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billvon

SOPA (WARNING: Experimental thread; highly moderated)

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>using despoa or non-us dns servers is trivial however this will increase latency for any
>DNS based CDN, which rely on the ip address of the DNS server to determine locality
>of the endpoint.

Agreed. That's one of the fundamental problems of this bill - there are so many ways around it. You'd have to go to a China-like "Golden Shield" to make a dent at all - and even that's not difficult to spoof.

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A couple thoughts:

1) I have this theory that SOPA is really just a set up for later passage of the Protect IP Act. In the minds of the RIAA and MPAA if SOPA somehow passes then great, but if/when it fails the PIPA will be offered up as the "reasonable alternative." And in comparison to SOPA everyone will go, "Ok that's a reasonable compromise." The truth is that while PIPA is better than SOPA it still has some major issues. Allowing corporations to force the removal of DNS entries is bad from a first amendment stand point and from a technological stand point but I don't want to get into a long discussion about that.

2) As Cory Doctorow noted in a recent speech, copying is never going away. Copying will only get easier from now on. That is the way technology works. The next generation will grow up in a world where every song ever published can be stored on a chip the size of a thumb nail and copied almost instantaneously. No law is ever going to stop that from happening.

3) One commentator suggested that "piracy" is primarily a customer service problem. When people are given the opportunity to purchase content for what they believe is a good price they tend to buy it rather than jump through a lot of hoops to get it free. There have been a lot of experiments that show this. Of course not everyone will go this way, but the vast majority will. Innovations like itunes and netflix have brought a lot of people back from the dark side of illegal downloads, yet entrenched interests continue to resist these types of efforts. In the end it will be better for everyone if the industry embraces these new models.
Another great example: I was talking to a friend who is into computer games. He used to "pirate" games but now he prefer to get them though Steam. He told me the only games he has gotten illegally lately are ones that aren't available through steam or a similar system. He doesn't want to go to the store and buy it and doesn't want to deal with complex registration process that are much more difficult or take a lot long than getting it through bit torrent. Offer consumers what they want, in the form they want, and they will pay for it.

Personally, I don't want to get movies on DVD anymore. I want to stream then from the internet. A lot of movies are not available that way, even ones that are many years old. The MPAA wants you to go to the store and buy a DVD or Blu-ray. A lot of people will just say its not worth the effort or the extra $ and download the movie free. That's money that the industry just lost by not providing the product that the consumer wanted.

I am all for IP rights and I think something should be done. However, the current course just isn't good business for industry.

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huh? not sure I understand your meaning.

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could SOPA spell the end of DNS based CDNs?
hmmm short Akamai?



How do you think SOPA would have much of an Akamai, Digital River, Apple, Amazon, etc?

]

Oops, I dropped a word...
How do you think SOPA would have much of an effect on Akamai, Digital River, Apple, Amazon, etc?

Their content is vetted.

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it'll fuck up their performance, the way most if not all CDNs determine the locality of the endpoint (which they use to redirect your request to a cache server that is geographically near you (in internet terms of latency)) is by the IP address of the DNS server you are using. (http://blog.unixy.net/2010/07/how-to-build-your-own-cdn-using-bind-geoip-nginx-and-varnish/)

No imagine that to circumvent SPOA that a couple million people start using DNS servers in Russia, South Africa, ...

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I understand it'll slow down their speed, but in your earlier post I thought you meant it might create legal issues for the CDN.

This bill is definitely a great way to start offshoring servers...might as well put em' in India, that way the server is in the same building as the call center.

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I understand it'll slow down their speed, but in your earlier post I thought you meant it might create legal issues for the CDN.

This bill is definitely a great way to start offshoring servers...might as well put em' in India, that way the server is in the same building as the call center.



Stupid, feel-good regulation causing companies to leave the US...whodathunkit?
Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

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Personally, I don't want to get movies on DVD anymore. I want to stream then from the internet. A lot of movies are not available that way, even ones that are many years old. The MPAA wants you to go to the store and buy a DVD or Blu-ray. A lot of people will just say its not worth the effort or the extra $ and download the movie free. That's money that the industry just lost by not providing the product that the consumer wanted.

I am all for IP rights and I think something should be done. However, the current course just isn't good business for industry.



That's sort of been my position on the matter for some time. I was in high school when napster broke and internet speeds and writable storage media got to the point where you could actually get a movie and burn it to a dvd. Prior to that happening, it just wasn't even possible. Once it was though.. it has only grown by leaps and bounds... I mean I know people with hard drives with thousands of movies on them.

