Slashdot Mirror

Lumpish Scholar writes: "Slashdot already reported Looking Glass Studios (creators of Thief, Thief II, and other games) declared bankruptcy. The irony was, their publisher, Eidos Interactive, was pumping all their money into Ion Storm's effort to finish Daikatana. Now, according to this story in Salon, Eidos has bought the rights to Thief III (presumably an asset when Looking Glass was dissolved) and has handed the work over to Ion Storm (under the helm of Warren Spector, not Daikatana's John Romero). Small world, innit?" Wow, that's cool. This should happen more often, I think.

kemokid writes: "At last, an example of what Courtney Love was talking about. Fairtunes is a site set up to allow users to tip musicians directly. You can read the Music Dish news story about it." $269 and change donated so far, I'm interested to see where this one goes.

owillis asks: "Reading this Salon article on file sharing programmers who are suspending or ending work on their projects due to the legal climate post-Napster, I wonder what the liabilty is for people who work on open source software. Does open source protect the creators from these laws or is it fair game?" We've discussed this before but it would be interesting to note if your opinions have changed after the Napster ruling. However it bothers me that in today's legal climate, it is easier to blame the creator of the tool rather than the users who use them illegally.

rombouts noted that Salon has a good piece on the liability of programmers. From Napster, to Freenet, to DeCSS, on down. If you're scared by any of this, you should be. There are a lot of cases out there right now that are gonna change the world, and folks, it could go either way.

A reader writes "Salon has an interesting interview with one of the brains behind SDMI. Watermarks in music? Talal Shamoon, a key technologist for the SDMI, says that he's found the key to protecting copyrighted tunes."

The reaction to the turning off of Napster's servers has been fast and furious. Whether you feel that unauthorized copying of music is a basic human right, the moral equivalent of "sharing" for yourself merchandise from Tower Records' loading dock, or somewhere in the fuzzy gray area between, you should at least know how the decision to turn off Napster for the moment has focused the various public reactions. Read on to see just a sampling of the numerous stories throughout the media related to this story.

Point Of Order, Point of Clarification Justin Maurer writes:

"it's come to my attention that a lot of news organisations, and napster themselves, have been twisting words around in this whole napster case. if you'll bear with me for a second, i can try and clear up a little bit of it.

everyone (including napster) keeps saying that the judge ordered napster to be shut down. this is not the case. the judge ordered them to make sure no one is trading copyrighted material, and the result is that napster is telling everyone they've been ordered to shut down. if you'd like, i can provide sources for this information, though i'm going to bed now :)"

[Note from timothy: Here is a link to the Preliminary Injunction Brief (pdf file) from the RIAA site; given the way Napster works, though, it does seem like its grant would have effect of shutting all but the chatroom, doesn't it?]

Are Bassists Smarter Than Drummers? JHancock17 reminds anyone who hasn't to read Courtney Love's speech as reprinted by Salon a while back, and res0 points to this ABC News interview with Chuck D. in which the P.E. frontman continues his eloquent tirade against the music industry as a whole. But Mr. D and Ms. Love have been famous outspoken in favor of Napster and electronic music exchange for a while: Now those stalwarts are joined by another big name. srcosmo writes "Radiohead have become the first British band to condemn the injunction against Napster. Their bassist, Colin Greenwood, showed enthusiasm for the availability of Napsterized live recordings, saying "We have just finished a tour, we played in Barcelona, the next day the entire performance was up on Napster and three weeks later when we got to play in Israel the audience knew the words to all the new songs and it was wonderful." An interesting change from the Metallica look at things- hopefully more artists will follow their lead."

Follow Your Conscience: What You Can Do cLn writes "Napster has been shut down and irc mp3 channels are being flooded by desperate mp3 junkies. What they don't know is that there are ways around this small problem. Napigator is a windows program that'll help the napster client connect to other servers other than the few it trys. Tripnosis works alot like napster, but you can download other files (zip, arj, rar, mov, avi, mpeg, jpg, gif, ect...), you can also search through online users files using the sites search engine."

