Player's (slightly) less buggy and crash-prone than AMD drivers. ;-)

I run a lot of web sites. Exactly none of them include ads or rely on any advertising network to make money. I just don't think the world owes me everything I ever wanted, on whatever terms I want it, for free.

Right, but if consumers may lawfully crack DRM in order to perform actions that are otherwise legal (under fair use or the equivalent, say) then in practice this is unlikely to be a problem. If it ever is, you just regulate or outright legislate such that anyone selling works in electronic formats for profit with DRM applied must lodge an unrestricted copy in escrow with some official body to ensure that the work can be used as the law otherwise permits once it has been lawfully acquired.

Ultimately, any creative industry has to sell its work to make any money. The general public as audience, via their respective governments, can impose whatever terms they want to ensure fairness and the creative industries will have to comply. This is no different to any other business that is regulated by consumer protection laws, usually because previously someone was exploiting the situation unfairly.

There is really no reason to pander to these industries if they abuse the one-sided power structure that exists today. They have nowhere to go. And I write that as someone who makes a decent living creating works of various kinds, because despite the bleatings of the big content distributors, I am evidently still able to make that decent living without imposing nasty DRM schemes on my clients/customers. If I can do it with my little businesses, I'm pretty sure the guys making programmes and films with multi-million dollar budgets can do it too, without making me sit through an FBI warning that is completely irrelevant in my jurisdiction or stopping me watching something over here even though the discs have been available across the pond for a while.

Can I therefore assume that you also want to be prompted for explicit permission every time a site you visit uses a CDN to serve some static assets, and every time you buy something on-line and the site links to data served by their payment service, and so on? Because I don't think that version of the Web would be an improvement, and I don't see how to distinguish between "desirable" and "undesirable" third party content without downloading it or at least seeing its URL first.

Once you have the URL then of course a browser can choose not to download it, as many of us do with ad blockers today. I don't see anyone here seriously agreeing with the IMHO silly argument by the French publishers in this case; certainly I'm not agreeing with them myself. All I'm saying is that if you run a browser that downloads someone's entire freely offered site, claiming that they should somehow have sought your permission or they're effectively stealing your bandwidth by supplying data your browser explicitly asked their server to supply is nonsense.

That seems reasonable enough.

However, I don't think anyone can credibly argue today that serving a web site that includes ads (or analytics and the like) is "entirely abnormal". Just the number of sites using Google's ad network and analytics tool would be sufficient to disprove any such argument.

Similarly, there's nothing at all unusual about relying on third-party servers for part of the page. Prohibiting that would break every CDN, most on-line payment schemes, most on-line webfont and video hosting services...

I am genuinely confused.

I wrote a post saying that it was absurd to argue that:

1. a website was using a downloader's bandwidth without permission,

2. this was effectively stealing the bandwidth, and

3. courts should force website owners to ask downloaders, who are actively requesting the freely offered content, for permission to use their bandwidth.

As I write this, the parent poster and several others have all replied as if I was somehow supporting the notion that downloaders should therefore be compelled to watch ads. I certainly am not advocating that position, and I don't see how you can even possibly read that into what I wrote before.

On the contrary. I still use Blu-ray because after I've bought a disc it is mine, permanently and unambiguously, and with the full force of my country's consumer protection laws behind me if anyone tries to interfere with my use of it.

I am not vulnerable to an on-line service yanking a series I'm watching from their library when I'm only mid-season. I am not vulnerable to disruption at my ISP interfering with my enjoyment of the film just at the crucial moment. I am not vulnerable to arbitrary price hikes in pay-per-view delivery caused by corporate politics far beyond my level of caring. I just play the disc.

Technically, they could add unskippable content to that disc that would interfere with my enjoyment. Obviously streaming content can carry ads just as easily, but the reality is that Blu-ray is much better than DVDs typically were on that score anyway. Anything that wasn't would just go straight back to the store as unfit for purpose.

Technically, they could also play some funny games that might break my Blu-ray player as part of the DRM scheme. Again, compared to some of the things people have tried to do with on-line DRM schemes, that seems a relatively low risk to me. In any case, it would be a brave vendor who sold a disc that actually did that in my country. If it ever damaged a legitimate customer then the vendor would immediately be on the hook both for the consequential losses (new Blu-ray player, anyone?) and potentially for criminal charges as well.

That's really the key point. Their own executives reportedly concluded that if they tried to move into the SDN space, they would turn their $43B business into a $21B business, yet they were publicly embarrassed when what was supposed to be a billion dollar deal with Amazon fell through. They are probably contemplating what happens when SDN and open devices are no longer the new kid on the block but an established, mature part of the industry. I don't suppose they much like the conclusions they must surely be reaching right now.

Good for you. Just remember that for every one of you -- an exceptionally awkward customer who is probably more trouble than you are worth from a business perspective -- these companies are gaining useful business insights from those tools that will ultimately make them far more money then you would ever be worth to them in a lifetime. You're perfectly entitled to block things and not use their forums and decide not to buy from them, but they are just as perfectly entitled not to care.

That's an absurd argument. They are offering you access to some information, for free. If you choose to point your browser at their site and your browser then requests a download for that information from their server, it is your responsibility and no-one else's. They have no obligation of any kind to help you download any specific thing, and certainly not to actively help you circumvent what might be their preferred method of revenue generation. Get over your entitlement complex already.

Or just use another blocker without the potential conflict of interest, such as Adblock Edge, or your hosts file if you're technical.

I'm not so sure in this case. Most of the web sites I value don't rely on third-party ads for their main or only income. The few that do so are expendable/replaceable. I appreciate having forums like Slashdot to discuss things on-line, but the value of news aggregation/discussion sites is in the consolidation and in the discussions and the communities -- in other words, it all comes from third-party contributions that are given freely, just like my own -- not in the site itself.

And the correct market response to that would have been to call their bluff, and then enjoy the movies from those that survived. The idea that all the studios would have stopped releasing their content anywhere but in theatres is utterly implausible and was never a serious threat.

Exactly. It is in no way in my interests as a consumer to have, say, a region-locked DVD player, or a Blu-ray player that won't let me skip to the contents I want to watch instead of sitting through legal notices that don't even apply in my jurisdiction, or a PVR where I can't transfer my HD recordings to a different PVR if the first player is defective and needs to be returned. There is literally no-one who gains from these restrictions, not even the content creators or the manufacturers.

However, the current state of intellectual property laws prevents anyone from (lawfully) competing in that market with a better offering, because patents and anti-circumvention rules make for very good ways to be anti-competitive without actually breaking any laws. And that is in the interests of the organisations that control those rights.

Please tell me someone in his office was then caught downloading something illegally.