Netflix streaming is cool, but 90% of the time, the movie I want to watch is only available via dvd or bluray and by the time I get the disc in the mail I am surprised cause I forgot about the movie amid the vast number of things in modern life that distract me. I would pay more for a streaming service that made available any movie that was post "theatre" period.

As it stands now, for the most part I just consume less. I do other things cause I don't really want to deal with the whole download world anymore. More risk these days, etc.

I see this as anything else, the companies aren't adjusting to the times. People will continue to "steal" the movies/music/etc until it seems reasonable financially to not do it. Even then though, people who can't afford to buy will take. The desire to earn more and more and more money has prevented these companies from moving forward. In reality, it mostly just makes the lawyers rich.

I guess all this rambling is really just trying to get at this. If the producers of this content would just find a way to put their product in the hands of consumers at a price consumers can actually afford to pay (given the fact that there isn't any physical product involved anymore) then the piracy would go away, at least for the most part.
~D
Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me.
Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

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Broken down like that, and with out all the double speak and gobbledygook of the bill, I think it could be a bad idea. To many shut downs over "I don't like what he is saying" events could happen.

Matt



It could be used for the intended purpose too, like when a certain company steals pictures and whole web pages for its financial gain.

Matt
An Instructors first concern is student safety.
So, start being safe, first!!!

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People will continue to "steal" the movies/music/etc until it seems reasonable financially to not do it. Even then though, people who can't afford to buy will take.

What business model would you suggest that can compete with "free"? How low do you suggest the price has to be to induce people to pay for something as opposed to just stealing it. (notice no quotation marks around stealing, because taking something that others have paid a lot of money/time to produce, without compensating them, is stealing, not "stealing").

Part of the equation of what seems "reasonable financially" is the penalty to be paid if you are caught stealing. If there was no chance of being caught, prosecuted, and sent to jail, how many people do you think would pay for gas instead of just filling up and driving off? After all, the gas companies are just greedy bastards and they have enough money already, and I need a tank of gas to get to the DZ! SOPA is incredibly badly thought out, and if enacted will do a lot of harm, but the need to legislate some restrictions and penalties follows directly from consumer behavior. Absent any negative consequences to stealing, taking something (anything) without paying for it is always "reasonable financially".

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...given the fact that there isn't any physical product involved anymore...

So musicians/actors/camera operators/set designers/writers/etc are owed nothing for their time and creative efforts? The price of a product should reflect nothing but the cost of the material used to generate a copy of the music/movie/book/whatever? How many movies do you expect will get made if the "reasonable market price" does not include anything for salaries, sets, special effects, etc? Do you really expect all those people to produce product for your entertainment without any expectation of compensation?

Don
_____________________________________
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

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>What business model would you suggest that can compete with "free"?

There are no "free" methods of theft. Every method takes effort and time, and that translates into cost. A business model that provides a product at a lower effective cost will win in the end over theft even without anything like SOPA.

>So musicians/actors/camera operators/set designers/writers/etc are owed nothing for
>their time and creative efforts?

He didn't say that - he said there was no material product involved any more, just intellectual property sales.

But no, they are not "owed" anything. I've written a dozen songs for the Cock Chorus at Lost Prairie - what am I owed? I've never gotten anything (other than a beer or two) for writing them - who should I sue?

The only thing anyone is "owed" is the amount someone else agrees to pay them. That's why we have intellectual property laws, so that people can enter into contracts like that. Many record companies are discovering that they can't make as much money as they used to from a small number of artists, since there are effectlvely no more record/CD sales. Some of them will continue trying to use the same business model as they have for 50 years; those will likely go under. Some will adapt and will change their business models to:

-concentrate more on revenue from live events
-sell more material from more artists for less (easier since creating and distributing content recently got much easier)
-incorporation of advertising into free/cheap products

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Here's another look at the piracy issue, from an author (and 'librarian' of the Baen Books free library):

There's more at the link.

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The first is what you might call a "matter of principle." This all started as a byproduct of an online "virtual brawl" I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it.

There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!

Alles in ordnung!

-------
I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:

1. Online piracy — while it is definitely illegal and immoral — is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market — especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people — is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. He more or less virtually snorted and expressed the opinion that if one of his authors — how about you, Eric? — were willing to put up a book for free online that the resulting publicity would more than offset any losses the author might suffer.

