Don't Worry About Copy Write Protection!

[Atrocities]

LOL - Very good.

The IRS fails audit after audit after audit, totalling billions of dollars. Yet they come after me, tooth gund and nail for a $14.00 paper work error on my 1989 tax return... WTF?

Certified Letter Arrives From The IRS
"You owe us $450.01 as a result of fines, penalties, fees, and collections costs for a $14.00 error on your 1989 1040 Tax form. Please remit this sum in full no later than last week."

So I sent them a black & decker skill saw and told them to keep the change. (They were not amused.)

[Saber Cherry]

Wow. That's pretty bad. Grossly bad, in fact. "I've been obsessing over you since we were in elementary school. You never noticed me, I sat behind you. Now pay me $450 for hiring a detective stalk you, cuz I have nothing better do do with my time than read his reports."

[Xrati]

Nice point!

Getting back to the original topic. All the countries in the world have jails, penal facilities and other such places for people who break the law. You are on your honor to follow laws put in place, to form a line that's not to be crossed. When/If you cross it, you violate that trust and these facilities are there as punishment. ANYONE know of an empty facility (not closed down but EMPTY). The point is there will always be someone who will cross the line. Not everyone will and certainly never would ‘no one ever cross it!' Society is here to raise a better generation then the one before. WE are regressing as a society and rules and laws mean nothing, to more people, on a daily basis then ever before. Are our children learning something by watching what society is teaching them. As we continue this path, less and less people will be willing to put out product that they cannot recover their costs to market. We will put an end to the industries and companies that produce products (Software and Recording mostly, but there are others). We have a choice to follow the rules/laws or to ignore them. IT IS AN INDIVIDUAL CHOICE that we all must make.

[Slick]

The ultimate solution (which publishers will never adopt) is to lower the prices of the games to 'reasonable' levels. If you could pick up the latest games at $19.95 would you? I would. If the answer is yes for the vast majority of game players then THAT would make a difference. What the publishers lost in single unit sales would be gained in volume of sales.

The true answer finally comes out.

[Suicide Junkie]

Its so much nicer in Europe.
It wouldn't be 19.95 over there... it would be a flat 20. Tax included.

Cheap psycological tricks, treating us like we're complete morons over here.
Plus it means we have to make change for everything.

And when making change, we have a lame set of coins compared to the Euro. $0.20 coins rule. And the two-cent coins are pretty cool too.

[Fyron]

Xrati said:
We will put an end to the industries and companies that produce products (Software and Recording mostly, but there are others).

Actually, an end to the music recording industry would be a great boon to society. Its pretty cheap to record an album in a studio these days. The bulk of the cost is in getting the music on retail shelves and supporting the losses from the huge number of bands that fail to sell enough albums to be profitable for the publisher. As digital distribution grows, it is eliminating much of the need for a big publisher. I don't know the exact figures, but it doesn't really cost much at all to get your music on Itunes and its ilk. It costs Apple virtually nothing to host a song. That song being downloaded is where there is some cost, and that is passed on to the consumer.

As the cost to enter the music market drops drastically, there will be more and more artists that can churn a profit off of there music, even at vastly reduced volume of sales. No longer will there be a need for dry, repetitive pop bands being manufactured to sell as much as possible just so the colossal publishers can afford to take a risk on new, innovative acts. Those new, innovative acts can much more easily just self-publish digitally, or join a small "publisher" that is pretty much a group of artists, as it should be.

In the retail world, your music won't be prominently featured (or carried at all) if you are not signed with a big publisher. In a digital store, there is little difference between a title published by Sony-BMG and Jqhn Doe, precisely because there is no concept of shelf space. In retail, shelf space costs money (either in terms of charging the publisher money or in terms of customers not seeing other, potentially more profitable albums). In the digital world, nada.

The other big hurdle is advertising. But really, when is the last time you bought music based on an ad, or seeing some random artist whoring themselves out in a Pepsi ad? After hearing it on the radio or seeing it on MTV/VH1/CMTV/etc. (when they deign to play music), sure. But they will in time look to digital sales as well as retail sales figures to see what is popular, so any self-published artist that sells well will still be able to get radio and TV exposure.