And DrEldarion points to "http://www.kripto.org/blocks/, "an anonymous distributed file transfer system designed for people with permanent 'always on' Internet connections;" good explanation on the site itself of how it differs from other such systems.

Mad Ross (Ross McKillop) writes "Everyone now knows of the recent decision about napster's future. This is unfortunate and many still agree unreasonable but I am attempting to gather all the open source clients and alternative servers in one place and create an organised network of replacement napster servers... If anyone is interested in helping by...

• contributing a client
• helping as a server operator
• running a napster server
• etc...

or just want's to be kept informed about what is happening then please please eMail napsterlives@madross.co.uk or visit madross.co.uk -- there should be napster related pages there by the time you read this.

What Else You Can Do: Alert The Media (Mavens) battery841 writes "In light of Napster getting an injunction against it by the courts, someone decided to register riaaboycott.org and setup a petition. You sign the petition, and once it's gotten enough signatures, it's going to be sent to numerous sources, including Napster and the RIAA." And as CmdrTaco posted the other day, there are boycotts in the air.

Another Angle On The Big Picture: Danse writes "Salon is running an article with reactions from all sorts of people connected to the music industry, Napster, Napster alternatives, etc. It's pretty interesting reading. Everything from the arrogance of Jack Valenti to the apparent cluelessness of Erwin Drake to the insightfulness of Glenn Reynolds to the amazingly short (obviously not written by Lars) comment by Metallica. To sum things up, the industry thinks this is a big win and that they now have a chance to offer consumers music downloads on their own terms. This displays their current lack of understanding of the real problems that users are seeking to remedy with Napster and the other music/file trading options. Napster supporters and alternatives feel that it's a loss for free speech, but that in the long run it will only hurt the record industry as people move to litigation-proof solutions."

The reaction to the turning off of Napster's servers has been fast and furious. Whether you feel that unauthorized copying of music is a basic human right, the moral equivalent of "sharing" for yourself merchandise from Tower Records' loading dock, or somewhere in the fuzzy gray area between, you should at least know how the decision to turn off Napster for the moment has focused the various public reactions. Read on to see just a sampling of the numerous stories throughout the media related to this story.

Point Of Order, Point of Clarification Justin Maurer writes:

"it's come to my attention that a lot of news organisations, and napster themselves, have been twisting words around in this whole napster case. if you'll bear with me for a second, i can try and clear up a little bit of it.

everyone (including napster) keeps saying that the judge ordered napster to be shut down. this is not the case. the judge ordered them to make sure no one is trading copyrighted material, and the result is that napster is telling everyone they've been ordered to shut down. if you'd like, i can provide sources for this information, though i'm going to bed now :)"

[Note from timothy: Here is a link to the Preliminary Injunction Brief (pdf file) from the RIAA site; given the way Napster works, though, it does seem like its grant would have effect of shutting all but the chatroom, doesn't it?]

Are Bassists Smarter Than Drummers? JHancock17 reminds anyone who hasn't to read Courtney Love's speech as reprinted by Salon a while back, and res0 points to this ABC News interview with Chuck D. in which the P.E. frontman continues his eloquent tirade against the music industry as a whole. But Mr. D and Ms. Love have been famous outspoken in favor of Napster and electronic music exchange for a while: Now those stalwarts are joined by another big name. srcosmo writes "Radiohead have become the first British band to condemn the injunction against Napster. Their bassist, Colin Greenwood, showed enthusiasm for the availability of Napsterized live recordings, saying "We have just finished a tour, we played in Barcelona, the next day the entire performance was up on Napster and three weeks later when we got to play in Israel the audience knew the words to all the new songs and it was wonderful." An interesting change from the Metallica look at things- hopefully more artists will follow their lead."

Follow Your Conscience: What You Can Do cLn writes "Napster has been shut down and irc mp3 channels are being flooded by desperate mp3 junkies. What they don't know is that there are ways around this small problem. Napigator is a windows program that'll help the napster client connect to other servers other than the few it trys. Tripnosis works alot like napster, but you can download other files (zip, arj, rar, mov, avi, mpeg, jpg, gif, ect...), you can also search through online users files using the sites search engine."

