Good easy to digest comment on an issue that will only get bigger. The push back has happened for years, and Napster was only the first large scale example of this. Funny how, pre napster, nobody ever yelled outloud that album owners could take the new album home, and then proceed to copy it over and over again from turntable to tape deck, then from tape deck to tape deck and give it to friends...and none of this was traceable by the big companies, and we never heard about it.
Then along came Napster, and suddenly, since the free exchange of music was traceable by the big corporations for the first time due to this exchange taking place on the trackable internet (excellent use of technology on thier part by corporations, I must say, to protect their ability to make money), all the sudden consumers "lost" the ability to freely exchange music, something they gained in the last decades of the 20th century with tape decks. The irony of the big companies, while being able to shut down Napster, and effectively have a bigger and more controlled market than before, are actually seeing the market "grow smaller" than it was in the pre intenet/digital music age. A quite delicious irony!
My pet peeve is the war by software companies on the "borrowing" of programs... which is feasible, as long as only one person actually registers online for updates, etc. I can see their point about intellectual copyright, etc. But what about mutiple machine single owner set ups? If you own a laptop and a desktop, you are "ethically" required to buy the family pac, and pay 20 more bucks to the company, even though you spent mutiple thousands to have two machines for one person to work on.
I think you get where I am going, and why Mr. Martellaro has perhaps started a great dialogue with this topic. The lashing back by consumers who are in the 10's of thousands getting tired of what he talks about, will eventually bring on more and more Napster-like creations. Will corporate Amerika have enough lawyers, time, money and cohones to fight everyone... one thinks they may, one hopes they can't/won't/don't.
The beauty of this is that the many 10's of thousands will eventually find their own moral balance point, their own high ground to stand upon, if you will, and this will still lead to innovative (if if illegal) soft and hard hacks that will permit "free sharing". And in a neat way, take us back to the end of the 20th century...when we could "share" a bit.
Jim P

This isn't quite the technical betrayal I was referring to. But it is a business betrayal of sorts, that is, abusing the honorable relationship between the customer and the company. In the Age of the Internet, everyone gets to
see it, hear it happen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JYIXzfhel8

I've run into this same sort of thing, not with an iPhone, but with a "free" (with 2-year contract) KRZR to replace my old v710. What gets me is that there is so much that the phone CAN do, but is disabled by the cellphone company, NOT the manufacturer. For example, it is next to impossible to load a ringtone on this phone WITHOUT paying Verizon. Sure, if you get the right software, you can mess with the internal file system of the phone, but why?

It looks to me like, at some point, the cellphone industry will have to man up and work like the landline industry; you can't lock your customer into a certain piece of hardware with a certain set of features. It just ain't right!

This is part of why there's no such animal as a DVD player that puts the _video_ out via a firewireport.

There was nothing technically wrong with this happening all the way back to the first days of Firewire. Yet the 'one wire to bind them all' behind the TV has easily taken an extra decade to get something even approaching the initial inklings of flexibility.

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jimperuzzo wrote:
Good easy to digest comment on an issue that will only get bigger. The push back has happened for years, and Napster was only the first large scale example of this. Funny how, pre napster, nobody ever yelled outloud that album owners could take the new album home, and then proceed to copy it over and over again from turntable to tape deck, then from tape deck to tape deck and give it to friends...and none of this was traceable by the big companies, and we never heard about it.
Then along came Napster, and suddenly, since the free exchange of music was traceable by the big corporations for the first time due to this exchange taking place on the trackable internet (excellent use of technology on thier part by corporations, I must say, to protect their ability to make money), all the sudden consumers "lost" the ability to freely exchange music, something they gained in the last decades of the 20th century with tape decks.

There is a major essential difference between a few low-quality tapes and millions of digital copies, some quite high-quality. In the same vein, it's not much of an impact to a publisher if someone decides to make a photocopy of the latest Harry Potter book (it might cost as much as the book), but it would be if they made a digital copy available free for downloading.

