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Hello, Big Number Fallacy!

Boy, that's just over a year old and it's almost like I custom wrote it for your post.

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1. Is this creative enough to qualify for copyright? There are two conflicting answers here:
   1. No, a computer can not be creative, at least in the legal sense. (Forget AI for the moment, it's not on the table right now anyhow and the problem is hard enough as it is!)
   2. Yes, on the grounds that if a human produced the exact same image, it would fully and unquestionably qualify for copyright.
   How to resolve it? Is calling some creative merely a description of the process, not the result as we would normally think of it? My full answer is in the essay above, but given the ground rules for this post of staying in the current system instead of my own ethical system, I don't have an answer for this. We'd have to wait for a judge.
   
   As an interesting side note, I note the Random Art program owner is now offering his prints for sale, so there is a commercial component at play here too. It technically doesn't affect the copyrightability or art question either way, but it would get a judge's attention, don't you thing?
2. If this qualifies for copyright, who gets it? This sharpens the previous question all the more... there is really only one candidate in the Random Art case, the program owner. Yet, if creativity is a process, not a result, for any given image he applied no creativity at all; in fact the site periodically cycles images and I'd imagine it is a fully automated process by now. So by copyright criteria, he probably doesn't hold the copyright; he applied all his creativity in the creation of the generation program, which of course he fully owns. On the other hand, if creativity is an adjective applied to a final work, clearly the output itself is copyrightable; many things of lesser visual creativity are as well.

1. Is this creative enough to qualify for copyright? There are two conflicting answers here:
   1. No, a computer can not be creative, at least in the legal sense. (Forget AI for the moment, it's not on the table right now anyhow and the problem is hard enough as it is!)
   2. Yes, on the grounds that if a human produced the exact same image, it would fully and unquestionably qualify for copyright.
   How to resolve it? Is calling some creative merely a description of the process, not the result as we would normally think of it? My full answer is in the essay above, but given the ground rules for this post of staying in the current system instead of my own ethical system, I don't have an answer for this. We'd have to wait for a judge.
   
   As an interesting side note, I note the Random Art program owner is now offering his prints for sale, so there is a commercial component at play here too. It technically doesn't affect the copyrightability or art question either way, but it would get a judge's attention, don't you thing?
2. If this qualifies for copyright, who gets it? This sharpens the previous question all the more... there is really only one candidate in the Random Art case, the program owner. Yet, if creativity is a process, not a result, for any given image he applied no creativity at all; in fact the site periodically cycles images and I'd imagine it is a fully automated process by now. So by copyright criteria, he probably doesn't hold the copyright; he applied all his creativity in the creation of the generation program, which of course he fully owns. On the other hand, if creativity is an adjective applied to a final work, clearly the output itself is copyrightable; many things of lesser visual creativity are as well.

It is not uncommon to see patients undergo permanent psychological trauma in the presence of the Sphere, before the nerve stapler has even been strapped into position. Its effect on the general consciousness of the culture is profound: husbands have seen wives go inside, and mothers their children. Dr. Xynan left the surface of the sphere semitranslucent for a reason. You can hear them in there; you can see them. It is a thing of terrible beauty.

Baron Klim: "The Music of the Spheres"

'Abort, Retry, Fail?' was the phrase some wormdog scrawled next to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds on the huge organic comp systems, we'd remind them: if you see this message, {always} choose 'Retry.'

Bad'l Ron, Wakener: Morgan Polysoft

It is not uncommon to see patients undergo permanent psychological trauma in the presence of the Sphere, before the nerve stapler has even been strapped into position. Its effect on the general consciousness of the culture is profound: husbands have seen wives go inside, and mothers their children. Dr. Xynan left the surface of the sphere semitranslucent for a reason. You can hear them in there; you can see them. It is a thing of terrible beauty.

Baron Klim: "The Music of the Spheres"

'Abort, Retry, Fail?' was the phrase some wormdog scrawled next to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds on the huge organic comp systems, we'd remind them: if you see this message, {always} choose 'Retry.'

Bad'l Ron, Wakener: Morgan Polysoft

Adding Tapestry looks like adding another language to me for a lot of us.

I'm working on a pure Javascript solution to that problem, XBLinJS (sourceforge project) which implements the capabilities of XBL in JS. It will is easy to create widgets that are XMLHttpRequest aware. I don't ship any, partially because the project is young and partially because needs tend to be too specific to be easily demo-able, but it's not too hard; I'll be doing that today or tommorow in the project XBLinJS is supporting for me.

Now that's not adding another language.

Don't think for a second that our clueless bureaucrats are special. The root fallacy here, trying to legislate tools rather than results, is widespread. Centuries of tool use and lawmakers still lack the cognitive toolset to deal with them.

I talk about this some in the context of "IP", but the argument trivially extends to other things as well.

But buck up a little; this isn't set in stone, it's just a law, and one on the fringe at that. The harder they come down the more people will agree with us. (I sometimes think our best strategy is to give Hollywood everything it wants, right now, and when people begin to have to worry about whether their particular combination of TV, DVD/video player, amplifier, speakers, and video disk are compatible, we'll win. Yeah, it's dangerous, but in the long term it could be best... BTW, I can counterargue this all day long, this isn't the total sum of my opinion, so feel free to post the counter-arguments if you like but don't expect to surprise me or anything.)