And DrEldarion points to "http://www.kripto.org/blocks/, "an anonymous distributed file transfer system designed for people with permanent 'always on' Internet connections;" good explanation on the site itself of how it differs from other such systems.

Mad Ross (Ross McKillop) writes "Everyone now knows of the recent decision about napster's future. This is unfortunate and many still agree unreasonable but I am attempting to gather all the open source clients and alternative servers in one place and create an organised network of replacement napster servers... If anyone is interested in helping by...

• contributing a client
• helping as a server operator
• running a napster server
• etc...

or just want's to be kept informed about what is happening then please please eMail napsterlives@madross.co.uk or visit madross.co.uk -- there should be napster related pages there by the time you read this.

What Else You Can Do: Alert The Media (Mavens) battery841 writes "In light of Napster getting an injunction against it by the courts, someone decided to register riaaboycott.org and setup a petition. You sign the petition, and once it's gotten enough signatures, it's going to be sent to numerous sources, including Napster and the RIAA." And as CmdrTaco posted the other day, there are boycotts in the air.

Another Angle On The Big Picture: Danse writes "Salon is running an article with reactions from all sorts of people connected to the music industry, Napster, Napster alternatives, etc. It's pretty interesting reading. Everything from the arrogance of Jack Valenti to the apparent cluelessness of Erwin Drake to the insightfulness of Glenn Reynolds to the amazingly short (obviously not written by Lars) comment by Metallica. To sum things up, the industry thinks this is a big win and that they now have a chance to offer consumers music downloads on their own terms. This displays their current lack of understanding of the real problems that users are seeking to remedy with Napster and the other music/file trading options. Napster supporters and alternatives feel that it's a loss for free speech, but that in the long run it will only hurt the record industry as people move to litigation-proof solutions."

The reaction to the turning off of Napster's servers has been fast and furious. Whether you feel that unauthorized copying of music is a basic human right, the moral equivalent of "sharing" for yourself merchandise from Tower Records' loading dock, or somewhere in the fuzzy gray area between, you should at least know how the decision to turn off Napster for the moment has focused the various public reactions. Read on to see just a sampling of the numerous stories throughout the media related to this story.

Point Of Order, Point of Clarification Justin Maurer writes:

"it's come to my attention that a lot of news organisations, and napster themselves, have been twisting words around in this whole napster case. if you'll bear with me for a second, i can try and clear up a little bit of it.

everyone (including napster) keeps saying that the judge ordered napster to be shut down. this is not the case. the judge ordered them to make sure no one is trading copyrighted material, and the result is that napster is telling everyone they've been ordered to shut down. if you'd like, i can provide sources for this information, though i'm going to bed now :)"

[Note from timothy: Here is a link to the Preliminary Injunction Brief (pdf file) from the RIAA site; given the way Napster works, though, it does seem like its grant would have effect of shutting all but the chatroom, doesn't it?]

Are Bassists Smarter Than Drummers? JHancock17 reminds anyone who hasn't to read Courtney Love's speech as reprinted by Salon a while back, and res0 points to this ABC News interview with Chuck D. in which the P.E. frontman continues his eloquent tirade against the music industry as a whole. But Mr. D and Ms. Love have been famous outspoken in favor of Napster and electronic music exchange for a while: Now those stalwarts are joined by another big name. srcosmo writes "Radiohead have become the first British band to condemn the injunction against Napster. Their bassist, Colin Greenwood, showed enthusiasm for the availability of Napsterized live recordings, saying "We have just finished a tour, we played in Barcelona, the next day the entire performance was up on Napster and three weeks later when we got to play in Israel the audience knew the words to all the new songs and it was wonderful." An interesting change from the Metallica look at things- hopefully more artists will follow their lead."

Follow Your Conscience: What You Can Do cLn writes "Napster has been shut down and irc mp3 channels are being flooded by desperate mp3 junkies. What they don't know is that there are ways around this small problem. Napigator is a windows program that'll help the napster client connect to other servers other than the few it trys. Tripnosis works alot like napster, but you can download other files (zip, arj, rar, mov, avi, mpeg, jpg, gif, ect...), you can also search through online users files using the sites search engine."

