Acidus wrote:

President Bush has created a new senior level position to fight global piracy and counterfeiting that cost American companies billions of dollars in lost sales each year, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said on Friday.

Calling "piracy" lost sales is really misleading because you count "pirates" as potential customers. First, the language "Pirate" is inaccurate. "Hobo" would be a more accurate analogy. A Hobo might bum a ride but never buy a ticket. This makes a Hobo a non-customer. A Pirate on the other hand, steals the actual potential for something to make a sale. Does a Hobo? No... A Hobo takes up unsold space on a train. In other words, while there is an unfair product distribution, this does not impede the rightful owner from selling more product. An IP Hobo in some ways encourages other potential sales. Most artistic tastes rub off by group contact, so for every Hobo'd copy has a good chance of selling a real copy and widening an audience that otherwise would not have known about a product. Video rental stores and Libraries purchase at least one official copy of an IP product. IP Hobos are free to borrow these copies and absorb their content. There isn't much of a difference between this type of distribution, and P2P methods. There are the added benefits that a single copy can be passed seamlessly along to the next reader/viewer/listener without the need to wait for the first person to finish (which is ideal for an archive of information). In a Library model, the person returns the media borrowed, but in this case is it even important? Most of these people aren't reading the media over and over again, the work simply exists as a part of the library.

What's the difference between a song you remember, and a song on your computer? A computer might have a somewhat better copy, but I think the crucial difference comes down to means of access. You can hum the song, its not quite the same as hitting play, however it is a means of access and distribution of a copy-written work. You hum the song, before you know it, your friend is humming the song, and his friends, and their friends and so on. Are these people thieves? Or is the fact that "Humming" is a degraded copy make a difference? Hmm... Lets say one person buys a CD and his friends hear the content while in this persons car... Did they purchase the rights to hear this music? Did this person have the right to expose this material? Should these things come with memory erase pills, so that no one remembers "content," but instead only remember liking or disliking it so you can buy an official licensed edition? Lets say you hum the contents of an album, and release a torrent file of the humming? Is that any different then releasing a shitty recording of the actual music in a torrent file? Is the shitty recording in any way less of an IP violation then a higher quality release? How... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

I always feel that the best entertainment on earth would be the ability for anyone to view anything. Ok, let’s put aside pornography or something related, we can assume that people like to see what is hard to be seen. For instance, you might just want to visit any country at any time without traveling there. I did mention before that what we can have is to organize a team of people acting as virtual tour guide and located at different locations. They will be equipped with VCR as well as video streaming capability to the Internet. What they would do is to wait for customer request and start shooting real time video.

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