However, if I were to plant this corn and it so happened to contain Monsanto seed (which I realistically have no way of knowing) how could I be legally lible to Monsanto, who I have had no dealing with?

By patent law, which requires no knowledge and all users, not just the designer/seller/original purchaser, incur liability for unlicensed use. (I'm not saying this is moral or ethical, but it is the legal situation.)

Actually, at this point, I'm not sure the "patents bad for genes" rant alone is appropriate; I think, as you alluded to, a healthy dose of ignorance of the law increasingly should be an excuse.

(Like I said in that post, what more is there to say?)

Considering both the target of the speech and the publisher of the speech is necessary. Suppose I use an Earthlink-hosted web page to criticise a Sony-released movie. If Earthlink can suppress my speech for any reason they please (on the theory that they own the wires and the site hosting), and have no legal or ethical motivation to not suppress the speech, then in theory, all Sony would have to do is convince Earthlink it is in their best interest to remove my site. The easiest way to do that is simply cut Earthlink a check exceeding the value to Earthlink of continuing to host my page, which is a trivial amount of money to Sony. In the absence of any other considerations, most people would consider this a violation of my right to ``free speech'', even though there's may be nothing actually illegal in this scenario. So if we allow the owner of the means of expression to shut down our speech for any reason they see fit, it's only a short economic step to allow the target of the expression to have undue influence, especially in this age where the gap between one person's resources and one corporation's resources continues to widen.

On the down side, welcome to the land of magic and wonder, where arcane bugs haunt the long forgotten planes of DOM...

Yeah, I dug into Mozilla development gung ho over the past year or so, and I've completely abandoned it... well, I'm in the process of creating a replacement XBL, but after that's done, I'm out. In painfully slow succession, I've tried in a serious way Moz's RDF support, XUL, and XBL, and in every case I have rapidly exceeded their capabilities (to the tune of segfaults) and gone back to JS + DOM. (For RDF, I now dump out my data as a JS file and use XMLHttpRequest to retrieve it and "eval" to run it; this is what Google Suggest uses. I beat them by about a month, I know others beat them by more :-) but it works and you'll be stunned how fast it is, even for many kilobytes of data; by far the fastest solution I've found, even independent of the fact that loading any sort of XML in Moz causes a huge stall of some kind and tends to cause crashes and memory leaks in nothing flat.)

I'm preparing a series of half rants, half detailed indictments on why the Mozilla specific technologies are not just poorly implemented at the moment for any task other than being a web browser, but why Javascript + DOM is usually, on the balance, a superior solution. ("On the balance" means that while my JS implementation of XBL is neither a subset nor a superset of "true" XBL, on the whole the benefits level out in favor of my JS implementation... and if I were willing to go pure Moz instead of cross-platform it would be a total win.) I don't want to repeat them here in toto, but, well, that's actually the basic argument: Me, a single schmoe, can replicate most of XBL in a couple of weeks, in Javascript, and it is actually much more reliable too, for reasons that will only make sense if you used Moz's XBL support for anything serious, like widgets that can load remote data or include other widgets in interesting ways. How much time has been spent on XBL, which is still behind?

Unless you need a XUL widget like "popup" that has no good HTML replacement, you're just better off with JS and DOM. Most people don't understand how powerful JS really is, and I've found it to be surprisingly speedy, too.

(To show I'm not just spouting off randomly, here is my current XBL in JS implementation. Still in development, but it oughta show I'm serious about this, and even now I'm finding it more pleasing to work with overall than real XBL. What stops me from releasing the rants right now is, well, there's some writing to be done yet, but instead of just bitching I want to have some constructive solutions as well; xbl.js is a big part of that, and right now I'm working on the POPUP element because I need that for my app. Ranting is great but I find they are even more powerful when they are not purely negative.)

Details forthcoming at a later date, but next time you're reaching for XUL or XBL, if it isn't for a Mozilla extension, stop and make sure you don't really want to do it in cross-platform JS + DOM. See, the thing is, those libraries are well tested and optimized in a variety of situations; I'm not encountering bugs hourly like I felt like I was in Moz.

Finally, to preempt some of the obvious responses, I'm not saying XBL or something was a bad idea; in fact the idea is so good I'm re-implementing it. I'm saying the implementation right now is so dodgy it isn't worth playing with when there is another less cool, but more functional, alternative available today in the form of JS + DOM.... and what advantages XUL or XBL have over my JS implementation are only a few small hooks away from being exposed to the JS as well.

It seems that if there is such a close race that there is only 10 votes in it, then it's not really democracy that's deciding the winner of this. Instead it comes down to combinations of random events.

Yes.

But before you get too upset about it, remember that Democracy here has basically stated that it "doesn't care" which one wins.

Thus, the real issue here is getting a happy loser more than obtaining a winner; practically speaking they both won or lost equally and "fair" or "meaning" really isn't on the table here, since they can't share the office.

Abstractly, this is just something that happens every so often; short-term exciting, but not worth getting too upset over in the long term. Concretely, if it makes people more aware of the pervasive voting fraud that is always done by both sides, some good might even come of it.

I think you're vastly underestimating the difficulty in homogenously distributing waste over that large an area.

Yes and no. Compared to the difficulty of guaranteeing that someone, somewhere, over the course of the next ten thousand years won't be even the slightest bit adversely affected to the 100% level that people seem to be demanding, it might not be so bad. People have already demonstrated they are willing to spread the risk; each and every one of us, even as we read, are breathing in a little radioactive material that used to live in coal, after all.

