@#13:
Any professor dull enough to present the same material year after year is either a hack or totally unconcerned with the concept of teaching. Universities and colleges are supposed to present the most up to date information available. How can you copyright knowledge?

So math, chemistry, biology, and physics professors teaching the introductory courses are hacks?
Curious. Please, please do enlighten me how to introduce the concept of an integral in new and exciting ways every semester.

Not to play grumpy old man (although I do it well), but the title is a tad misleading. The band didnt make $750k. They sold at least that much, but I'm pretty sure it actually cost money to make the album.

Congrats!

An observation:
"On the other hand, its obviously not fair use to scan a book and put it online, or distribute copyrighted films using BitTorent.[sic]"

This is the part that I think so few will want to swallow (*cough* Pirate Bay owners/users/defenders, *cough*)

Observation 2:
I think the example of the Beatles re-eq is a very interesting one. As opposed to the Grey album example, I can easily imagine people saying 'well, now I don't need to buy the Beatles original'. The problem is in the statement "easily imagine", since other people would argue otherwise. The terms adding value and substitute need to be very very well defined before one could actually use this idea to replace current copyright laws.

At least they are telling you what your limit is. Try getting that out of Comcast......

@Cory: "That's what YouTube is promising and Viacom is demanding -- if your video generates a false positive, it never sees the light of day."

Ok, so? Why should YouTube have to allow every movie people want to upload? YouTube is providing their service for free. They would be within their rights (albeit silly looking) if they randomly deleted every 17th upload. People are simply not entitled to unfettered YouTube uploads.

The video sees the light of day, you just have to use something other than YouTube. Now if you are positing a 'slippery slope' argument, that may be a different matter, depending on the method one sends the video.

@ Cory: I would argue per minute pricing is also a poor way to go, given lag, and a different manifestation of wht you just said: you dont know if the page is 12k or 300k in general, but the 300k file takes longer to load.

Unlimited data plans should be just that: unlimited. Up the cost if need be to keep it that way, but dont futz with per bit or per minute.

The one and only thing that would prompt Netflix to drop the DRM is if subscribership went down. Period.

Sticking a little tag in the envelope is a) stupid b) a waste of resources and c) stupid. Yes, I repeated myself, because it's just that stupid.

I think you're dodging my point again, so I'll phrase it as a simple question, then I'll stop making Teresa sleepy, and never argue this point again much to the joy of everyone involved:

Is it wrong to download for free something that you should be paying for?

As an aside, it's funny how the phone companies are the bad guy but when I load BB, I get ads for Verizon wireless.

Cory, to me the battle here isn't record companies on the brink of collapse, publishers giving away books for free in the hopes that internet good faith drives sales, or DRM. The issue for me is simple: it's just plain wrong to take stuff that you haven't paid for. Forget semantics of whether or not it's "theft" for a minute and just ask the moral question.

Trying to pass off the act of downloading stuff that should be payed for but isn't as somehow ok since you otherwise bought lots of other stuff is avoidance at best, malicious at worst.

And please, spare me the line "The point of being an entrepreneur is to pick the strategy that makes you the most money, not the one that ensures that you have maximal control."

Do I have to post links to all the times where you lambast companies for doing things that make the most money, but inconvenience you? Example: Aren't phone carriers simply being entrepreneurs trying to make money by locking the phones to their networks.

Finally, if it's no biggie to you that the pirates (your word there) take your work and make money off it, why license it at all?

There's plenty of evidence that the most avid file-sharers are, generally speaking, the most avid music consumers, in all fora: most active used-CD buyers, radio listeners, concert-goers, and new-CD music. They're just three sigmas over and above the rest of us on all the graphs of music consumption -- the 20 percent who do 80 percent of music-related activity.

So what Cory? Because they spend more on music it somehow makes it o.k. for them to download stuff they should be paying for? One simply has nothing to do with the other. By your logic, it's ok for me to copy your books and sell it under my name in violation of the CC license, just as long as I buy plenty of other books.

because if you have one nude thumbnail or one page about circumvention

Oh come now. If boingboing had only one nude thumbnail, then that means that Cory built a steampunk time machine and went back in time and killed Xeni.