And DrEldarion points to "http://www.kripto.org/blocks/, "an anonymous distributed file transfer system designed for people with permanent 'always on' Internet connections;" good explanation on the site itself of how it differs from other such systems.

Mad Ross (Ross McKillop) writes "Everyone now knows of the recent decision about napster's future. This is unfortunate and many still agree unreasonable but I am attempting to gather all the open source clients and alternative servers in one place and create an organised network of replacement napster servers... If anyone is interested in helping by...

• contributing a client
• helping as a server operator
• running a napster server
• etc...

or just want's to be kept informed about what is happening then please please eMail napsterlives@madross.co.uk or visit madross.co.uk -- there should be napster related pages there by the time you read this.

What Else You Can Do: Alert The Media (Mavens) battery841 writes "In light of Napster getting an injunction against it by the courts, someone decided to register riaaboycott.org and setup a petition. You sign the petition, and once it's gotten enough signatures, it's going to be sent to numerous sources, including Napster and the RIAA." And as CmdrTaco posted the other day, there are boycotts in the air.

Another Angle On The Big Picture: Danse writes "Salon is running an article with reactions from all sorts of people connected to the music industry, Napster, Napster alternatives, etc. It's pretty interesting reading. Everything from the arrogance of Jack Valenti to the apparent cluelessness of Erwin Drake to the insightfulness of Glenn Reynolds to the amazingly short (obviously not written by Lars) comment by Metallica. To sum things up, the industry thinks this is a big win and that they now have a chance to offer consumers music downloads on their own terms. This displays their current lack of understanding of the real problems that users are seeking to remedy with Napster and the other music/file trading options. Napster supporters and alternatives feel that it's a loss for free speech, but that in the long run it will only hurt the record industry as people move to litigation-proof solutions."

Stephen King is conducting a fiendish experiment. He - not his publisher - is putting the first installment of a novel online today, and then waiting to see how many people will pay a dollar for the download. The second part goes online next month, and then when it comes time to upload the third part, King will only release it if enough people have paid for the first two. This is the first high-profile test of a promising artistic compensation algorithm in the post-copyright world -- and when it fails, don't give up on it.

"The average writer is really more interested in writing than the transaction part of the process."
-- Jack Romanos, President/COO of Simon & Schuster, quoted in NYT

"We're confident that publishers add enough value to the process that authors are still going to want to use them."
-- Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, quoted by AP

"My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare."
-- Stephen King

"Looks like the future of publishing to me."
-- Bruce Schneier

We've had a few people submit this news item, describing it as "shareware." It's not. This is shareware with a bite attached, something else entirely. What King is doing is a real-world test of the Street Performer's Protocol.

The SPP is a proposal for artists to make money without retaining any control over their work (since, on the net, copyright is rapidly being rendered irrelevant). Here's the paper by Kelsey and Schneier if you'd like to get all the technical details.

But the bottom line is that Stephen King is never going to have to publish the end of his novel.

Readers aren't going to send in a flood of cash and money orders (!) -- that's a given -- envelopes and addresses are a hassle. Luckily for him, he's brokered a deal with Amazon to accept credit cards, which is pretty sweet considering that most places won't even look at $1 credit card charges -- too much overhead. (My guess would be that Amazon is doing this as a loss leader to get the attention and signups. That won't work forever. Amazon PR didn't return my phone call by press time.)

But the real problem is that King demands that 75% of his readers be honest. That'll never happen.

Kelsey and Schneier's original SPP proposed thoughtfully that authors ask for a flat fee: say, $100,000 for a novel. If the majority of an author's readers never pay, that's fine: as long as the remaining minority is large enough (or rich enough) to collectively make the payment. (If not enough pay, the money stays in escrow and then reverts to its owners.)

King's terms make the question one of relative loyalty, not absolute popularity. He's not offering a transaction with his readers -- he's testing them. And the test is guaranteed to fail.