If we could drop that 100% down to something more reasonable I'd totally agree with you. But perfection is damned expensive.

(It's usually infinitely expensive, but in this case there are perfect alternatives that aren't infinitely expensive. One that may be cost effective is waiting until we have a space elevator and flinging it all into the sun. IIRC the far end exceeds the escape velocity for the solar system so literally flinging things into the sun is feasible. Anything else, of course, won't do... just flinging it out of the solar system will have people worried that the radioactivity boogieman will magically fly back and crash into them.

Oh, who am I kidding? Such a plan would be blocked by a new coalition of SOS (Save Our Sun!), a misguided group of environmentalists who want to preserve the pristine purity of the Sun (What if there is life on the Sun, after all?), and a bunch of brave environmentalist types whose science education is straight out of the 80s... the 1880s... who are afraid the Sun would suddenly start shooting dangerous radiation out. Yes, start shooting it out, because of course the hellfire nuclear fusion inferno that converts tons of matter to energy per second was otherwise, up to the point we meddling humans got involved, as fuzzy and cute and natural as a puppy, or cobra venom.

Pardon my bitterness here; even in this supposed bastion of intelligence that is Slashdot (and I'm not being terribly sarcastic here, I would expect the average Slashdotter to have an above average understanding of space issues) I can count on one hand the commenters that have a clue about big numbers.)

Anglo-saxon countries have those terrible hangups about State-issued ID (amongst other things), mostly for neurotic reasons that can be traced back to the magna-carta.

I recommend you investigate the provenance of the phrase "Show me your papers." (Google is not your friend on this one, I tried.)

Neurotic, or another one of those "those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it" sort of things?

And what about the misuse and abuse of social-security numbers? Video-clubs will ask for it to rent a goddammed DVD!!! It is not likely that a video-club will keep it's database as securely as a bank does.

You falsely assume that people against state IDs are otherwise OK with the situation as-is and implicitly accuse them of hypocrisy. Speaking at least for myself, I am not happy with the situation as is, so no hypocrisy here. (Although perhaps not for the exact reason you think; some reasoning here, but also, even though Social Security really isn't a national ID card, it is, as you point out, wildly unethical for entities unwilling to safeguard it to require it. Whether or not it is a "national ID" is irrelevant; the point is that it is a highly privacy sensitive information (a term I define quite carefully), and for corporations in general to require it, but not respect and safeguard it, is very unethical. Going along with the writeup I link, the problem with a National ID card is it concentrates the privacy-sensitivity so much that no real entity can ever be responsible enough by my standards to handle that kind of power over me... therefore, it will simply be taken, against my will and with no compensation to me of significance. (And remember, ethically I set my price; this precludes the obvious comeback to that phrase.) Not a good thing.)

Anglo-saxon countries have those terrible hangups about State-issued ID (amongst other things), mostly for neurotic reasons that can be traced back to the magna-carta.

I recommend you investigate the provenance of the phrase "Show me your papers." (Google is not your friend on this one, I tried.)

Neurotic, or another one of those "those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it" sort of things?

And what about the misuse and abuse of social-security numbers? Video-clubs will ask for it to rent a goddammed DVD!!! It is not likely that a video-club will keep it's database as securely as a bank does.

You falsely assume that people against state IDs are otherwise OK with the situation as-is and implicitly accuse them of hypocrisy. Speaking at least for myself, I am not happy with the situation as is, so no hypocrisy here. (Although perhaps not for the exact reason you think; some reasoning here, but also, even though Social Security really isn't a national ID card, it is, as you point out, wildly unethical for entities unwilling to safeguard it to require it. Whether or not it is a "national ID" is irrelevant; the point is that it is a highly privacy sensitive information (a term I define quite carefully), and for corporations in general to require it, but not respect and safeguard it, is very unethical. Going along with the writeup I link, the problem with a National ID card is it concentrates the privacy-sensitivity so much that no real entity can ever be responsible enough by my standards to handle that kind of power over me... therefore, it will simply be taken, against my will and with no compensation to me of significance. (And remember, ethically I set my price; this precludes the obvious comeback to that phrase.) Not a good thing.)

If Microsoft had released similar search feature, it would be one more nail in the coffin of poor security, no matter what user advisories they had given.

Microsoft has released a similar feature. You've been able to find files by a string in the contents for a long time now. Not only is it not "a nail in the coffin of poor security", it is completely unnoticed in this entire fracas. Yes, the implementation sucks (and it seems like I've never gotten it to work right in XP), but it is there and I am yet to hear a Google Search privacy problem that is not equally a problem for the built-in OS search.

I guess you can only bitch about what you know about. Most people, even on Slashdot, are ultimately pretty ignorant about what is in the seething miasma that is Windows. (I'm only slightly better than ignorant.) Speaking as a certified privacy wonk, this is all too silly to worry about.

Perhaps, as this experiment shows, the Asian mentality may actually be the superior strategy?

Oh, this is a bad time to get all multicultural.

Sure, it works out great for the Masters, who get to the winners circles on the backs of their Slaves.

Meanwhile, if you want to call Tit-for-Tat the Western strategy, everybody mostly wins after a while, even though few do really well.

