And fat pimply ones no less. Hey, no arguing with taste.

We are the 99.9999999999% of Slashdot. You are the .0000000001% of complete imbeciles.

Occupy MichaelKristopeit! Who's with me?

Yeah, it's not legal, but what a fantastic way to alienate your fan base. They'd have to be retarded to start doing that. I fully realize that (like everything else) 90% of the Lets Play's out there are crap, but I'm willing to bet there is a potentially significant portion of sales deriving from those videos.

Oh, I really enjoyed "Freemans Mind" lets go buy Halflife!

TOTAL WIN!!

So what you're saying is that the so-called "tragedy of the commons" is it's own antithesis? I like it.

Well I guess the high and mighty, freedom loving Europeans still haven't quite gotten past that little historical fact of state established religion after all. How sad. At least in the States (and lets not get into the other bits, I'm strictly talking financing here), it's illegal for, at least the Federal government to directly subsidize religious institutions. Sure, they may be tax exempt but that's at least arguably different than actually giving them money.

I actually feel sorry for the Europeans, you guys had a long way to go after being fucked by the Catholics for so many years. In all seriousness, my condolences. The bloody Catholics ruined EVERYTHING they ever touched, especially that wacky little religion we call Christianity. As much as the Protestants don't want to admit it, even their precious little belief structures are based on the decisions of the Catholics. Sure, you don't bother with the saints and all that shite. But you still accept their canon (albeit with a couple of excisions).

Sorry, I'm starting to rant. In conclusion, fuck the Catholics. They really, truly suck. My message to the Protestants: Your religion, while completely insane, was developed part and parcel by megalomaniacal Roman Emperor wannabes hell bent on subjugating all religious thought to fall into their own sphere.

Sorry... didn't mean to rant. Goddamned Catholics made me do it.

Ok, then why are there so many "Let's Play" videos on YouTube? Or is that one of those magical "exceptions"?

You're absolutely right, now construct a plausible legal argument stating that.

I've got $5 on it

That's right, if it was good enough for Moses, it's good enough for me. Never mind if it makes sense to have an arm of the military exclusively devoted to projecting air power. Yeah, the navy and marines have aircraft divisions, but those are rather constricted to being on carriers. That may not be a bad thing, but saying categorically that the air force is unconstitutional, if only due to the fact that the founding fathers would faint dead away if they saw an airplane, makes perfect sense.

Got anything else?

It's ok, we know you're not the real Michael Kristopeit. You didn't blather on about hiding behind nick names. Better remember to throw that in next time, feeb.

Well let's not forget that since he didn't state explicitly that he set down his "high definition DLSR professional grade camera with boom mikes", chances are the quality of the recorded music was rather poor indeed. Not to mention that the music was completely incidental to what he was intending to record (if that even matters). The idea that just because they are legally allowed to issue take down notices, doesn't mean they are required to do so, nor that they should.

I can just see the boardroom scene now:

"OMG, some guy recorded our song as background noise while taking a video of his vacation. WON'T ANYONE THINK OF THE PROFITS????"
"Nuke that video from orbit, it's the only way to be sure"

LOL. If anything, this is just evidence that there are outsourced Indians mindlessly clicking through check boxes, "Is this infringing? Yes/No/Retry"

Well it isn't as if they have any compelling reason to do so. What are you going to do, sue them? BWAHAHA.

I mentioned this above, but while it's all well and good that technically a misrepresented DMCA claim holds the claiming party libel for "lots of bad stuff", you've got to prove it first, If you are, as the GGGP presumably is, some guy who just likes to make recordings of public domain works, you all too likely don't have the financial where-with-all to duke it out in the courts to vindicate yourself. Sure, you might get recompense for all the money you spent on the legal proceedings, but unless you find a really nice lawyer, chances are you're gonna have to be able to prove ability to pay in the event your case fails. Not to mention, any recompense is hardly likely to come in any reasonable time frame. If you want to force that, well guess what, more legal fees.

Face it, the system is stacked, and well, it's being stacked on you!

I just know someone's gonna think I'm trolling but... isn't that the Ayn Rand/Libertarian ideal? Private parties own everything, and well if they start screwing things up... um... sue them, I guess.

There's gotta be an antithesis to "tragedy of the commons" as applies to the theories of the "private ownership only" crowd.

Better stop now before this turns into a full fledged rant.

Too true! It's like good ol' Clinton, it depends on what the definition of "limited" is. Infinity - 1, while mathematically impossible could probably be successfully argued in the courts to mean limited. Or failing that, "until the cold death of the universe". Hell, they don't even have to get that creative, "one million years" (cue pinky bite)

While I laud your idea, it seems to me that by attempting to encode all possible copyright-able works you would by necessity be encoding works already copyrighted. So the "infinite recording" would actually be infringing on all currently copyrighted works, rendering the entire exercise moot.

Off the top of my head, you'd have to figure out some method of excluding all currently copyrighted works from your algorithm which would almost certainly require more work (and either a huge amount of data or an extremely clever algorithm) than figuring out the actual algorithm would be. Plus, you could never be quite certain that you didn't miss even just one previously copyrighted work, and presuming the capability of this "infinite recording" to me amiable to data mining, the same techniques you would presumably use to find future infringements could also be used to find and infringements of previous works extant in your "infinite recording". Also, assuming you're forced (for whatever reason) to go the "huge amount of data" route, how would the data describing works to be excluded be encoded in such a way that that data set isn't infringing in itself?

Thinking a little more, especially on the excluding of previous works, it's obvious that there is a legal precedent stating that while two encoding of a recording, e.g. CD PCM and MP3, while being technically different formats both represent the same copyrighted recording. IANAL, but it's highly unlikely that very many of the files people have been sued over were actually uncompressed WAV files ripped right off the disc.

Chances are, even if you managed to develop an extremely clever algorithm that somehow had rules defined to exclude previously copyrighted works it would probably be possible to argue that the rules encoding the exclusion are also infringing because it's the same logical format shift as WAV to MP3. Heck, you could probably end up mathematically proving that the difference between the algorithm rules and the previously mentioned data set is the same difference between 1 and 3/3 by way of it simply being a different method of encoding.

As I said, I think the idea of an "infinite recording" encoding all possible works is an awesome idea, it just seems like it creates just as many problems as it (ostensibly) solves.

And for the record, I'm calling it an "infinite recording" because I'm really not sure what else to call it.

Oh, and if you ever get around to making this thing, let me know. I'd love to play with it :)