What he's proposing is a Prisoner's Dilemma played between thousands of people. Because of the large nature of the game, the actual statistical "profit" returned by sending in your dollar is a tiny fraction of the enjoyment you'd get from reading the third installment that King would post. Your payoff matrix looks like:

Novel Released Novel Not Released Cooperate
(pay $1) Get $10 reading enjoyment for $1, profit: $9 $-1 Defect
(pay $0) Get $10 reading enjoyment for free, profit: $10 $0

No matter what happens, you do better by not sending in your dollar. (It's fair to ignore the infinitesimal chance that your single dollar will be the one to hit the 75% mark.)

Of course there are other considerations (can you sleep at night knowing you cheated Stephen King out of a dollar?) but for the most part, people will weigh these options and decide they're not going to pay.

And once you start thinking that you're not going to pay, you realize that many others won't either, and it starts to look even more like throwing money down a drain. Vicious cycle.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is only interesting if the same players play together over and over. What we have here is a "one-shot" game, and in such a game the only rational strategy is to defect. Unfortunately, if everyone behaves rationally, we all merely break even (and the novel never comes out); if only we were a little more irrational we'd all make a profit of nine dollars - or however much King's story was worth to us.

Douglas Hofstadter ran an experiment for Scientific American in June 1983, asking twenty friends to play a similar one-shot Dilemma. Even though Hofstadter's was profit-only, no chance of losing money, and even though participants knew their choices would be reported in a national magazine, his cooperation rate was only 30%.

I predict King's return rate will be something like 15%. Maybe it will go as much as twice as high, thanks to his deal with Amazon to let people use credit cards -- much more convenient.

The disappointing thing is that two months from now he's going to announce that the experiment has failed and then either drop the novel, or keep writing it out of the kindness of his heart. Either way, the press is going to report that this new distribution method is a crock. Which is a shame because it only needs to be done right.

First of all, the percentage thing needs to go. King doesn't write for the satisfaction of knowing that he has honest readers. He writes to make money.

I suspect King is too used to thinking in terms of royalties, hoping for a good-sized slice of those unpredictably large pies he bakes. He might not know which novel will be the runaway best-seller that will make ten times the money he'd hoped for.

My advice to him would be to relax; don't try to look for the gravy train. You're on the internet now, that won't work. Set a price for your time -- an obscenely high price, to be sure, you're one of the world's most popular writers -- and be content with what you get. When contributions hit that number, release the book.

Second, invite readers to contribute as much as they like toward the novel. For some, a dollar; for real fans, ten dollars or more. Let us decide how much it's worth to us.

Third, hold contributions in escrow until the novel is released, and if the limit is not reached by a certain time, give us our money back. As a contributor, this makes my cost negligible, and changes my payoff matrix to, let's say...

Price Reached Price Not Reached Cooperate
(pay $3) Get $10 reading enjoyment for $3, profit: $7 Get my $3 back: $0 Defect
(pay $0) Get $10 reading enjoyment for free, profit: $10 $0

This way, there's no risk; the worst-case scenario is that I lose some time and energy at the mailbox. It's a win-win situation, and I'm much more likely to play.

If Stephen King wants to craft a real nightmare for Big Publishing, that's the plot he needs to use.

(P.S. If you're interested in reading more about the Prisoner's Dilemma, I've assembled a few references -- and thoughts -- at thedilemma.org. See in particular Hofstadter, pp. 740ff., re the one-shot PD.)

(P.P.S. Updated 90 minutes later. I had this link to "the download" up in the top paragraph, but took it out because some people didn't realize it led straight to the pay-me-a-dollar PDF file. Sorry; that's why the link is down here now. If you read it and want to pay your dollar, you can probably figure out to visit stephenking.com, eh?)

RomulusNR writes: "Salon has a story and review on "I Want To Blow Up Silicon Valley", a new indie film by a pre-tech-explosion SV resident. The place was a quiet backwoods small town when he was a kid; he comes back to find his home worth $2 million, his childhood hangouts filled with uber-wired techies, and all the unique local towns becoming one big bland electronic megalopolis."

RomulusNR writes: "Salon has a story and review on "I Want To Blow Up Silicon Valley", a new indie film by a pre-tech-explosion SV resident. The place was a quiet backwoods small town when he was a kid; he comes back to find his home worth $2 million, his childhood hangouts filled with uber-wired techies, and all the unique local towns becoming one big bland electronic megalopolis."