I don't believe either categorization. I'm just pointing out that if you're going to base your argument on this article, you are saying that it is good that a few individuals come out better, at the expense of a lot of other individuals, in the putative Asian system of thought. Which I find barbaric, though YMMV.

I once defined a political axis as "people who know they would be kings, vs. people who think they would be serfs". Sounds like I can guess where you come out on that.

If there is an implied arrangement to watch an ad in return for a service, then I guess, from one point of view, this is justifiable (if not currently legal), however offensive we may find it.

Contracts can not override Constitutional rights, and for that matter, neither can Congressional bills.

No sane intepretation of the right to free speech, despite the common phrase we use to identify that right, can fail to include the right to listen to whomever we choose, or not listen to whomever we choose. (My own logic for that statement is here, but like I said, it is really hard to rationalize one but not the other.)

I'll be fair and say that this is probably not a certain win, legally, because your argument has force, too. But there does come a point where you can't sign away your rights, and free speech is one of the few we still really have left.

Do not forget you must take my argument out of just the context of watching a movie, and apply it generally. Once it is allowed to require listening in the context of movie viewing, it will swiftly become required elsewhere; even if it starts out acceptable to the Supreme Court someone will push it too hard.

I can not think of a context where we are today forced to view commercials. Even in a theatre, you are not denied access to the movie if you come in after the previews/commercials.

Sorry, it was meant to lead to the "Bi-partisan note", which was meant to show I think there are "loonies" on both sides, or at least were in the recent past. (Of course the Republicans haven't 100% removed them, but they no longer set the agenda.)

I define "loonies" as I did, as I also define "liberal" and "conservative" damn near everytime I use them, because there are so many definitions of the words that when you see them in isolation, they are worse than meaningless. On my blog, I have alternately used "liberal" to mean "conventional, vaguely left people", "classical liberal of the 19-th century (where we get the term "liberal arts")", "economic liberal", and "person who tends to concentrate on individual effects vs. social effects" (one of my faves). That last one in particular has no apparent connection to the literal meaning of the words, but don't blame me for starting down that road, I'm just following other's usage. :-)

I particularly define "loonies" as the ones who won't change their minds, even when shown facts, particularly when they do spectacular mental gymnastics to convert the plain facts into something that supports their views, because they are the dangerous ones. The democrats are currently way too controlled by people seriously running around claiming Bush is worse than Hitler; while I'm personally not impressed with some of the authoritarian actions his administrations has taken, he's a far cry from Hitler.

The reason they are so dangerous to the Democrats is that just like the Loonie Christian Right (and bear in mind as I say this that I consider myself a Christian), they are so disconnected from the mainstream that they don't realize how crazy their accusations sound to the mainstream, and how they marginalize the mainstream. Off the top of my head I can't think of any equivalent for the Christian Right, but I suppose watching the 700 Club for a week will fill you in adequately; I wasn't politically active during the height of their power.

An example of the leftist loonies are most of the protestors at the RNC (though presumably not all of them).

(Generally, though this is necessarily vague, I'm looking at political, social, and academic "leftness", not economic leftness (socialism/communism), and I tend to think of anarchists on the libertarian/populist axis because I've seen both left and right anarchists, arguing against government for almost entirely opposing reasons, but ending in the same place. Yeah, there's overlap; if only the world were so simple.)

This is one of those books you have to let percolate a bit before passing (negative) judgement against it; I first read the book just as I was getting my Master's degree and it is hard to come to grips with the idea of just how much of your life has been wasted by the system. A lot of you are still in school and the cognitive dissonance can still be bad for you.

And I was even one of those who would attack the schools on other grounds, mind; I was open to the idea it was flawed, hell, I knew it was flawed, but just how deeply and how deliberately sent me into shock.

Give it a try; more of my opinion in the above link, though I won't trouble Slashdot with it. Gatto really puts his case together well.

Also, I observe there are a lot of Slashdotters who reflexively assume home schooling is some sort of evil. Make sure you first satisfy yourself that the institutional schooling we now have is not itself a form of evil, perhaps even worse. Having read both sides of both issues, at this point I consider not home schooling borderline child abuse. Most of the homeschooling flaws pointed out by people, such as the ever popular (and unfounded in my experience) "lack of socialization" is correctable, with parental effort. The flaws in institutional schooling are not; indeed, they are assumed "beyond reproach". What amazes me about the human spirit is how many escape the system as I did without a crushed spirit, not how well it works.

1. Vegetables, esp. green leafy ones, are good for you.
2. There is room in a healthy diet for all the food groups, and nobody (without an ideological agenda) supports removing fruits, veggies, and all meats (some would remove red meat, but I know of no serious nutritionist who wouldn't want you to eat fish).

• Demand, supply, and price are all interrelated. You can't posulate a rising supply and a constant price. That's impossible.
• The reason it's free right now has nothing to do with "already being used". It's because there's no demand for it right now. In fact, there's "negative" demand, in that there is a demand for services to take it away. Raise demand, and you'll raise price, and I guarentee you it'll shoot right up to be slightly more expensive then normal gasoline in short order, with only a very small supply. (It won't shoot past gasoline significantly because then people will just buy gas.) The supply will remain small, because thanks to the interference of gasoline, you can't support an infrastructure that produces the stuff with the explicit goal of using it as fuel. If you could, we would be doing it right now. Thus, logically, using simple economics, this can't get large.

