Posts by Peter Graham
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Er that is rather the thing we don't want to do. The police should not be allowed to dispense punishment; that is not their role.
They decide punishments when they put people through diversion, don't they?
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I don't object to subscribing to HBO to get the latest episodes of things. I object to paying for other crap I don't watch to get it.
Would you be happier paying the same price and not getting channels you don't want to watch?
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Given that I can watch Game of Thrones in America for $25/month
For the latest episodes? And is that full cost of basic pay tv + whatever premium channels you need to buy?
If you've seen that Oatmeal cartoon of trying to buy G of T in the US online you'll see we're not the only ones who struggle with this model. You can buy the cable TV service online, but the content will be delivered by cable TV to your TV. Not quite what we're after.
That Oatmeal comic is really silly. Game of Thrones was available to him, he just didn't wan't to pay the price. That's a pretty weak justification for piracy. HBO use an aggressive pricing model where you have to pay for an HBO subscription if you want to watch HBO shows as they come out. If you don't want to pay that much you can wait and buy a DVD later. This is pretty much the same pricing model that the novels use, and I've never heard anyone justify pirating novels because they didn't like the pricing model.
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to 3410,
I suppose you'd argue that legal = legitimate, but if I wanted to watch legal and fresh episodes of Game of Thrones, as far as I know, the *only* way is to pay Sky about $1000 a year. Screw that.
So you could pay $250 to watch Game of Thrones now. Or you could wait a year and buy the dvds for $60.
The are plenty of production companies that screw over their New Zealand customers. HBO isn't one of them.
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When Damian Christie asked the four candidates featured on the Ōhariu electorate special of TVNZ7's Back Benches to raise their hands if they wanted people to vote for them, only two of them did. Lots of people stand knowing that they won't win, but putting your name forward for election when you don't even want to win seems almost dishonest, and I'm not sure we should be writing our electoral laws to benefit those who wish to run in order not to be elected.
I think the Ohariu campaign was because we use FPP for electorates. The Greens wanted their supporters to vote for Charles Chauvel so Peter Dunne didn't return to Parliament. National wanted their supporters to vote for Peter Dunne to give themselves a natural partner in Parliament and hopefully pick up another MP from list votes. The only way for them to achieve this in FPP was to ask people not to vote for them. Or not run at all, I guess, but they might feel that is worse than running but not trying very hard. If we used instant run-off instead of FPP then candidates could campaign for first choice votes without fear of vote splitting.
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There's at least on example of a private company spying for a government: Xerox spied on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
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Copyright on recordings made in the 60s is going to expire over the next decade, so Ray Columbus is going to lose his royalty income if the recording copyright term isn't retroactively extended.
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Their email server was in Virginia, too. The USG case against Megaupload is based on emails they probably got off that server. That might be the mistake that sinks Megaupload.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The FBI could shutdown Google and arrest its staff on much the same grounds
If Megaupload encouraged their users to infringe copyright and were profiting from that infringement then they're definitely breaking the law. The FBI has emails where Megaupload staff discuss encouraging their users to infringe copyright. If the FBI can prove Megaupload were encouraging and profiting from copyright infringement then they'll get their convictions, and fair enough.
I don't think anyone has accused Google or YouTube of encouraging people to upload copyright infringing content. They've definitely profited from their users' copyright infringement, but that by itself isn't a crime. Also note that Google is being sued by Viacom for failing to do enough to stop copyright infringement.