I echo the post above which says that I wouldn't want my kid to see a number of the posts here.

Ask yourself the question, 'do I want the guy sitting next to me furiously reloading trannygrannysluts.com during my trans-atlantic flight?' Granted, boingboing is hardly a porn site, but having BA err on the side of caution isn't exactly stupid.

If one actually reads the article:

A spokesman for the Cambridge police, James DeFrancesco, said that no crime was committed and no arrests were made.

Might wanna change the post title.....

Patrick,

I hardly think that using actual things Cory says is sliming him, but fine. And yes, I'm doing it crassly, so perhaps I should stop doing that, point taken.

Let's look at the statement you say I'm avoiding This is how the world works now, and we had better figure out how to work with it..

How the world works now, quoting the intro text: Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked copy on the public internet.

How to work with it: One camp might argue 'take the cracked one, it's easier to use, has no DRM, and is free'

A different way to work with it: Acknowledge that there is no DRM that is unbreakable, but still make the choice not to use the cracked copy. Focus your efforts instead on moving the content providers to change content delivery in a more pro consumer way.

What irks me is that people claim they want to do the second, but until the industry evolves, they still do the first. Returning to the intro quote and the way the world is, it bothers me that the quote implies that it's somehow ok for you to use the cracked copy, because you weren't the one that cracked it.

Teresa,

The big thing no one seems to get about Cory's views on copyright law, DRM, and the free flow of information is that he isn't saying "This is how things should be." He's saying "This is how the world works now, and we had better figure out how to work with it."

I call bull. Cory constantly tells the world that the industry should give up DRM, cause people are gonna get the bits either way. Every time someone breaks a DRM scheme, the trumpets herald on BoingBoing along with a snub at the industry for being so stupid as to even try. To me, that's a pretty big message on how he thinks things should be, not just how things are and how to work with it (unless if by 'work with it' you mean 'break the DRM').

And by way of a different example, I do believe that Cory thinks himself entitled to the bits, even when the content providers don't. Every time some new episode of 'The IT Crowd' comes out, he spends a good portion of the post practically bragging that he got the episode off the Pirate Bay because the BBC didn't bend over backwards to make the bits freely available to him.

The sad thing is that I actually agree that DRM is a bad thing, but I fundamentally do NOT agree with the philosophy that just because you don't like DRM or the way in which content is provided to you (often for free), it's ok to break it, or download it from someone it has.

Ok Andrew, then let it be a civil wrong, not theft, fine by me. I'll admit wrong on that point.

Nevertheless, in Cory's mind, and in the mind of many others, it's not even a civil wrong. 'They're just bits!" they claim, and since they can access those bits far easier than the can of soup or the farmer's plot, they think themselves entitled to those bits.

What I'm trying to argue here is that the rallying cry for downloading copyrighted material is that the industry hasn't caught up, or that the industry wraps the bits in DRM, and thus they somehow deserve to have their bits downloaded, irrespective of the civl wrongness of the act.

"But every time a PC is connected to the internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the internet."

Odd, since for the brick and mortar world, I could just as well write "but every time a person enters a store, and they have opposable thumbs and fast legs, a new option appears: you can just grab it and run."

I'm sorry Cory, but even if the entertainment industry is behind the times, even if DRM is bad, even if, even if, even if..., going to the pirate bay, getting the torrent, and downloading content intended for sale without paying for it is still theft. Just because you don't like how the industry acts doesn't give you license to steal.

I give it 10 minutes before Xeni posts a link to a t-shirt of some badly drawn cats with the tag OMGLOLZ DONT PISS ON ME BRO.

I just don't get it. Why are you advertising for disney on one page, then accusing them of unfair labor practices on another? You'll boycott a music player over DRM, why not a company that abuses employees?