You are right, the digital world is much different in this respect. I was referring more to the individual and their abilty to share.
Perhaps my choice of example was wrong, but then again, what about buying one copy of a book and then sharing it with others? Our purchase of digital products compromises much of this with the protections companies are putting on their wares, protections that did not exist prvious to digital media.

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jimperuzzo wrote:
You are right, the digital world is much different in this respect. I was referring more to the individual and their abilty to share.
Perhaps my choice of example was wrong, but then again, what about buying one copy of a book and then sharing it with others? Our purchase of digital products compromises much of this with the protections companies are putting on their wares, protections that did not exist prvious to digital media.

The fact that a song in your iTunes library is in an electronic/digital format, where there is no physical copy, represented a new problem in copyright law. It's not new--we wrestled with it during my time managing a forum on CompuServe in the mid-'90s, but it has evolved and changed over the years. The DMCA is a major stage in that evolution, which is continuing.

As for protections that did not exist previous to digital media, the digital media didn't exist, either. One "protection" against copying a book, for example (besides enforcing the copyright) was that copying could cost as much as or more than the book and take a long time. Also, copying companies would generally refuse to make more than one copy of parts of a book.

One issue was people copying portions of several books to assemble an anthology. The copyright laws addressed this particular issue decades ago, especially the case of teachers who would copy stories, essays, poems, etc., so that their students wouldn't have to buy a slew of books. The Fair Use provisions were pretty explicit about this situation.

Also, don't refer to sense or analogies, but rather to the law. The law may represent a sensible approach to some, but not to others. When there are conflicting interests, as there are here, someone is bound to be unhappy.

RE Iphone hacking.
You mean to tell me that after I buy an Iphone for 500 bucks and don't
register to activate I am not able to do with my phone as I please?
My feeling is that they want you to be captive no matter what even if you
paid full price.
I for one will steer off a gadget that costs 500 and is not usable to its
full extent.

Funny how Blu-ray fanboys say Paramount's decision is bad for consumers. Those are the same people who talked about how the format war is bad for consumers. Of course they don't really mean that. They really mean that HD-DVD should hurry up and die. Those people don't care about consumers. They care about themselves and the money they blew on BR. But Paramount DOES believe the format war is bad (for business of course) and they stood up and took a stand. Because of them, the war will be over very soon and that will indeed be very good for consumers (and for the Studios). Just because your format of choice didn't win the war doesn't mean the other 99.9% of the population got screwed.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the subject line, it all boils down to the fact that anything is permissible in the name of "business" these days in America. People can lie, cheat, steal, even kill, as long as their excuse is "well, it's just business."

This can be traced back to laws allowing the creation of legal fictions known as "corporations," enabling the lack of personal accountability from corporate executives.

re guest and Blu-Ray fanboys. (Are there enough owners of either format players to have fanboys?)

Paramount didn't make a business decision and choose a format. In fact, they were making both HD and Blu-Ray discs and selling them. So people with either player were happy. In fact according the the linked article:

"Blu-ray has been selling two-to-one over HD DVD this year, and this includes Paramount titles. The last Paramount title shipped on both formats, Disturbia, had a 68:32 split in favor of Blu-ray in the most recent Videoscan survey."

So in fact, the sound business decision would have been to drop HD (How do you like THAT HD fanboys

Instead, "According to the New York Times, HD DVD promoters are paying $150 million to Paramount/Dreamworks to pay for Paramount dropping its support of Blu-ray while retaining support of HD DVD."

So Paramount was PAID to drop the format. Not phase it out, not announce that new titles would only be available in HD. No they DROPPED Blu-Ray, pulled existing stock back from retailers and told their Blu-Ray fanboys (er, customers) too damn bad.

As I said at the beginning, there are probably not enough HD customers, so Paramount felt they could take this money and not cause a revolt. Given that the news made barely a ripple in the main stream press, they appeared to have been right. But just because it doesn't affect the majority of their customers does not make it OK.