It seems to me there's a dual standard for prior art: If you want to invalidate a patent, you must show that someone did essentially the exact thing covered in the patent. This is generally quite hard, because generally the patent will have enough detail that everything anyone comes up with is just a little bit off.

On the other hand, when it comes time to enforce the patent, anything that looks vaguely like the patent is forbidden.

So, you could build a Direct-To-CD system with technology pre-dating the patent that isn't quite like the one in the patent, and even if you could prove that system was used for that purpose before the patent was filed, it would not invalidate the patent if shown as prior art. On the other hand, try to use that system today and you'll get sued.... you might win, but you'll probably lose.

Someday, I hope to see a defense to the tune of "I was using this system before the patent" for a system like the one described in the previous paragraph, and see what happens to the patent then when the two conflicting standards both come into play at once.

(Of course, there's a reason the patents are broad: A narrow view of these patents would be almost impossible to infringe, rendering the Patent Office nearly meaningless, and that's anathema to a bureaucracy.)

The possibility of acquiring a patent, and thereby a guaranteed source of revenue, is what spurs innovation.

This is the theory.

It is shockingly short of evidence that it actually motivates anyone in the software industry, if you discount mere assertion like your post.

The software industry was thriving before patents were allowed, and there's no particular evidence they help any actual innovaters now, either, except again, mere assertion.

And you still don't answer the possibility that it both spurs and retards innovation... and given the lack of evidence that patents have helped anyone in the software domain (where by the time you have the patent it's old news anyhow), whereas the evidence of patents being used to quench innovation lies in nearly every lawsuit ever filed w.r.t. software patents (the majority of the large cases have been submarine patents, or patents for which the justification for the lawsuit boggles the mind), the bulk of the evidence would seem to be on the "quench" side.

(Like the one-click patent, when Amazon sued B&N: Did B&N still Amazon's code in the night? The systems are more likely night-and-day different, to the point that experience on one would only be marginally useful in understanding the other, yet since Amazon apparently patented an entire concept, B&N had to stop using their one-click implementation. Note, in passing, this is another failing of the patent system in the software domain: Patents are supposed to encourage alternate implementations of similar things, but that's not possible in patents. See here for expansion on that point.)

Bayes Attack Report

There is still the lack of a strong corresponding US movement.

Because we've largely already lost. I try to be optimistic, but at this point, the only thing that is going to undo software patents is if they start causing serious economic damange that nobody can claim is just "the way IP works", or we start getting our clocks cleaned by a country with saner laws and people correctly diagnose the problem and fix it... as opposed to the knee-jerk reaction we'll actually get to tighten IP laws since the only narrative lawmakers currently understand is "IP too weak".

I'm a certified anti-software patent wonk, but I still think the system isn't going to change until the damage these things causes gets into the billions, and it can no longer be denied by anybody the damage exceeds the benefits.

There is still the lack of a strong corresponding US movement.

Because we've largely already lost. I try to be optimistic, but at this point, the only thing that is going to undo software patents is if they start causing serious economic damange that nobody can claim is just "the way IP works", or we start getting our clocks cleaned by a country with saner laws and people correctly diagnose the problem and fix it... as opposed to the knee-jerk reaction we'll actually get to tighten IP laws since the only narrative lawmakers currently understand is "IP too weak".

I'm a certified anti-software patent wonk, but I still think the system isn't going to change until the damage these things causes gets into the billions, and it can no longer be denied by anybody the damage exceeds the benefits.

... if only I get a cut of the action. They are selling MY information which is deamed to have value so why am I not legally entitled to my cut of the profits?

This, incidentally, is the single best non-tin hat reason to support privacy reform, something that everybody ought to agree with. Your private information has value, as demonstrated by the fact that it is routinely sold, for more money then you probably realize. Why is it OK for people to effectively steal this value from you without compensating you fairly, and indeed, charging you in the form of the time you have to spend dealing with people who then use this data?

It's only going to get worse.

(In fact, you can boil all privacy arguments down to this point, but it's better for many people to state it nakedly as a monetary issue, even though IMHO the non-monetary concerns are more interesting and important in the long run.)

I'm not Godwin, but I wrote an essay on that topic, which requires branching out a lot. (Which is to say, it isn't always 100% about copyright law all the time, but it's always related.)

It's easy to be against something, it's a lot harder to come up with something you're for, and I felt I had to do that before I could feel good about opining on this topic.

Summary version: It can't be summarized well, because you pretty much have to toss out copyright as you know it and start from nearly scratch. Even things like the concept of "Expression" have to be tossed out. Communication has fundamentally changed and old conceptions of copyright are wrong after centuries of refinement in a now-obsolete technological paradigm.

Not necessarily a popular view but I believe that sooner or later we're going to have to face up to the contradictions in the law head on, as I outline.

I'm not Godwin, but I wrote an essay on that topic, which requires branching out a lot. (Which is to say, it isn't always 100% about copyright law all the time, but it's always related.)

It's easy to be against something, it's a lot harder to come up with something you're for, and I felt I had to do that before I could feel good about opining on this topic.

Summary version: It can't be summarized well, because you pretty much have to toss out copyright as you know it and start from nearly scratch. Even things like the concept of "Expression" have to be tossed out. Communication has fundamentally changed and old conceptions of copyright are wrong after centuries of refinement in a now-obsolete technological paradigm.

Not necessarily a popular view but I believe that sooner or later we're going to have to face up to the contradictions in the law head on, as I outline.

