someone explain to me what's so bad about the ACTA thing? Its so broad I'm having a hard time understadning the remifications (if any considering that it's an international treaty.)
In a nutshell:
- "ACTA contains new potential obligations for Internet intermediaries, requiring them to police the Internet and their users, which in turn pose significant concerns for citizens’ privacy, freedom of expression, and fair use rights."
- "the goal [of ACTA] is to create a new standard of intellectual property enforcement above the current internationally-agreed standards"
- it includes: "new legal regimes to "encourage ISPs to cooperate with right holders in the removal of infringing material" criminal measures and increased border search powers"
- it "mandate copyright filtering by ISPs" (I think this was removed last May, but I'm not sure)
- https://www.eff.org/issues/acta
Other than that, which I acknowledge isn't much, I got nothin'.
I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it. The entertainment industry (ie, not the entertainers, but the industry itself) ultimately does not care about content. They care about selling you tapes, discs, tickets, rentals, SD cards, or any number of otherwise worthless items (hereafter referred to as "widgets") that happen to have that thing you want to consume encoded onto it somehow. It's no different than designer purses or jeans, the 'label' just serves to sell more stuff. The industry does not make its profit based on which items you purchase, they make it solely based on how many you purchase. Think about it...the cost to manufacture a million widgets containing Serenity is no different than the cost to manufacture a million widgets containing The Wiggles: Hot Potatoes!
Therefore, when the industry tries to decide which properties to protect, which entertainers to sponsor(/hire), which laws to create/support, and what to promote, they choose to lavish their attention on the ones which will encourage people to purchase the greatest total number of widgets. They don't care about niceness, morality, remakes, sequels, rereleases, or critical acclaim...unless that acclaim helps them sell more widgets, of course.
Every time a new widget technology comes along, they lick their lips at the opportunity. The ideal widget is read-only (eg BluRay v. SD card) so that it has no alternate use other than as a delivery vehicle for their content (and therefore hopefully discarded when it goes obsolescent) or transient/ephemeral (eg movie ticket/music subscription) and therefore not replayable (forcing the consumer to pay every time the experience is desired). This is why they hate recordable media so much (especially re-recordable media) and why they fight so hard to make sure you can't get your own unprotected version...because once you divorce the content from the widget, you no longer need the industry and all of its manufacturing facilities.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and give an example of what I'm talking about. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD had a big fight recently and Blu-Ray won thanks to its higher capacity and that it was slightly harder to hack. The sheer capacity of the disc (25/50GB) enabled new widget technologies such as 3D video, multiple camera angles, more audio tracks, and 1080p video...these are the carrots. The managed content, AACS, selective output control (ICT), and the whole 'analog sunset' thing? That was the stick. And there's currently no good alternative for getting primo, hi-def content up onto your display system of choice, so you were pretty much stuck with it.
Well, that was then. Now we have USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt out there, which mean it will finally be practical to watch movies on SDHC since a standard SD card reader will finally be able to get that data into the computer/TV fast enough to display it on the screen (without all the CPU overhead of the slower USB 2.0). And I'm betting SD cards are a whole lot cheaper to manufacture and distribute than Blu-Ray. Sure, they're slightly slower than Blu-Ray (Hi-speed SD can hit about 30MB/s, Blu-Ray starts at 9MB/s but is supposed to eventually hit 32MB/s with a theoretical max of 50MB/s...IF you spin the discs at 10,000 RPM, but that could lead to other problems*). Also, the thing about SDHC? They're recordable and the 16GB ones are almost exactly the same price as current Blu-Ray discs. So you can basically "tape over" them as many times as you want in a format that is about 1/10th the size of Blu-Ray. Really, the only reason the studios aren't moving to SD right now to save money on distribution and manufacture is probably because they know the average consumer isn't going to want to replace their entire collection of movies again so soon. Plus they haven't yet figured out how to hogtie the SD format to prevent so-called 'abuse.'
--Patrick
*Blu-Ray discs are deliberately made more durable than CDs, but once they start to crack, they're just as likely to go.
What are you smoking? What do CD-Rs have to do with Apple paying royalties to the bands?
Nothing. It's more about how the industry lobbied to get the gv't to assume that all CD-Rs and other recordable media are going to eventually be used for piracy and therefore should have a preemptive fee charged to offset the income lost to that infringement.
--Patrick
You said earlier, "Here's a novel concept, getting royalties even from pirated content."
It's not a novel concept - it's a bad solution to the problem.
I'm only participating because I have to--lack of spending money.
So now the RIAA, MPAA, and the major ISPs are going to introduce the "Six-Strikes" system to crack down on piracy. Copyrights holders just have to file a complaint to the providers, and then you are given a strike. It is then up to you to prove that you did not do what you are accused of within ten days. After six strikes, that's when the bandwidth throttling and lawsuits begin. And the board in charge of handling these complaints is made up entirely of RIAA, MPAA, and ISP members.
None of what's being implemented had public input, and you are guilty until you can prove otherwise. Lovely.
None of what's being implemented had public input, and you are guilty until you can prove otherwise. Lovely.
S
Soliloquy
Could you let me know what you find out? I'd like to not have to deal with this kind of BS.
What constitutes piracy? Watching Youtube?
Never even heard of it.
So far I've found out that it's really hard to get a straight answer from an ISP as to whether or not they're part of this 'voluntary' program.
Since this is a program run by the ISPs and not regulated nor legislated in any way, it pretty much means they can potentially accuse you of 'piracy' whenever they want, and the burden of proof is upon you, not them. And since there is (presently) no government oversight since this is just an 'agreement' between the major ISPs, they can pretty much kick you out of the Internet club if they want to.
They have publicly stated that they will only collude with one another in the most responsible way possible, of course.
--Patrick
Is Anon still a thing?
Good point.
Phew.I think Anon just got back at me for posting that >.< My PC exploded with Malware alerts.Had to reinstall windows.it's all good now.
Strange cooincidence.
Strange cooincidence.
...and it looks like Blu-Ray may poke itself in the eye with that stick, or so they think over at Anandtech. People keep breaking the copy protection, so it looks like rather than just give in, the Blu-Ray people are going to layer on more and more DRM, which will a) make it harder to watch, b) break compatibility with players made before 2011, and c) do pretty much nothing to prevent piracy.
From the CCI's own (deliberately?) misspelled documentation, the list of participating ISPs is as follows:
AT&T
Verizon
Comcast
Cablevision Systems Co
Time Warner Cable
...and their respective subsidiaries.
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
Good gravy, here we go again.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act now has more than 105 co-sponsors, and some fear the bill could go further than SOPA and PIPA in threatening online privacy. SOPA and PIPA were finally discarded earlier this year after resounding online protest changed the debate, but the same doesn’t yet appear to be the case with CISPA.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation , H.R. 3523 “would let companies spy on users and share private information with the federal government and other companies with near-total immunity from civil and criminal liability. It effectively creates a ‘cybersecurity’ exemption to all existing laws.”
The bill could sneak through Congress quickly once it’s back in session, so be sure to track its progress .
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act now has more than 105 co-sponsors, and some fear the bill could go further than SOPA and PIPA in threatening online privacy. SOPA and PIPA were finally discarded earlier this year after resounding online protest changed the debate, but the same doesn’t yet appear to be the case with CISPA.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation , H.R. 3523 “would let companies spy on users and share private information with the federal government and other companies with near-total immunity from civil and criminal liability. It effectively creates a ‘cybersecurity’ exemption to all existing laws.”
The bill could sneak through Congress quickly once it’s back in session, so be sure to track its progress .
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