Posts by Matthew Poole
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Danielle, yes it's the Beatles. But the principle holds for anyone. Limited edition physical media with a non-trivial-to-copy design has serious cachet. I imagine that those Beatles USB keys are probably in the vicinity of USD15 each to manufacture, given that they're a pretty limited run, though hard to really estimate without knowing the construction. They're selling for USD280 retail, which is one heck of a good margin.
Oh to be able to look six months in the future, at eBay.
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does anyone think we dont have the capacity and the technology to be more self governing by way of online or txt based referenda ?
Yes. Me.
Texting is certainly absolutely, irredeemably insecure. Anything that relies on a device that can be cloned with negligible effort and expertise is unsuitable to be entrusted with the basic functions of democracy.
Online, well, maybe. I have expostulated on the past on how you could create a system that would achieve both verifiability and non-casual levels of anonymity, but it does rely on some form of useful two-factor authentication being issued to voters. It's a similarly non-trivial exercise to conducting a general election online, which I believe is scheduled to be trialled in the future but is still quite some way off from being widely utilised.
To be credible, voting must be heavily non-trivial to rig. Paper-based systems as utilised here meet that requirement. SMS-based fails, miserably. Online is untested, and is also vulnerable to coercive techniques when performed from home. That is a significant hurdle.
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I wonder which of those is an LAQC that will show a $450,000.00 loss against Tax next year?
It's only $90k per company, if they're all LAQCs. But we'll never know, given that it's a criminal offence for IRD staff or any other person who's acting as the taxpayer's agent to disclose tax information except in specific circumstances relating to the operation of the tax or criminal justice systems.
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Assuming that he's the same Colin Graeme Craig who resides at 5 Triton Drive, Albany, he's the director of five active companies:
1110716−Managers’ Apartments Limited
526401−Shore Bins Limited
1622321−Centurion Utilities Limited
817427−Centurion Management Services Limited
893043−Centurion House LimitedI'd say it's probably the correct person, with company names like those.
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Just curious, has anyone else started hunting through the Companies Office for background on Colin Craig? I'm waiting on the emailed results of a directors' register search as I type.
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Also, all of you with ad or Flash blockers -- you're stealing my content. But that's okay.
Not that I do, but if I did I'd like to think that I contribute enough electrons to the discussions to compensate ;)
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My personal point of view is that all it would really take is people to feel as if their illegal activities are being monitored for illegal downloading to go down notably.
Who's going to pay for that monitoring, Peter? The ISPs will, quite reasonably, scream bloody murder if the content industries expect the network carriers to wear the bill to monitor traffic for illicit downloads. It's non-trivial to do at large scale, impacts on throughput and speeds, and horrendously expensive. I'm perfectly happy to defer to your experience on why the cost structures of the movie industry can't just go away, but please defer to my experience when I say that monitoring for illicit file-sharing is effectively impossible. I use the word "effectively" because, although technically (and this is getting pretty far into the territory of a PhD thesis) possible the costs would be so horrendous as to make any notional losses to downloading look like the proverbial drop in a bucket. It could be done if everyone were still on dialup and we had modern network hardware, though still at vast expense, but we don't exist in that hypothetical world.
Why shouldn't the ISPs pay? Because, contrary to the media industries' position, the ISPs don't make money from heavy downloaders. They actually lose money because they have to provision more capacity to ensure that other customers aren't unduly affected, and can't effectively pass the cost on to the relevant customers for a whole bunch of reasons.
It's not as simple as just looking at traffic types, either. P2P can be used for entirely legitimate purposes, and often is. Pretty much all Open Source operating systems distribute their installation media as torrents, and without capturing the download in its entirety and reassembling it it's impossible to be certain of the contents. I discussed the technical complexities of global monitoring in "that thread", so won't go back into them in depth here. Let's leave it at really, really difficult and expensive, and also going to do awful, horrible things to transfer rates for all internet users.I don’t know what the technicalities of the law are in regards to fining people without them having the option of going to court?
Skating on very thin Bill of Rights Act ice. Parliament can just make it so, and it's legal, but it's also a very nasty abuse of power. Enabling use of the state's coercive powers without allowing recourse to the courts is police state territory, and although I'm sure there are quite a few people at the top of various large media conglomerates who don't see the problem with that I doubt it's a position that'd have too many fans further down the distribution chain. It's certainly heavily unpopular with the general public, as we saw with the s92A furore.
To me it’s more a case of targeted education: let people know the ways in which pirating is harming the industry, that what they’re doing is effectively theft, which is harming the artists, and personally, I think many casual illegal downloaders will think twice. People, generally speaking, are ethical, they just need a gentle reminder of that fact.
Yes, most people are ethical and will pay. But, they need to be given the opportunity to buy the product. It's not enough to tell them off, you need to offer a viable alternative. What's the viable alternative for Linux users? What's the viable alternative for Mac users? As I said in my last post, if the choices are crippled legit downloads that can only be watched in Windows Media Player 11, or an illicit download that has no restrictions, a lot of people are forced to take the latter option because they cannot reasonably comply with the former. This is what I mean by convenience. It is not a magnanimous gesture of beneficence to use layer after layer of digital restrictions management and then expect people to buy not only that product but also another product in order to use the first product.