"Fair use" is a technical term, and "timeshifting" is not now and never has been "fair use".

The courts did rule in Sony v. Universal City Studios (1984) that use of VCRs is primarily for time-shifting, and that such use does not harm the value of the work to the copyright holder, thus the courts refused to ban VCRs. However, there has never been any ruling, implied or otherwise, that copyright holders are obligated to assist us in our fair use, or prohibited from engaging in other technological measures to prevent us from engaging in activities that might be defended as "fair use".

Slashdot in general has a very, very, very unbelievably wrong idea of what "fair use" is, to the point that it has virtually no connection with what the legal concept actually is. Fair use is a very narrow allowance to use small portions of copyright works subject to severe limitations, no more. There is no such thing as a "fair use" right in law. (Which isn't to say there shouldn't be one; I do in fact argue that something like it should be protected. But that doesn't make it magically appear in the real law we have now.) As a result, the flag can not infringe on our non-existant "fair use right".

The reason why I continue to post this point, despite continued evidence that Slashdot as a whole refuses to understand this, is that the misunderstanding is dangerous. Thinking you are protected legally means you won't do anything to protect a "right" you think is safe. It's not. Fair use doesn't do shit for you unless you fit into the narrow provisions as described in the link above, and Slashdot as a whole needs to stop thinking otherwise or we will continue to have our "fair use rights" "stripped" from us, with no coherent protest.

I know Slashdot has never been a place you trust unquestioningly for your news, not that trusting any source unquestionably is a good idea, but is it just me or have the editor's knees been getting a much better workout over the past couple of months?

Based on my understandings of the problem, just looking at the current YRO frontpage, two of the last four stories have blurbs that are just plain wrong ("Courts Overturn FCC - Return of the Monopoly?", "Do You Have A License For Those Facts?" (my debunking and I'm a certified IP wonk). One of the others ("MSN Search Blocking Results For XFree86?") didn't really have enough data to prove or disprove (so it's probably not worth the 868 comments it attracted).

Now this article, where I think the blurb is deceptive enough to constitute being "wrong".

Slashdot editors, you are getting sloppy and going from moderate benefit (at least it provided some reasonably centralized source of information) to positive menace. Please, either spend more time digging into these stories, or stop posting the blurbs. You can disclaim responsibility for the accuracy of the stories until you're blue in the face, but the fact is that posting does constitute some degree of approval, since there is a selection process.

This is an intervention. Please stop damaging our cause. You're marginalizing all of us who are legitimately concerned about the way things are going when you post so much obviously wrong stuff under the guise of "being on our side".

(At least do us the courtesy of starting to shill for the RIAA and MPAA if you don't want to be bothered with improving your accuracy.)

And so far, no one is complaining. So sad.

Are you sure nobody is complaining? Sometimes, people don't "complain", they just silently change their purchasing/consuming habits. Haven't you seen the stories on Slashdot where people are spending time on the web or with video games, taking the time out of their television viewing?

That is even better than complaining.

DiVX, the Circuit City self-destructing DVD technology, in the end wasn't killed by geek complaints. It was killed by people who didn't buy it. (Sometimes, the "sheeple" aren't. "Sheeple" is mostly a term for feeling yourself superior anyhow, but I digress....) DVDs, IMHO, have already crossed the line of what people will tolerate, as evidenced by being forced to back down from forced previews to allowing people to skip them. Don't expect them to get any worse, or if they do, expect rapid punishment exacted on the offending studio by the market.

I'd not bet on it yet but it is a perfectly plausible outcome that by 2006 or 2007, no broadcaster will use the flag, because they can't afford the viewership loss! PVRs aren't going away over the next year. The Internet isn't going away. Video games certainly aren't going away. The optimal time for TV to pull this shit was about four years ago; now too many people have tasted the "forbidden fruit" of interactive media, especially PVRs, and many of them are already choosing to decrease their TV usage, before the TV industry implements the squeezing! (If you've got the disposable funds, buy your representatives a TiVo; that donation will probably have a greater effect then anything else you could do with the money.)

Oh, there's valid reason for concern and I still would like to see a lawsuit that labels this as unconstutitional restriction on our speech, and personally I find attempts to control viewers who aren't sharing effectively unethical. The fight should be fought... but I'm pretty sure that in this arena, we've already won. The TV industry would like to think otherwise, but they are, in the end, dispensible now. Viable alternatives exist and most of them are one-way transitions for the people who try them; the television's only choice now is between declining slowly and maintaining a real but smaller existance, or throwing a hissy fit until we starve them as a society. (No laws necessary; we can't be forced to watch TV barring a sudden UK-like tax law.)

Does anyone have a link to the real bill?

I want to examine it for the feasibility of placing my address and phone number into such a database, possibility together with other people (to reach some "size" criterion), and claim that since the facts in this database are copyrighted, nobody may use them against my(/our) will.

As the copyright laws get more and more snarled, it may get more and more messy, but that means there will be more and more opportunities to do GPL-style judo against the "status quo", using their own restrictive regimes against them.

Now that the rush on this article has passed I don't feel too bad announcing it; don't care to hype it especially as it's not released yet. I'm working on an outliner called Iron Lute, written in Python/Tk.

For an outliner moving a paragraph up is a very basic operation. I prefer writing essays in outliners, but there isn't a useful one for Linux, except maybe JOE.

