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Santa Cruz, California (Score:5, Funny)
also known as the World's Largest Open Air Mental Institution.
P.S. Sorry, but you'll probably only get this if you've actually visited the place.
Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:4, Funny)
No, no. The Capitol is enclosed.
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Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:4, Insightful)
I realize that it's only one data point, but having a crack smoking mayor reelected is pretty crazy.
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Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:5, Insightful)
The crazy people in Berkeley wander around pushing shopping carts; the crazy people in Glastonbury sit in fields smoking pot. What is distinctive about Santa Cruz is its peculiarly high-functioning crazy people, like this guy, who are entirely divorced from reality, yet somehow manage to, for instance, run a record label.
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Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:5, Funny)
As a native of the People's Republic of Berkeley, I will be organizing a march to protest this obvious attempt at profiling and oppression. Meanwhile - dude, I've got the munchies...are you going to finish those fries?
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Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:4, Informative)
"What, you mean I'm not allowed to point a camera in a certain direction and push the button?" (just because it happens to be pointed at a copyright painting?) "You mean it's illegal to pluck magnetic waves from the atmosphere and visualize them?"
Those all are legal.
What you are not allowed to do is redistribute the result. Then you have violated copyright.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I live in Newark, NJ. I got you all beat on crazies.
I actually had a guy attempt to attack me with a canteen. A frickin' canteen!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't that "leylines"?
Re:Crackpots (Re:Santa Cruz, California) (Score:5, Informative)
The SCO that operated in Santa Cruz is not the same SCO that sued IBM. The Santa Cruz Operation company came out with Xenix, SCO UNIX (OpenServer) and Unixware. They purchased Tarantella earlier this decade, and then sold off their Unix-related business to Caldera. As their primary business was now Tarantella, they changed names. Caldera then took over the SCO moniker eventually becoming The SCO Group. It was that company, formerly Caldera, that took on Novell, IBM, et al.
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Worst headline EVAR (Score:5, Insightful)
The blame falls on the lurid headline over at Wired, which completely mischaracterizes the actual article. But it's Slashdot's fault for repeating it both in the headline here and in the summary.
For shame.
Re:Worst headline EVAR (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah call it "worst evar", "lurid", and "mischaracterizing", but do not try to explain *why* it is wrong, it's much more dramatic that way.
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What kind of idiotic title is that anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it just me, or is EMI not suing the Beatles (half of which aren't even going to show up in court), but really some fuckwad that sold illegal copies of their songs?
np: Burial - Distant Lights (Various - 5 Years Of Hyperdub (Disc 2))
Re:What kind of idiotic title is that anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
The story is tagged badtitle when in fact it should be wrongtitle, or even better toostupidtomakeagoodtitle.
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Re:What kind of idiotic title is that anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
that wasn't my title, actually its been completely rewritten by K Dawson, editors do a lot more than people think on here.
The site is still up and offers 160kb streaming of a good quantity of music for free and you can buy tracks at 25 cents each I believe and some remarkably high quality original recordings of some familiar tracks.
http://www.bluebeat.com/ [bluebeat.com]
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I'm sure in Santa Cruz, Ca it makes perfect sense (Score:3, Informative)
Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Ironically, those Bluebeat guys are the ones arguing for mandatory DRM [arstechnica.com] and suing all the music stores for using "inadequate DRM". A judge finds a company trying to promote their "unbreakable" DRM for copyright infringement.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
THIS is the sort of piracy that I think any intelligent human being opposes.
Except for those of us who think that songs over 30 years old have already been STOLEN from the public domain. Or are you talking about the post-'79 Beatles?
Re:Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
but I can't imagine forcing things into the public domain for living authors.
Why not? That's the way it originally worked.
If we went back to the original system, if the authors want to earn more money after their copyrights expire, they would have to get up off of their asses and work some more, just like the rest of us have to. If they don't want to have to work later in life, they should put some of their current earnings into a 401k, like the rest of us have to.
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Re:Piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
GP says shouldn't, but equally important these days is the greater realization that it's "can't": See Streisand Effect [wikipedia.org]
And this is a key point: The internet is a giant copying and storage machine. Where the old systems may have made sense due to the difficulty and expense of publishing and disseminating information, the internet has in fact cleared the way for knowledge to be fairly universal. Where we had technological and financial barriers to which copyright may have been a viable solution we now only have an artificial barrier holding progress back.
I'm not sure I understand your assertion.
Are you suggesting that without copyright we won't have any ideas? That's a non-starter that ends the conversation.