The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. After all, Dave Weber's On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a "loss leader" for Baen's for-pay experiment "Webscriptions" for months now. And — hey, whaddaya know? — over that time it's become Baen's most popular backlist title in paper!

And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.

Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a "gesture of solidarity. "But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren't worried about the small cost — once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug. )



Neither the author nor Baen seem to have lost money by his books being shared out.
Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

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>What business model would you suggest that can compete with "free"?

There are no "free" methods of theft. Every method takes effort and time, and that translates into cost. A business model that provides a product at a lower effective cost will win in the end over theft even without anything like SOPA.



And this is where the RIAA and Movie studios have been hurting themselves. Aside from being cheaper (free), in numerous instances the torrent or ripped copy is easier to work with then the sold product.

Video tapes were embedded with macrovision at a loss in picture quality. DVDs and Blu-rays have encryption that make it harder to play on non traditional devices (ex: in home network streaming). And they're loaded with ads and fluffy that I didn't pay for. Apple's itunes store music is a proprietary format rather than mp3.

And then you have the subscription services where you never own anything, lose it as soon as you stop paying money. As well as pay per view with unrealistic pricing - $5 for a lower quality streamed movie when it will be in the dvd bargain bin for that in short order, or could be rented for $1 or 2 from Red Box or a rare movie rental store? The geniuses at the studios thought that with blu-ray they could charge $35-50 for a movie instead of the $20 DVD standard. People said hell no to that. They expect the better experience for the same price, or at least not a 100% more expensive.

---
Amazon has it right with music. When you buy a song or an album, you get non DRMs MP3 files which will work on every music player made. There are no limits on how you can use it. It does, however, have some sort of unique purchase ID in the metadata, so were you to distribute it widely, there may be consequences for you or for Amazon to continue selling this way.

Amazon combines it with their cloud storage offering - you can stream it from them, or you can download the mp3 files to your internal network. I plop them on the mt-daapd server and I'm good to go in the house.

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People will continue to "steal" the movies/music/etc until it seems reasonable financially to not do it. Even then though, people who can't afford to buy will take.

What business model would you suggest that can compete with "free"? How low do you suggest the price has to be to induce people to pay for something as opposed to just stealing it. (notice no quotation marks around stealing, because taking something that others have paid a lot of money/time to produce, without compensating them, is stealing, not "stealing").

Part of the equation of what seems "reasonable financially" is the penalty to be paid if you are caught stealing. If there was no chance of being caught, prosecuted, and sent to jail, how many people do you think would pay for gas instead of just filling up and driving off? After all, the gas companies are just greedy bastards and they have enough money already, and I need a tank of gas to get to the DZ! SOPA is incredibly badly thought out, and if enacted will do a lot of harm, but the need to legislate some restrictions and penalties follows directly from consumer behavior. Absent any negative consequences to stealing, taking something (anything) without paying for it is always "reasonable financially".

Quote

...given the fact that there isn't any physical product involved anymore...

So musicians/actors/camera operators/set designers/writers/etc are owed nothing for their time and creative efforts? The price of a product should reflect nothing but the cost of the material used to generate a copy of the music/movie/book/whatever? How many movies do you expect will get made if the "reasonable market price" does not include anything for salaries, sets, special effects, etc? Do you really expect all those people to produce product for your entertainment without any expectation of compensation?

Don



The last couple of guys hit it on the head with what I was saying. No I don't suggest that anyone shouldn't be compensated for what they create, should they desire that compensation, but expecting the public, who isn't as entirely stupid as people would seem to assume, to continue paying $15 for a CD that used to cost $5-$10 to make, ship, store and sell at retail when you have cut out 95% of the effort required on the sales end is the definition of being greedy. Adapt and survive or people will find another way. I am not saying it's right or wrong, just what I see people doing.

I never really read a lot of books, but I would borrow them from friends at times and have read the odd pdf version of a book, or shop at used book stores, whatever. I just couldn't stomach paying $25-$50 for a new book. I have a kindle now, if I want to read something I click through the menu and it gets charged to my credit card. I read more now and actually buy books. (Thanks amazon!)

That's the point though about finding the right price. I don't mind paying $100 for seats at a concert where I can hear the music blaring see the singer sweating and the drummer wailing away. That's awesome. But I won't pay $20 for a cd. Dunno I just can't do it. Consequently I don't have much of a music collection. I listen to pandora (free with ads) and I pay like, $30 a month for SiriusXM for car/car/truck/work. It's convenient and gets me what I want at a price I can stomach.