I think the current keyboard shortcut is actually "CTRL-Up" ;-)

It's not like Bud is handing over your drinking habits to the US gov't,

Wanna take bets on that? And would you like to take the same bet five years from now?

Privacy-sensitive information is almost always innocent in the hands that collected it, but it is valid to be concerned about where that information will end up.

And while the "terrorism" angle here is probably not terribly likely (though rest assured such data will be processed and evaluated for whether it indicates terrorism), but now that the information is collected, I could see someone getting the bright idea of passing it all on to the law for use in marking who is buying a lot of beer, which can be used in many ways.

Concern about privacy is concern about the flow of information, and every time a new "flow" is created there are valid concerns. Does it really hurt that Budweiser knows? Probably not. But who will they tell? That is a valid concern that can't just be waved away.

(And of course, in isolation, this is a small issue. But this isn't in isolation, it's one small part of a massive trend. That doesn't make it less interesting, it makes it more interesting, because the value of all this information multiplies as it is added together.)

Uh-uh, no dancing on me. I was clearly criticizing your last phrase, which I quote: All it does it remove the mask of civility and democracy from what is ***IMHO*** an increasingly tyrannical power.

Survival isn't tyranny.

Support Human Justice for Human Beings.

This story is part of a larger pattern, where law enforcement thinks it can farm its job out to machines. DRM is another instance of the exact same bad idea.

But machines enforce a machine version of the law. We are human. We need fuzziness, and we need the expense of prosecution, as well. (See my linked essay for a justification of that second clause.) This is a feature of the law, not a bug!

What do you do when the machine gets a false positive? Or your life depending on going somewhere right now? Is the state going to take responsibility for the extra 30 it took to get someone to the hospital while they are having a heart attack, or on the verge of a potentially life-threatening birth??

Machines and law enforcement do not go together!

I discuss why we need a new form of IP protection here. None of the existing models quite work, but taken as a whole, protecting "privacy sensitive information" does fit right into our current IP domain fairly cleanly; you need to recombine various aspects of the other domains but you don't need anything truly new, so it's hardly asking for a lot to protect private information. (I also cleanly define what I mean by "privacy sensitive information".)

I discuss why we need a new form of IP protection here. None of the existing models quite work, but taken as a whole, protecting "privacy sensitive information" does fit right into our current IP domain fairly cleanly; you need to recombine various aspects of the other domains but you don't need anything truly new, so it's hardly asking for a lot to protect private information. (I also cleanly define what I mean by "privacy sensitive information".)

Well, I may not have made it into the BBC but my attack is much more effective and much, much harder to defend against: Bayes Attack Report.

It even counters the "personalization" quality of Bayes filters by finding the "common core" of personalization that we all share.

Fortunately, spammers continue to be too stupid to understand this attack. Last time I posted this on Slashdot I got joe jobbed, because apparently it's easier to do that then to actually figure out what I was talking about.

In summary, I wouldn't worry about your Bayes filters for a while: While they are attackable, spammers are too stupid to understand the attacks. (My article has been posted for over a year.) Thank goodness, sort of. (This will eventually be a temporary situation... but I see no particular evidence that the breakthrough will happen anytime soon.)

Well, I may not have made it into the BBC but my attack is much more effective and much, much harder to defend against: Bayes Attack Report.

It even counters the "personalization" quality of Bayes filters by finding the "common core" of personalization that we all share.

Fortunately, spammers continue to be too stupid to understand this attack. Last time I posted this on Slashdot I got joe jobbed, because apparently it's easier to do that then to actually figure out what I was talking about.

In summary, I wouldn't worry about your Bayes filters for a while: While they are attackable, spammers are too stupid to understand the attacks. (My article has been posted for over a year.) Thank goodness, sort of. (This will eventually be a temporary situation... but I see no particular evidence that the breakthrough will happen anytime soon.)

CoSource does this but doesn't have any means for the customer to check whether progress is being made (although they define a third party to judge when the project is completed). And this is where XP comes in: through UserStories, UnitTest s and ContinuousIntegration the customer can always check progress. Plus after each 2-4 week iteration they can terminate the project and only pay for the work done to that point.

XP would not be enforced, can't anyway, but the intention is to offer tools which allow the customer and developers to a) communicate and share ideas, b) allow the customer to see whether progress is being made and c) both sides to check the quality. Tools should not be forced upon projects, however, customers would have the right to define which tools should be used for a project (after all they sponsor the projects). However, to a certain extent, a project should be given time to find it's own tools of choice.

Benefits for customers:

1. Many potential customers can combine forces and allow a product to be dev

Well, "create a similar work of your own" is a bit fuzzy; if it's close enough it becomes a "derivative work", but that's handled tolerably well in copyright law.

It's interesting to note that software is already treated like the text of a book; software is the only thing I know of covered by both patents and copyright. Is anybody surprised the system is unbalanced as a result?

The patent system and the copyright system were never designed to interact; of course this is only one small example of the general problem of previously seperate domains starting to interact thanks to the Internet.

Well, "create a similar work of your own" is a bit fuzzy; if it's close enough it becomes a "derivative work", but that's handled tolerably well in copyright law.

It's interesting to note that software is already treated like the text of a book; software is the only thing I know of covered by both patents and copyright. Is anybody surprised the system is unbalanced as a result?

The patent system and the copyright system were never designed to interact; of course this is only one small example of the general problem of previously seperate domains starting to interact thanks to the Internet.