Are you suggesting that without copyright we will have less ideas? There I'll challenge you for proof of your assertion.
Of course, maybe I've really not understood what conclusion you were working towards.
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No, they didn't (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually RTFA, and Beatles music is still available in internet jukeboxes. What happened is some guy tried to twist copyright law in a foolish and illogical way, saying that resampled Beatles songs are his, and he actually registered copyrights of them. The judge PREDICTABLY and logically ruled against him. I'd have laughed him out of court.
EMI holds the real copyrights, sued, and won. The guy posting Beatles songs was clearly in the wrong. As is the summary.
The true evil here is that the Beatles' music should be in the public domain by now; they broke up in 1971, almost forty years ago. You should be able to reuse their art in your own art by now; that was, in fact, the whole purpose of giving Congress the power to write copyright law in the first place.
MRT's History (Score:4, Interesting)
The guy posting Beatles songs was clearly in the wrong.
I just wrote about this in my journal last night [slashdot.org] and would like to point out that Media Rights Technology (MRT, owners of BlueBeat.com) has a long history of neurosis when it comes to the legal system. Although not cross referenced above, you may recognize MRT as the very same people who sued everyone in 2007 for not implementing DRM [slashdot.org]. If you're Hank Risan, you've probably been asking yourself "How can I twist the law in a bizarre way to get rich quick?" And here we are.
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Re:No, they didn't (Score:5, Insightful)
If falls in the PD, then no one should be allowed to profit
That's possibly the dumbest interpretation of "public domain" I've seen here, and that's saying a lot. Here's a biscuit!
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Debugging (Score:3, Funny)
Of course... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lucy in the Sky with Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
If Timothy Leary was born a few decades later, he'd patent psychedelic trips. Then we'd be stuck in the bland 50's forever singing doo-wap tunes.
Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
Psycho-acoustic simulation sounds like a real good pseudo-science.
It's what most of us call mp3 or m4a.
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Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:4, Insightful)
But EMI don't own the particular soundwaves which comprise the Beatles' songs. Instead they own the very idea of these songs. EMI has sole and total ownership over the platonic ideals of which any particular instance of a Beatles song is merely a shadow. This ideal encompases any sound resembling the songs, any text resembling their lyrics, any album cover resembling theirs, any musical notes close enough to a Beatles tune.
In a very real sense, EMIs ownership of this music is analogous to them owning the number 537. A platonic ideal. No matter who sings it, or performs it, or records it, or sells it, or even hums it this music belongs to EMI because they own the very idea of it. They own it now, and will probably own it in perpetuity, for the rest of eternity.
So which is crazier; this guys argument or the concept of copyrighted music itself?
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Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
No matter who sings it, or performs it, or records it, or sells it, or even hums it this music belongs to EMI because they own the very idea of it.
That's not entirely true. US Copyright law carves out some "compulsory licensing" exceptions that copyright holders are obligated to accept particular amounts of payment on and cannot deny permission. Web radio, for example. Mechanical reproduction for another (cover bands, etc). Which I believe may have been the exception this guy was going for, by trying to ride the fine line of what constitutes a new recording of the work. Even the makers of Guitar Hero did this (albeit in a much more legal way, by actually playing and rerecording the songs), and resulted with what sounded to the amateur as identical to the originals.
So this guy's idea wasn't necessarily *crazy*, just too close to literal duplication for this judge's taste (seems even the legal system applies some common sense now and then).
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Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
Why, why, why must people who might otherwise help argue the case that today's copyright is broken spoil their credibility with exageration and mis-statement of facts?
1 - Not every person on Earth benefits from public domain music. Some are too damned busy trying to remain alive.
2 - The Beatle's copyrights do not funnel every penny made off of sale of their music to the surviving band members.
Yes, their music should be out of copyright by now. You'd be a greater help to the cause of copyright reform that would make that happen by sticking to reality and sounding like you've thought the issue through, than by spouting off feel-good numbers that make it sound like you're wearing blinders so you can reach the conclusion you want.
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Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:4, Funny)
P.S.
>>>1 - Not every person on Earth benefits from public domain music.
Strawman argument. I didn't say "every person". I said 6 billion, but the actual population is much higher than that, so I did not include "every" person in my first statement.
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Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you for supporting my viewpoint that copyright has been hijacked. It's meant to benefit the originators of the idea, not suits that were not even born when the songs were first created.
