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This is a dumb article, but definitely not for the reason you give. This is a patent for a theoretical way of enforcing a license that doesn't exist. Today, you

This is a dumb article, but definitely not for the reason you give. This is a patent for a theoretical way of enforcing a license that doesn't exist. Today, you'd have to have the kinect somehow measure a threshold for a poorly defined "public" performance and report you and find someone willing to sue over it and find a sympathetic judge, etc etc. Meanwhile, you seem to be advocating for fighting draconian or ridiculous intellectual property laws or actions by...letting the market decide? That's not going to work out. Just because someone makes a desirable product certainly does not give them the right to "get away with [all] sorts of crap" just because "people will put up with it". People often aren't going to vote with their wallet, which is exactly the point. SOPA could very well have passed and people would still have bought content from the companies that were very publicly pushing to have it passed. Stopping consumption of big content so you won't get upset when sites are summarily censored doesn't stop the underlying injustice, and it certainly won't stop the inevitable expansion of the scope of those powers as intellectual property "owners" demand perpetual extensions of their "rights". As an example: the public domain is in some ways a right of the public, since the constitution allows only time-limited copyright. Whether or not you consume "big content" now, you will have the right to unfettered access to it eventually, that is, unless companies can convince congress to continue to extend copyright length to make copyright length perpetual in practice.

rayiner 14y ago
> Meanwhile, you seem to be advocating for fighting draconian or ridiculous intellectual property laws or actions by...letting the market decide? That's not going to work out. I'm against government spending lots of money to help enforce copyright. I was against SOPA because it forces third parties to help protect content providers' property rights. Which is unreasonable. After all, the law doesn't force my neighbors to help protect my property rights. People are responsible for policing their own property rights for the most part. But that's not what is at issue here. Charging per viewer for content is like BMW charging ridiculous amounts for parts and labor for their cars. Who cares? If you buy a BMW you know that being gouged for maintenance is part and parcel of the experience. It's between you and the company you are buying from. I'm not a free market true believer by any means. I think there are lots of problems not solved by the market and we need affirmative measures in those cases. But I suppose with the copyright debate, I just don't agree that there is really a problem. If Disney figures out a way to charge you every time you watch their shitty movies, then great, more power to them. It's a great business model to sell something that is physically totally fungible, but which consumers perceive as non-fungible (LV bags, BMW cars, etc). The fact that consumers eat it up anyway doesn't strike me as a problem worth solving.
- magicalist 14y ago
  Except you have a right to show a film to "a normal circle of family and its social acquaintances" (aka not a "public" performance), and you have your fair use rights. If a company uses some camera-based DRM scheme to take away that ability, you have a tension between your rights to the use of copyrighted works and the government-enforced anti-circumvention rules in the DMCA. This is another area (with closely related time-shifting and device-shifting) that companies will overstep their bounds on if allowed, in order to lock in consumers, and it is again via the enforcement of the government. That seems to fall under the area of things you oppose. If all we had to worry about was the inconvenience of a legal jailbreak, I would let lemming consumers twist in the wind as well. (all this is fairly theoretical, as it relies on someone getting this scheme to work even somewhat reliably, but the point stands for much of the copyright overreaches we face today)

rayiner 14y ago

> Meanwhile, you seem to be advocating for fighting draconian or ridiculous intellectual property laws or actions by...letting the market decide? That's not going to work out. I'm against government spending lots of money to help enforce copyright. I was against SOPA because it forces third parties to help protect content providers' property rights. Which is unreasonable. After all, the law doesn't force my neighbors to help protect my property rights. People are responsible for policing their own property rights for the most part. But that's not what is at issue here. Charging per viewer for content is like BMW charging ridiculous amounts for parts and labor for their cars. Who cares? If you buy a BMW you know that being gouged for maintenance is part and parcel of the experience. It's between you and the company you are buying from. I'm not a free market true believer by any means. I think there are lots of problems not solved by the market and we need affirmative measures in those cases. But I suppose with the copyright debate, I just don't agree that there is really a problem. If Disney figures out a way to charge you every time you watch their shitty movies, then great, more power to them. It's a great business model to sell something that is physically totally fungible, but which consumers perceive as non-fungible (LV bags, BMW cars, etc). The fact that consumers eat it up anyway doesn't strike me as a problem worth solving.

magicalist 14y ago
Except you have a right to show a film to "a normal circle of family and its social acquaintances" (aka not a "public" performance), and you have your fair use rights. If a company uses some camera-based DRM scheme to take away that ability, you have a tension between your rights to the use of copyrighted works and the government-enforced anti-circumvention rules in the DMCA. This is another area (with closely related time-shifting and device-shifting) that companies will overstep their bounds on if allowed, in order to lock in consumers, and it is again via the enforcement of the government. That seems to fall under the area of things you oppose. If all we had to worry about was the inconvenience of a legal jailbreak, I would let lemming consumers twist in the wind as well. (all this is fairly theoretical, as it relies on someone getting this scheme to work even somewhat reliably, but the point stands for much of the copyright overreaches we face today)