What will mining the moon do to things like tides here on Earth?

Please stop worrying about this. The Moon's mass is a really big number.

Mining the moon will have precisely no measureable effect on tides on the Earth. The quadrillions of tons that we'd have to move off-planet just isn't going to happen; by the time we have a power source to do that, we either won't want to, or we won't care.

If we all started digging with shovels (or hell, construction equipment, it doesn't matter) for the rest of our lives and the shoveled dirt was magically removed from Earth, it would not be a significant amount of the mass of the Earth before we all died. (It would bother us because we'd first get to the part of the planet we most like, the very surface. But percentage wise, it's insignificant.)

Do you have evidence to back that assertion? In my case (I know it's just me), ham basically means either refering to my open-source projects or written in French (even then spambayes does a good job at rejecting French spam).

Language is often a big indicator; since spam is aimed at a particular langauge group I don't consider it much. The fact my filter marks Japanese or Korean messages as spam is almost irrelevant, in a way, since I can't read it anyhow and it's easily dismissed.

But there's this common misconception that inside the spam filter it just looks for the three or four key words that mark "your" ham to the exclusion of all else. In reality there are big cues that are indepedent of "personalization"; see the Interesting Results section. Would you have guessed that "I'm" is such a non-spam indicator?

There's a strong core of hamminess that will be common to nearly everybody. (Also clarifies your point 1.)

2) Lack of "training data" for them We have lots of data from which we can learn how to avoid spam, but they have very little data which they can use to "train" anti-filter techniques.

Well, I sure didn't have any trouble finding ham for my training! Collecting 20,000 ham messages took me about 15 minutes; it took me longer to process them then find them. If I were a dedicated spammer I could collect a million in a couple of days, depending on how diverse a selection I want to acquire. One "weakness" of my experiment is the limited selection I acquired, but that's easily fixed and I think based on my experience it's already plenty diverse.

3) They have to get the main message through. Eventually, if you can detect all forms (that remains to be seen) of the word "Viagra", they simply can't use that word in their email anymore (assuming I've got no ham containing that word).

Yes and no. I already acknoleged in my post that without "cheating", you can't really get a sex spam through. (Though you'll have a hard time getting a real sex email through, too, if that is a normal email for you.)

But I "played fair"... spammers don't have to. They can craft a highly hammy message and append it to their spam. Even if your filter stop it, it poisons the filter. The filter writers can then take countermeasures against that, but you're back to an arms race and that's not a gain over what we had before the Bayesian filters.

4) Because each spam message is different, they have to find a cost-effective way to make each of them immune to filters. That's not easy either.

Well, creating a highly hammy message and appending any short spam to it they want ought to work. That's not too expensive.

Even so, you're sending a lot of people the same message for so little money it boggles the mind. Raising the bar for writing a message a little won't stop the flow, because it amortizes across all copies of the message sent too well. You need to raise cost per message or a number of other approaches.

I don't think spammers are that dumb either.

I used to not think so, and I had bet that Bayesian would already be useless by now. But I now realize that I have overestimated them by a significant margin. Like I said, I know some of them have read that piece. I get hits for "bypassing Bayesian filters" nearly every week from Google. I've gotten several requests for source code to my program, and I wager not all of them were legitimately academic. (Fortunately, I've lost it through a hard drive crash, but I consider my results still scientifically valid as at least in my opinion, I've given enough information to replicate my results.)

But they still haven't progressed past stupid o.b.f.u.s.c.a.t.i.o.n techniques (no, that won't get past Bayesian) and purely random words (neither will that) very far. (Remember, which a lot of people seem to miss when they read my piece, I respect Bayesian

The real problem will be when the spammers finally figure out how to deliberately poison the Bayesian filters. So far they're using more-or-less random words, but that won't really work against Bayesian; it can tolerate that.

However, what constitutes "non-spam" is not as unique as most people think, as I've examined here. If they figure out how to deliberately put in hammy words, Bayesian will fall.

I feel OK posting this because I freely admit to this point I've overestimated them; I'm sure spammers have read that piece, and to date they have been too stupid to figure out what I said in plain English. But sooner or later one of them is going to figure out.

There's a strong core of "ham" that is "ham" for everybody, and sooner or later they're going to start abusing that.

And if I may forstall one objection... "But you don't understand Bayesian, it's [awesome for some reason and can't be beat ever, by anybody]" - I'll listen when you've actually written a program to examine filters yourself, OK? I understand it pretty damn well. It'll take more then bald assertions to convince me I'm wrong, I've done actual research, in the original sense of the word.

About two years ago [now more like three], I took Statistics in college. The second most interesting part of the course was the industrial manufacturing focus, specifically quality control.

Even more specifically, reliable ways to determine how much quality you can take out of the product and still meet some specification with some good probability....

On the other hand, these are the techniques used to reliably manufacture a device that will fail in 2 years, plus or minus 3 months, with 50% probability. This is the source of the flood of cheap garbage that has really only been gaining steam in the past four or five years; yes, in the 80s and 90s people were decrying "consumerism" but it's gotten several times worse as some of these techniques become refined and universally applied.

The upshot of all of this is yes, the quality of consumer electronics has been steadily declining for a decade or two now, along with everything else that comes off the factory floor, and the better the statistical techniques get, the closer to the consumer rejection threshold this stuff will get.