Actually, that's incorrect. Before copyright, there were no artists or writers clamouring for "protection". The people pushing copyright were the publishers [wikipedia.org], who wanted copyright to benefit themselves (which is exactly what we have right now.) The whole "think of the artists" stuff is propaganda invented to create support for copyright from artists and "average" people.
Before copyright, artists considered it a complement that their work was replayed and enjoyed by others.
This, of course, doesn't make the hoarding of our cultural works and the impingement on free expression right, but I just wanted to point out that it was never meant to protect artists, only publishers.
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Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
It was not, giving 28 year terms of copyright to a populace that would live only 35 on average.
Statistics. You fail it.
If you have 1000 people, 500 of which died before they reached one year, and 500 of which die when they're 70, what is the average life expectancy?
In that time period, most adults lived into their 60's, not mid-thirties. The "35 year lifespan" is a garbage statistic spouted by people who don't understand math.
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Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:5, Insightful)
Generalize much?
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Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:5, Funny)
Generalize much?
never.
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Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:4, Interesting)
Aren't college students stereotypically poor already? Don't they have bad credit histories already? I don't see the point.
This might hold true for "poor" college students, but not college students in general. I went to college in my mid-to-late twenties, and had pretty good credit, a lot of my friends back then were also older than normal, and had decent pre-established credit (a lot of them being ex-military/GI Bill students). A lot of the younger college kids didn't qualify as poor either, the ones who were poor, were poor by bad spending and budgeting ("I need $x in loans because I can't eat, but I just went to see Radiohead on tour in London (from Arizona)")
Now, if they can't just erase the fines with a bankruptcy, that gives them less incentive than ever to stop file sharing. If they already have a life sentence, what more do they have to lose?
This isn't about the file sharers who get caught, this is about deterring the file sharers who didn't get caught. I doubt that the **AA really cares about the damages they receive from the people who are caught, they just want ALL file sharers to know "we will destroy you".
Think about it, if your a normal middle class American, and get stuck with a million dollar fine, how long would it take for you to realistically even pay off a fraction of it? I know people in their 40s (solidly middle class) who are still paying off student loans from the 70s, and these loans were vastly less than what the **AA is demanding.
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Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:4, Insightful)
The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
Ray Beckerman (/.'s NYCL) is a copyright lawyer, and he doesn't think file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads. In fact he fights them tooth and nail.
But I would bet he would agree that this guy's defense is laughable.
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Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:5, Insightful)
The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
I wouldn't put too much weight on what they think.
What is legal or not, and what is right or not are often completely different. These lawyers may have some rather screwy ideas about the latter, but it's their job to have a very good understanding of the former. So when the former is what's under discussion, what they think probably should carry a bit of weight.
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Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not? I know the dumbing-down of the modern media urges us to think in terms of black and white concepts, but there should be room for this. EMI are obviously evil copyright trolls, and this Hank Risan is equally obviously selling copyrighted material. Shakespeare (as always) has a good line for this:
"A plague on both your houses."
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Re:Heh Heh (Score:4, Funny)
It's pretty yellow of EMI to submarine this guy out of the blue like that. It's going to be a hard days night for this guy in the future. Ask me why! Because! He told EMI to come and get it.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Since psychoacoustic is explicitly mentioned in regard to audio compression tech (like MP3) I think he just invented a term for "I ripped it to MP3"
Re:What is PAS? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the Bluebeat guys did something a bit more tricky. They compressed the music as MP3 (whch I guess is psychoacoustic simulation - after all, the MP3 was compressed by using psychoacoustic principles to reduce the data contained, producing a simulation of the original). But the trick they're using to get around copyright law was to embed images into it [arstechnica.com], turning it into an "audio-visual" work. There is a separation, because AV works (think movies) are one entity - you cannot copyright the sound part of a movie separately from the moving images part.
Of course, that defense must fail, otherwise Hollywood would be using music with aplomb instead of having to get licenses to it when they incorporate it into a movie or TV show. Many older programs are tied up from home viewing because licenses don't allow home video distribution, and are often edited to replace licensed works.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I would guess that what was done was one of two things:
Mechanical production of a cover through some device that, on "hearing" a tune, would attempt to duplicate it in some analogue way, thus producing what would be, under some definitional frameworks, a cover rather than a reproduction.
Computer-driven replication of a file through means that are not exactly copying, e.g. churning over random generation of bits of data and comparison with the original (either direct or medium-specific, e.g. audio). Done wit
Re:First (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Slashdot editors,
please slow down with the new topics, poor Anonymous Coward keeps missing his shot at first post.
Signed,
Nobody really cares about first post.
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