Be my guest - rip me off!

[WilHarris]

http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2005..._me_off/1.html

As a side note, I bought the book and loved it

[Etacovda]

the discuss this article link appears to link to itself

/me downloads book

[fev]

VHS recording of a TV program to a mate who missed it?

Televisions show "Programmes"

same eurl tag problemo as before

good interesting article though, felt it explained the issues

[L2wis]

Great article really enjoyed the read

[Da Dego]

agreed...very well done. An honest explanation of the issues, including the idea that there should and easily could be some middle ground between bit-torrents and digital lockdowns. I also REALLY liked your point about *why* bit-torrent stuff is not quite like the 80's tape-passing, because we honestly forget that a lot. Now if only either side would listen...

By the way, 428 people could be a very credible number. A look into the statistics would be interesting, but I bet they're using about 90% confidence interval (which would require about 3% sample of the population assuming normal distribution). The problem is, that number looks like they sampled only THEIR university. It would be more credible if they backed it up with maybe a random sample of multiple Uni's as well.

And I still don't think it's lost sales to the record company. It's lost POTENTIAL sales. They don't want to think about the fact that people just won't listen at all if they have to pay $20 for something that only has one song on it they like. Same issue I have with a lot of game piracy figures...Yeah, most of us have a few that we got through less than legitimate means, but they were the once-and-done games that we would never have spent the money on anyways. One day maybe these companies will stop counting every piece of pirated software and downloaded music as stolen revenues...

[Firehed]

So true Da Dego, it's what I've been saying from the start. Doom 3, for example, wasn't even worth my friend's bandwidth (I copied it off his hdd over the network after he pirated it). I use downloading as a sampling service whether they like it or not. But the more DRM they impose, the more I'll pirate and NOT buy just so I don't have to deal with it. If I can get a free copy of music without DRM or buy it and not be able to do anything (legal) that I'd like to with it, even if I know that maybe fifty cents of the $14 goes to the artist, guess what my choice will be.

That's even more true for software. You think I'd pay $700 for photoshop? Get real. Sure it's a nice piece of software, but for my purposes it's paint plus a couple of bonus features (like not artifacting the crap out of stuff after changing it from bmp to jpg). Indeed a lot of software that I've pirated I also own legally, I just don't want to have to deal with activation every time I reinstall.

[Wolfe]

I would just like to point out that there is an active group of people out there who regularly scan books, run an OCR through the scanned media, and release it as an e-book on p2p networks.

I got a kick out of it when i came across it.

[Godboy_g]

Originally Posted by Wolfe

I would just like to point out that there is an active group of people out there who regularly scan books, run an OCR through the scanned media, and release it as an e-book on p2p networks.

That's true, I've seen books on the p2p networks weeks before they were released in stores.

[Da Dego]

Originally Posted by Wolfe

I would just like to point out that there is an active group of people out there who regularly scan books, run an OCR through the scanned media, and release it as an e-book on p2p networks.

I got a kick out of it when i came across it.

Some people have WAAAY too much time on their hands. You could always just go to the library and check the book out. Oh, wait, I'm sure that will be made illegal soon enough! "You can't book-share! The EULA on that book says you are the only one who can read it!"

[Dadmag]

Not with my book.

[lepre]

i agree with the article.
i think that intelligent people buy what they like instead of downloading.
personal if i download a game it's difficult i play it more than 5 hour (sometimes it takes me more to download/install it than the time i play it)
that's the same for the music and everything else. also films, if i want to see a film i like i don't want to know anything about it because i want to watch it myself, if i don't want to see a film and i download it for the sells it doen't change anything because i'm not going to pay to see a film i don't want to see and perhaps if i like it from the "screneer" i may go to see it with my friends at the cinema.

people who just download every crap just to "full-use" their broadband are just sick and stupid and are not a danger for selling as media want to make us think because they won't never see/listen/read/etc (even buy) more than 10% they download.

well you already know all this...the problem is make everyday-pc-user-tv-watcher-paper-reader-people know this..

[Firehed]

the RIAA and MPAA rather. They assume everone's using P2P to screw them over, whereas we try and find a CD that doesn't suck. If you care about the quality, you go out and buy the CD, and then probably rip it to your hard drive using software that doesn't DRM it, or often make a personal backup and use that so the original doesn't get damaged.

This type of licencing is exactly what I was arguing with TheAnimus about (we argue way too often!) - how it lets the original user be the only one to profit from it if profit is to be made, but still allows for future development by other individuals. At least if I understood the article correctly. Best way it can be done imo, that way others aren't profiting from your ideas but it still gets improved upon. And the people who are likely to do this are also the ones that are most unlikely to be charging hundreds of dollars for software that only works right half the time.

[mrplow]

Nice to see that hugely impartial review of the book on your site there.


ps: I'll get it and give it a go, sounds interesting enough

[TheAnimus]

Originally Posted by Firehed

This type of licencing is exactly what I was arguing with TheAnimus about (we argue way too often!) - how it lets the original user be the only one to profit from it if profit is to be made, but still allows for future development by other individuals. At least if I understood the article correctly. Best way it can be done imo, that way others aren't profiting from your ideas but it still gets improved upon. And the people who are likely to do this are also the ones that are most unlikely to be charging hundreds of dollars for software that only works right half the time.

you knew this would happen

with music copyright its always been intresting when people have taken very short samples (6 bars or less) hell not samples, but the same few notes, now does that mean they should pay the full amount, what if its the sample that everyone loves about the song, very hard to gauge pratically.

Try to apply this to software, when i've been testing stuff, i've often ripped chunks of code, compiled, no source needed because i'm so leet code, this is common pratace amoungst people making cracks (so i like to give them a suprise ) now how do u license it. How can u make this work, say source is given out, imagine if someone say when creating a language got the idea of the foreach, and got the rights for that. Were do you draw the line.

as i've tried to say before, in good software design you break stuff into blocks, often into modules (don't please think DLLs, we're talking smaller than that, classes mabye). So say you only apply it to classes (the idea that its their class, so if you use it, you pay). How big does it have to be, how complex.

Its a mind feild, and this type of licensing, well i'm not going to say it won't happen, its just not going to make it easyer, so i hope it wont!

[Dadmag]

Books are a bit different to other types of content, because of their history as repositories of knowledge. 'Fair Use' allows you to use quite large chunks of another person's work in your own, so long as it's fully attributed. This is absolutely essential for academic works, which are always to some extent a discussion between the new theorist and the ideas of the past. If you had to pay for every word used in this way, academic development would stop dead in its tracks.

In fact, all culture works like this. Classical composers have used folk tunes as the basis for their music since the year dot. Every new work in an art genre owes at least some heritage to what went before. But the restrictive DRM that is being proposed at the moment could put a stop to that. Culture needs dialogue to continue developing. But those behind these DRM schemes want the development to stop, with them remaining at the top. That's why it is essential we fight them, unless we really want to be their slaves.

I dont think the release of books like this is a new idea is it? Matt Reilly did it last year that I know of with his book Hovercar Racer through his fan site before it was published as a "book". That was done via pdf as well.

[Dadmag]

No, I'm not the first to put out a PDF version of my book, obviously. But Creative Commons licenses are pretty new to the UK, so an explicit license for works published here to allow sharing is uncommon. Very few publishers offer this license yet in England.