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someone else will make the equivalent service without the ads

and do it for free? do it well, and for free? seeing it ain't you who's volunteering, who's this fella named "someone else"? who's this little elf that appears in the night and maintains code for gigantic server farms handling terrabytes of data each day, and footing the bill for the bandwidth? I'd like to meet him, buy him a beer!

Here's the Michael Geist narrative:

http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-11.html

Snow White (1937), Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Song of the South (1946), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Robin Hood (1952), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Mulan (1998), Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Jungle Book (1967).

Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse's first success, was a parody of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill.

And this entire comment is taken from Lawrence Lessig's work Free Culture, let's hope he doesn't issue a DMCA takedown notice for this comment ;)

I'm getting all my info from Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. If you are interested you can read the relevant chapter here.

If they did away with the DRM YOU WOULD KEEP PIRATING.

I just knew that if you rambled on long enough you'd eventually get something right.

Dr. Cory Doctorow said, "keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall." This was in his presentation to Microsoft about DRM. It's an excellent read: http://www.authorama.com/microsoft-research-drm-talk-1.html

Pirates will pirate regardless of DRM. The content owners will never get their money. This is why DRM as a response to piracy is idiocy. Any company that designs its products around people who will never pay for them is incompetent. Putting restrictions on your paying customers because of the actions of pirates is like kicking your dog because your cat pissed on the rug.

If you don't want to deal with DRM, stop pirating.

This is, in fact, the opposite of true. I don't pirate. As a result, I have to deal with DRM. If you don't want to deal with DRM, pirating the content is the best way. The main reason I'm so vocal in my opposition to DRM is because I'm an honest user.

I found out years later that I was actually (and still am) suffering from a rare sleep disorder

Well, with me, it was my liver that was out of order

Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the Caribbean from her. Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if he can descramble the CSS-encrypted VOB - video object - on his DVD player. Otherwise, the disc is only useful to Bob as a drinks-coaster. So Alice has to provide Bob - the attacker - with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext.

Hilarity ensues.

Patent protection is not necessary to have an "effective" copy prevention mechanism. So we'll just discount that one off the bat.

No; however, it is one way to "require a process with the authority of the copyright owner to gain access to the work." Which is my point; in the context of the DMCA, "effective" does not mean what the dictionary says it does; it only means what the Law says it does. (Welcome to the Wonderland of Law.) Patent and trade secret would seem to be two ways for protection to qualify.

If you believe an alternate interpretation is more appropriate, please elaborate on your understanding of the DMCA's definition of "effective" in 17 USC 1201.

Why didn't the CCA go for the kill? They would have had a much stronger case than trade secret protection.

My guess is that lawyers are a cautious bunch. They do not want an explicit ruling saying CSS does not qualify as an "effective" tool, which would be an obvious defense if they attempted a direct DMCA charge. Ergo, they tried for the lower risk maneuver of trying trade secret law first.

On the other hand, CSS did at one point qualify as a trade secret. However, due to reverse engineering, it has since lost its secrecy — as the judge eventually ruled. If they had won the case on a trade secrets basis, they could have gotten court orders so that anyone who used, uploaded, or downloaded the DeCSS code via US network computers (and possibly other jurisdictions) to cease&desist, and possibly even gotten them to forfeit the computer they used to do it.

Trade secrets law allowed for a possibly bigger win, and would not make a loss completely final. This is also probably why they dropped the case when they did; with that ruling, appeals would risk some other judge adding "CSS is ineffective" to the ruling -- which (in the dictionary sense) is pretty much what they were told by the cryptographic experts they consulted when they were developing the standards.

As it stands right now, the CSS system has not been declared ineffective. So anyone who dares to violate it does so at their own risk.

Correct. However, I(AmNotALawyer) argue that such a case looks very possible, as the DVD-CCA's position has been badly weakened, and that the DVD-CCA risk that if they have to bring a case. And, given the nature of the modern business world, and the nature of corporations to try anything for a profit that they can at least argue is legal (until it's explicitly ruled otherwise)... I suspect it's only a short matter of time before someone tries.

Whereas I am sick and tired of people trotting out this 'We're all a bit Aspergers' line because we're in IT. [...] There's a huge problem with people self-diagnosing autistic spectrum disorders, they read a paragraph or two on Asperger's and then they have the 'omg that's me!' moment. [...] Repeat after me - Wikiepdia is not a fucking doctor, it cannot diagnose you.

Straight on. I had a girlfriend once who was manically depressive and who made life very difficult for herself by talking herself into thinking she was a borderliner when every medical professional told her she wasn't.

I think the best description of what happens when people diagnose themselves is in the first chapter of Jerome K Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat":

"It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into some fearful, devastating scourge, I know and, before I had glanced half down the list of premonitory symptoms, it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever read the symptoms discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vituss Dance found, as I expected, that I had that too, began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Brights disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaids knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadnt I got housemaids knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaids knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to walk the hospitals, if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.

Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted mys

WTF is insightful about this comment?

Walt Disney would never have been able to create Micky Mouse if had to live in your world.

http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-4.html

At least I read (and cringed some) at the term as found in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" published in January 2003. Despite this I tend like his writing and ideas.

This usage may appear earlier but I do not know where.

I believe if we look at the record of vulnerabilities in all current DRM solutions by any vendor, we can conclude that it's more an issue of DRM not working than an OS issue overall.

Not that Apple is perfect by any means, I just think the analogy is somewhat flawed.

Anda's Game by Cory Doctorow: http://www.authorama.com/andas-game-1.html/

This is a key point: even steamboat willie (AKA Mickey) was borrowed from Buster Keaton. Nothing wrong with that per se, as Larry Lessig points out in Free Culture , that's just the nature of cultural production, and should be encouraged.

However, what Disney's been particularly guilty of last few decades, excepting Lilo and a few others, is regurgitation, not simply borrowing or being inspired by other stories. Their stories are sappy, flat, and smell bad, and, as a parent of culturally vulnerable cartoon consumers, demonically cross-marketed. They exploit the audience, who are mostly kids.