The same will happen to the game industry at some point, though it will take longer since it takes more bandwidth to quickly download 3 GBs of game instead of 50 MBs of album. Companies like Shrapnel, Matrix, and Valve are on the forefront of this.

[David E. Gervais]

Atrocities said:
LOL - Very good.

The IRS fails audit after audit after audit, totalling billions of dollars. Yet they come after me, tooth gund and nail for a $14.00 paper work error on my 1989 tax return... WTF?

Certified Letter Arrives From The IRS
"You owe us $450.01 as a result of fines, penalties, fees, and collections costs for a $14.00 error on your 1989 1040 Tax form. Please remit this sum in full no later than last week."

So I sent them a black & decker skill saw and told them to keep the change. (They were not amused.)

AT,.. Contact the media about this and say "Have I got a story for you".. After the IRS stops blushing at the inapropriate persuit and fine of an honest citizen,.. who knows they may just accept the B&D as payment afterall.

or, sue them for charging you for their slow processing of your 1989 tax return.. After all you handed it in on time. Taking/waiting 17 years to process the return is just so wrong on many levels. If you have the 'return' for back then where you paid or recieved a tax due/refund. then the error is theirs not yours. If the IRS has no deadline on cold cases and can retro fine someone they are robbing the public.

A Similar story happened with an overdue book in a library.. when someone died their child brought the book back to the library. They Had no idea the book was lent out,.. they had to search through their records to find that it had indeed been lent out and said $300 in late fees were due. He went to the media,.. the library accepeted the book back and did not charge anything.

With the IRS Logic,.. when they see a person has tax due $14 or $14,000 all they have to do is ignore it and wait 16 years then say they owe $450/$450,000 due to an error. (even if the error was theirs)

Sick, it's just plain sick. Come to Canada, we are not as bad here.

Nuf said, Cheers!

[Sivran]

If you could pick up the latest games at $19.95 would you? I would. If the answer is yes for the vast majority of game players then THAT would make a difference. What the publishers lost in single unit sales would be gained in volume of sales.

Depends on what sort of copy protection was on the game. Any game on the starforce-infected list gets a pass. Games which have a warning on the box that say they include copy protection which may interfere with virtual drives get pirated extended-demo'd, checked, googled, purchased only if worthy. Period.

My friend had Freedom Force (the original, uninfected one) and I would've been tempted to buy Freedom Force vs The Third Reich -- except that the game uses Starforce. I'm not buying it for that reason. There was a poll up on the S1 forum asking, "Would you buy SE5 if it had Starforce?" Only one person answered that he would. Sure, Starforce'll slow down the pirates slightly, but it'll also slow down or completely stop sales among those who know about it.

What, no strike-through ubbcode on this forum? Sheesh Had to switch to HTML..

[Fyron]

Hmm... Cato Institute has published a lengthy report against the DMCA:

"Fortunately, repeal of the DMCA would not lead to intellectual property anarchy. Prior to the DMCA's enactment, the courts had already been developing a body of law that strikes a sensible balance between innovation and the protection of intellectual property. That body of law protected competition, consumer choice, and the important principle of fair use without sacrificing the rights of copyright holders. And because it focused on the actions of people rather than on the design of technologies, it gave the courts the flexibility they needed to adapt to rapid technological change."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060322-6435.html

Direct report link:

http://cato.org/pubs/pas/pa564.pdf

[Baron Munchausen]

Slashdot had an article (discussion) on this. Lots of interesting points get raised when hundreds or thousands of highly educated techies comment on something:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/21/210228

Also, Slashdot had another copyright related story today:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/0516243

DRM More Important Than Life or Security?

An anonymous reader writes "Ed Felten of Freedom to Tinker has an interesting writeup regarding how copyright holders are still having serious objections to the built in exceptions of the DMCA even when it might threaten lives or national security. From the article: 'One would have thought they'd make awfully sure that a DRM measure didn't threaten critical infrastructure or endanger lives, before they deployed that measure. But apparently they want to keep open the option of deploying DRM even when there are severe doubts about whether it threatens critical infrastructure and potentially endangers lives.'"

Yes, that's right. The assorted 'porkerations' behind the DMCA are so completely corrupt and insensate to human life that they are lobbying against even exceptions to preserve human life or the general public welfare. Their profits are more important than anything else...