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Peter, first, don't apologies for writing treatises. We do that here. Many of us even read them in their entirety, or at least try to.
But not having solid indisputable numbers is not a reason to dismiss the argument. It may be a reason to be a little more cautious about what we do to stop piracy, as the effect is not completely known.
My big concern is that the only people advocating caution are those who are being dismissed as "pirates" and "thieves". The vocal people on your side of the argument are all calling for immediate implementation of draconian "solutions" to a problem for which there is no solid evidence of its existence. You've even conceded that there is no solid evidence, and it's not just a matter of there being no "control earth", as you put it, but also that online movie marketplaces in the style of ITMS have no history to support or refute either side of the debate.
Eight years ago, the music industry was in precisely the same situation as the movie industry is now with regard to online distribution. It was an accepted "fact" that you couldn't possibly make money from selling music digitally. Nobody would buy, or if they did they would immediately share it with the whole world. Do those arguments sound familiar?I don't mean to lecture and patronise, I really don't, so please accept my apologies. It's just hard to phrase things in a way that don't come across as such when I'm seeing the movie industry making exactly the same arguments against online distribution as the music industry made, when we've now got conclusive proof that you can make money selling music online. Not only that, it looks like the music industry is undergoing a resurgence that, if you had listened to the dire predictions of many involved, should be completely impossible in the face of continued downloading.
I'm going to leave this one alone now. I've made my point, you've made yours. I accept, and always have, that there are some unavoidable costs in making movies that are not faced by music - film stock, for example, which will remain an expense until such time as digital achieves the same saturation and colour fidelity as film. I know the list of sub-million-dollar movies isn't anything to base an industry on, but it was posted to counter the assertion that movies must cost tens-of-millions to make.Perhaps, but as you mention an 8 gig file is going to be a very different beast to most music, even flac, so we’re in for a wait before that becomes viable. Particularly if (heaven forbid) your film actually starts doing well, downloading starts to accelerate, and servers come under pressure
This is where that evil bittorrent comes to the fore, doing exactly what it does best: breaking up large files for distributed distribution. We're using it at work to distribute 20GB install images to hundreds of computer lab machines simultaneously. It doesn't matter if the file is encrypted to high heaven, you can still distribute it over BT. One of the real problems I have with the "bittorrent is t3h evil" attitude is that BT actually provides a way to solve the distribution issue for large files, even ones containing protected material. Encrypted, protected torrents are a very viable way to get a high-def movie distributed online, without killing the servers.
the Production Company worked very hard on creating their ‘market’ or consumer base or whatever you want to call it, and then those same people turned around on release and downloaded it for free on the internet.
I said "marketplace", not "market". Huge difference. If it's not convenient for people to find and use a legitimate outlet they won't buy, it's that simple. The success of ITMS over the offerings attempted by the labels, aside from minimally-intrusive DRM, was that it brought together catalogues from a bunch of different labels. It was the cliche one-stop-shop. If you wanted something, odds were that it was on iTunes, at least if it was fairly recent. That is what I mean when I say "marketplace". I don't mean building up a base of customers, I mean building a place where the customers can come to find lots of offerings from different sources, and easily get them in convenient formats. What illicit downloads offer that, so far, has been totally anathema to the big labels is the product in formats that are highly portable: DivX/XviD, MKV, MP3, ogg... Not DRM'd to the hilt, impossible to watch without Windows Media Player, etc. People want to watch on their own terms, in their own time, on their choice of device.
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And for those people who can't play it legally (OSX, Linux, etc), there's always bittorrent
I know you're being flippant, but this is back to my point about convenience. So far, if you want to play Blu-Ray discs you have precisely two choice: buy a hardware player, or buy a computer with Windows. For Mac-heads, that's hardly an appealing thought, though with BootCamp and other techniques it's not exactly outrageous - except that Macs won't have built-in BR drives until there's a stable, Apple-released BR player, and given that we're now two releases of OS X into the life of BR I'm not expecting that situation to change in the foreseeable future. For those of us who happen to be fans of open, however, it's a big problem, especially if we don't terribly want to have to add yet another box to the living room.
The demand exists, I'm certain, but it will only be met on the terms of the movie industry. Yet again, we see clear evidence that they have no desire to relinquish any control even if it will mean a gain in paying customers. That leaves people to source high-def content off torrents, because there's no legitimate way to get it otherwise. -
instead of just a discussion masquerading as pragmatic that is really just as ideological
Where's the line? Is it impossible for an ideological solution to also be pragmatic? Leaving regulation as it is (or, ideally, cutting terms and codifying fair use) and seeing if a market-based solution (Keir, STFU!) can present itself is certainly ideologically attractive to me, but it's also absolutely pragmatic. Just leave it the hell alone, instead of tinkering and tinkering under the assumption that it's broke. We don't know if it's broke, but it certainly feels like some people are out there screaming "If it's not broke, fix it until it is!"