Wrong. With something like a photograph, the right commercial customer may come along and find it ideal for a marketing campaign, etc. The photographer - who has not yet licensed it to anybody else - can then license it exclusively to that company, and charge appropriately. If the image has already been appropriated and used out of context by some other infringing part, that can cause problems for the photographer's later ability to license it as he sees fit. You're not understanding how this works.

And as an attorney and someone who publishes stuff herself, she should know that every work is subject to copyright, and that if she can't see where someone has granted her license to use it without asking, she can safely assume that running off with it and using it as part of her own material is infringement, plain and simple.

B.S. I just recently had a Cox DVR that output HDMI from HD recordings. I believe most cable systems have HD DVR devices. Certainly Dish and DirectTV do as well.

Now, you can't take any random HDMI source and record it. There is no HDMI recording device available, nor is there going to be.

As to what you can work around with HDMI, I don't know but I suspect the answer is that there is no such thing as an HDMI input device available. Period.

Composite isn't going to be HD no matter what - the bandwidth simply isn't there. What you could probably find is a component input device that delivers a digital HD stream from component inputs.

If you, the viewer skips the commercials there is no problem.

If some does this for you, as a service, there is a huge problem. A video store that was cutting out all the "nasty" parts of movies to make them more "family friendly" got sued over the same thing a while back. I think they lost. I expect Dish to lose as well.

The downside is channels like SciFi will no longer exist. Of course, neither will the Golf Channel, or EWTN and that might be a good thing.

The far, far bigger downside will be with consumers paying directly for programming they will be faced with a decision every month (at least!) of "is this channel worth it?" Today, these costs are hidden whereas with this model it will be clear and obvious - and most channels will fail the "worth it" test. End result? There will be far, far fewer channels if any are left at all. HBO will remain because it is already passing the "worth it" test every month for every viewer that gets it. But virtually nothing else is going to make it.

Sure, you might be willing to subsidize the SciFi channel, but just about everyone else will not. Same thing goes for the Golf Channel - where there might be hundreds of people that would easily plunk down $20 a month to receive it, that isn't enough people by far. So it dies. ESPN? They might survive, but it will be a near thing.

A far bigger question is sports in general. Today what pays for the entire college sports program, everything from golf to swimming to polo? Football television revenue. Wipe out the advertising there and there is no more television revenue or certainly not anywhere near what it is today. So most colleges will fold up their sports programs, all of them, simply for lack of funds. Was someone thinking of building a billion-dollar sports palace for a pro sports team? Ha. Without television revenue, which all comes from ads, there will be no more huge sports palaces. There will not be million-dollar contracts for NFL players either. So ESPN might survive, but there will be virtually nothing to show on it. Bye-bye ESPN.

No, without advertising revenue you are looking at a signficant remaking of American society in ways you cannot imagine. I can't either - it is too sweeping a change with television ad revenue sponsoring or supporting so many different aspects. Were this to change - and I really doubt it will - the changes will affect every single person in the country, probably in a negative manner.

Sorry, but that salary isn't there today. The problem is in the US that (1) almost nobody is actually paying for music anymore and (2) the ones that are paying are spreading their payments across thousands of artists. End result is recorded music is free and live performances are expensive to put on. Gone are the days where a bar would invite a group in to play and pay them - the expectation is they will do this for free or even pay the bar for the opportunity to be heard.

Europe has a strong tradition of supporting artists of all sorts by directly paying them from public money. So maybe in Europe you can decide to be a musician and survive. In the US it is unlikely many will choose to even learn to play an instrument in school because it is an avenue toward ... nothing.

A long time ago a friend of mine told me a story about a job he created. He was interested in pipe organs and learned how to make organ pipes. He found a few places that had antique pipe organs that needed some pipes replaced and he was the only person around that could make them. He did this for several years but discovered that there simply was no market for organ pipes in the 1960s in Chicago. He could no longer do this and survive. Today, music is what pipe organs were back then - there is no market for it. Sure, there is plenty of music but it is being given away or taken for free.

I suspect the guy with the horn in the subway tunnel playing for change is getting about as much as most people from sales of their music today.

The problem with patronage is you get what you pay for. In the case of music in the 1600s and 1700s nearly all "popular" music came from patronage and overall it was very alike. So you had all the artists striving for patronage and the rich patrons were paying for a particular sort of music.

Today, the folks that are likely to be paying are over 40 and not so much into hip-hop, trance or electronica. Lots of 70s era stuff. OK, if you want two centuries of music in the mold of 1972 be my guest.

Well, you do understand that things like some AM radio stations are designated as information sources for emergencies and are required to be on the air during such emergencies, right? This means that such radio stations have to have backup power and diverse antenna systems so they really can stay on the air.

Cell phones, on the other hand, have no such requirements today. The network is pretty robust so if one cell site goes down the impact isn't all that great. But, there are no requirements for how long sites can be down, which can mean in a rural area that a cell site can be down for a couple of weeks. Unlike land lines, there are no tariff requirements for uptime. Which means that cell service is available when it is available and when it isn't, ... well, it isn't. No requirements means it is completely unsuitable for emergency use.

Example - land lines are powered by 48V DC and a good part of a CO is the banks of batteries that are required for long power outages. They have backup generators as well, but I believe they are required to have TWO DAYS of battery power. Contrast this with a cell tower that might have 15 minutes on a UPS. I suppose we could expect the government to simply mandate that power outages not occur...

Once cell service is tariffed like land lines are today, then we can talk about how cell phones can be used in emergencies for informing people. Until then, it is silly to even think about such stuff - it would mean virtually cutting people off. We have lots of interesting gadgets today, but for emergencies we haven't really moved from where things were in 1960. And every proposal centered around eliminating some aspect of this support infrastructure is from people that simply do not understand the role of fairly low-tech but extremely reliable systems in emergency information and communication.

Here's another one for you. You can receive AM broadcasts with a batteryless receiver - unless of course they eliminate AM broadcast in favor of some digital technology that makes it impossible to receive such emergency broadcasts in this manner. What happens when the batteries run out? Well, better hope that doesn't happen, right?

You do understand that dial-up was $30+ a month when there was a physical modem for each possible connection and a whole bank of modems in each place an ISP wanted to make it possible for people to connect to. These modems would fail and need to be replaced requiring an ISP technician to go to the place where the modems were - not the telephone office, by the way - and replace the failed ones. Huge expense for maintenance.

What allowed the price to drop was the phone company completely took over the modems and the maintenance. You would pay to have a T-1 connection or better and have data calls routed to it. The phone switchgear actually handled the modem functions internally, without a modem being involved. This made the costs for dial-up service drop to almost nothing and allowed for a huge leap in service without any maintenance cost. This also meant that any CO with the required software (and hardware?) could now be used as a dial-in location rather than requiring each ISP have banks of modems at some location. This also ushered in the era of the 50Kbps modems because they were connecting directly to the telephone switchgear.

In short, technology caught up with modems for ISPs and made them obsolete, eliminating the maintenance costs.

You seem to be under the impression that the taxes on cable service are retained by the cable company. Sorry, but they are paid to the state and local governments that enacted the taxes. There used to be some subsidies for building out but those are long gone today.

What, do you think the content is free or something?

Ignoring the television content for the moment, just the connection to the Internet for data is going to be 100K a month, easy. We aren't talking $700 for a T1 here.