PedroReish writes "Here's the first review of X-Men: The Movie, oddly enough it's from Daily Radar. While you're at it, have a peek at Senator Kelly's "Stop the X-Men" commercial (sorry, it's Quicktime) over at Mutant Watch.If you can't get enough, browse over to Salon, they've got a piece on The queer world of the X-Men and a nice bio on Stan Lee, father of the X-Men and some of Marvel's better superheroes. " This is the movie I've been waiting for this summer. I can't wait for friday!

PedroReish writes "Here's the first review of X-Men: The Movie, oddly enough it's from Daily Radar. While you're at it, have a peek at Senator Kelly's "Stop the X-Men" commercial (sorry, it's Quicktime) over at Mutant Watch.If you can't get enough, browse over to Salon, they've got a piece on The queer world of the X-Men and a nice bio on Stan Lee, father of the X-Men and some of Marvel's better superheroes. " This is the movie I've been waiting for this summer. I can't wait for friday!

PedroReish writes "Here's the first review of X-Men: The Movie, oddly enough it's from Daily Radar. While you're at it, have a peek at Senator Kelly's "Stop the X-Men" commercial (sorry, it's Quicktime) over at Mutant Watch.If you can't get enough, browse over to Salon, they've got a piece on The queer world of the X-Men and a nice bio on Stan Lee, father of the X-Men and some of Marvel's better superheroes. " This is the movie I've been waiting for this summer. I can't wait for friday!

Afterimage writes: "This article at Salon from the AP mentions several big name firms are adding chief privacy officers to their executive staffs. The general take is that these new folks are to retain customers by not infringing on personal information. I think the verdict is still out on exactly what this means, but hopefully, it's the avoidance of another DoubleClick or Toysmart.com debacle."

Afterimage writes: "This article at Salon from the AP mentions several big name firms are adding chief privacy officers to their executive staffs. The general take is that these new folks are to retain customers by not infringing on personal information. I think the verdict is still out on exactly what this means, but hopefully, it's the avoidance of another DoubleClick or Toysmart.com debacle."

jsa writes "Salon has released Chapter 2, part 2 of the Free Software Project Book" It's by Andrew Leonard again. He's been busy, it's a long one, but there's lots of cool parts that you probably don't know about (including a gratuitous pinball reference ;)

Ricofencer asks: "After reading Courtney Love's rant a thought occurred to me. In her speech, Courtney makes reference to a change in copyright law that makes recorded music works for hire. This transfers the copyright to the record label, away from the artist. Yet, Metallica's actions against Napster were based upon the premise that their copyrights were violated. If their works were covered by the new law, doesn't that mean that they do not in fact have any copyrights regarding their recorded works? How would that affect the demands they made of Napster? Can Metallica, and now Dr. Dre make demands of Napster based on copyrights they think they may have but may legally be held by their record labels? Or do Metallica and Dr. Dre actually hold the copyrights of their recorded works? (I don't know, I don't have a Metallica album at hand to examine)" If this is true, this would put the Napster suits (and Metallica's own claims) in an interesting light, wouldn't it? However, even if Metallica and Dre no longer retain the copyrights to their work don't they, as the original performers, have the right to act in their record companies' behalf?

Weeden writes: "Here is a Salon article that wants to know why computers have to make so much noise. They think if the iMac can be quiet, why can't everyone else? Just do what I do and turn on some music, that makes the noise go away!" Quiet is certainly a concern for all-day computer users; I know I'd pay quite a bit more for a nice ATX case with a massive heat sink, if that were practical. If you need quiet now (and like the Salon writer, aren't willing to switch to an iMac) you might also want to check out this Ask Slashdot on the same topic.

Weeden writes: "Here is a Salon article that wants to know why computers have to make so much noise. They think if the iMac can be quiet, why can't everyone else? Just do what I do and turn on some music, that makes the noise go away!" Quiet is certainly a concern for all-day computer users; I know I'd pay quite a bit more for a nice ATX case with a massive heat sink, if that were practical. If you need quiet now (and like the Salon writer, aren't willing to switch to an iMac) you might also want to check out this Ask Slashdot on the same topic.