Everyone's idea of reasonable is different. In the last few years I have been having a harder and harder time accepting what corporate America wants me to feel about "reasonable" and "value." I am not about to go out and occupy something but I can understand where those people are coming from.

Also, fwiw, I said steal with quotes because there is a difference in taking something that is tangible vs intangible. Neither is right, but there is a difference.
~D
Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me.
Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

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Video tapes were embedded with macrovision at a loss in picture quality. And they're loaded with ads and fluffy that I didn't pay for. Apple's itunes store music is a proprietary format rather than mp3.



None of these statements are true.

The cost to produce a quality recording hasn't gone down very much at all. Musician's time is musician's time. I get paid the same per hour today as I was paid 10 years ago. The tools used to produce a piece have gone down, but not enough to matter much.

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Video tapes were embedded with macrovision at a loss in picture quality. And they're loaded with ads and fluffy that I didn't pay for. Apple's itunes store music is a proprietary format rather than mp3.



None of these statements are true.



How do you figure?

Macrovision *does* produce a loss of quality on video tapes:

"After passing through a VCR a macrovision protected signal will show symptoms includeing vertical lines, flashing black and white display, loss of color, static, loss of sync and flickering."

Trailers and such *are* added to movies, and Itunes *is* by default a proprietary format (AAC) and not mp3.
Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

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Video tapes were embedded with macrovision at a loss in picture quality. And they're loaded with ads and fluffy that I didn't pay for. Apple's itunes store music is a proprietary format rather than mp3.



None of these statements are true.

The cost to produce a quality recording hasn't gone down very much at all. Musician's time is musician's time. I get paid the same per hour today as I was paid 10 years ago. The tools used to produce a piece have gone down, but not enough to matter much.



DSE - if you're going to disagree with every factual statement, in addition to the subjective statements, how are you not going to end up in the fossil record?

Evolve or perish.

One option is to escape the heel of the distribution companies. One fabulous benefit of the ease of copying/distributing digital files is that you no longer need a record company to take all of the gross away from you. You can now hand out your poster/fliers/artwork at performance with your web address on it and sell/give away/promote.

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>The cost to produce a quality recording hasn't gone down very much at all.

While I agree, that's not because it's currently expensive - that's because it has always been amenable to being done very cheaply. Tom Scholtz recorded most of the first Boston album in his basement, and it's widely recognized as being a very well put together album. The only reason he needed Epic Records was to distribute the final result. Nowadays that's not needed.

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I'm surprised I haven't seen more posts here about SOPA.



I, for one, am very glad that you started this topic.

Here is a link from the ultimate geek site where it is also being discussed. Maybe some of you will enjoy the links in the synopsis at the beginning.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/03/229233/why-politicians-should-never-make-laws-about-technology

Everyone who uses the Internet really needs to understand SOPA.

You also need to contact your representatives and tell them "Vote NO!"
Guru312

I am not DB Cooper

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Part of the equation of what seems "reasonable financially" is the penalty to be paid if you are caught stealing.



While in principle that is true, I see this situation as a little different.

DVD and CD prices are pretty standard. Now the industry is lobbying to protect those price points with high penalties.

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If there was no chance of being caught, prosecuted, and sent to jail, how many people do you think would pay for gas instead of just filling up and driving off? After all, the gas companies are just greedy bastards and they have enough money already, and I need a tank of gas to get to the DZ!



To put this in line with the entertainment industry. It would be equivalent of the gas companies setting a standard price for gas at $10 a gallon and lobbying for the death penalty for anybody who even thinks of or talks of stealing gas.

When I look at the movie and music industry, it would appear that the artists and products with the highest piracy rates are also making the most amount of money.

Most pirated movie in 2011 is reported to be Fast Five. Cost to make: $125 million. Box Office revenue $626 million. Further millions in secondary revenue.

It is time for the studios and entertainment industry to adapt. If that results in Vin Diesel, Brad Pitt and Brittney Spears making a couple million less, I am ok with that.

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>It would be equivalent of the gas companies setting a standard price for gas at $10 a
>gallon and lobbying for the death penalty for anybody who even thinks of or talks of
>stealing gas.

And outlawing gas cans and siphons because they can be used to steal gas. And requiring industry-standard, non-openable-by-owner gas caps on cars so you can't put stolen gas in them.

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