Yet another company has been caught surreptitiously uploading information from their customers. This time, it was Mattel, who I would have thought would have already reached their "bad PR" quota this year by suing the people who distributed CPHack. But no; they're spying on the children who use their software too, and Simson Garfinkel raises some very important points. A hint for all the /. readers who are handy with a debugger: you want to get your 15 minutes of fame, just figure out what information the DSSagent program is sending and let us know.

An Anonymous Coward wrote in about the Salon article of an unedited transcript of Courtney Love's speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference. Gnutella News wrote in and told us that Inside Music is running a story about the RIAA uncovering very incriminating internal memos and e-mails between Napster executives that the RIAA says is "proof that the service represents a haven for music piracy and should be closed immediately". Also, head on over to Camp Chaos for the latest flash cartoons about Napster, including one featuring the real Motley Crue. There's also a parody over at Everything2 to check out. Also here is a Wall Street article about the copyright office and the age of the Internet.

An Anonymous Coward wrote in about the Salon article of an unedited transcript of Courtney Love's speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference. Gnutella News wrote in and told us that Inside Music is running a story about the RIAA uncovering very incriminating internal memos and e-mails between Napster executives that the RIAA says is "proof that the service represents a haven for music piracy and should be closed immediately". Also, head on over to Camp Chaos for the latest flash cartoons about Napster, including one featuring the real Motley Crue. There's also a parody over at Everything2 to check out. Also here is a Wall Street article about the copyright office and the age of the Internet.

When you "purchase" software, what do you get? Increasingly, the answer is: nothing. Nothing tangible; no rights; and no resale value. This rant is spurred by Microsoft's changes to its distribution policy for all future editions of Windows. No longer will you receive a CD which is capable of installing the operating system with your new computer - Original Equipment Manufacturers are forbidden to ship you one, even though you just paid ~$100 for the software, and even though the change makes customers less than happy. Meanwhile, Adobe's chairman has the gall to tell us it's our own fault. I take a look at the future of software licensing.

MS's most recent abuses of its customers are just the latest in a series of increasing restrictions. OEM's are no longer permitted to include full-capability Windows disks with new machines - instead, what you'll get is either a disk image on your hard drive or an image on a "recovery CD". The "recovery CD" must be crippled so that it won't run on any hardware except that specific machine.

So what you bought is either some extra bits on your hard drive (sure hope you didn't want to use the full capacity of the drive; sure hope your disk doesn't fail) or a nearly-useless CD which is solely capable of restoring your PC to its original state - you'll have to backup and restore all of your data, reinstall all other software, re-change all settings you've customized, etc., if you ever use that CD. But you're a Microsoft customer [motto: "Your time isn't worth a bucket of warm spit to us"], so get used to it.

If you did something foolish, like swap in a new hard drive, or a new motherboard, well, I'm sorry, but you've lost any ability to restore your Microsoft operating system. And naturally, of course, you won't be able to copy it to another computer - even if you delete it from the first one. You can't sell it, you can't lend it, hell, you can barely use it yourself. Office 2000 with its forced registration procedure is much the same, and we're now getting submissions about this from people who didn't catch stories last year about it. Office 2000 binds itself to your system with the registration in exactly the same way as the "Recovery" CDs must be bound by the OEM to the system they ship.

The main effect of this will be to eliminate the concept of "used software". Software vendors like this; they can sell more retail copies if there's no aftermarket.

Generally, copyrighted works are governed by what is known as the "first sale" doctrine. This means that once the copyright owner has sold the item the first time, they lose all control over it - it can be resold without limitation. This matter originally came up when a book publisher was trying to prevent Macy's from selling books at a discount price. Essentially, the publisher (Scribner and Sons, still in business today) had a nice scheme going where it set "minimum" prices for its books. In fact, the scheme is practically identical to the scheme that music publishers have going today, and that software publishers like Microsoft are now moving to.

A brief quote from one of the cases:

The appellant is the owner of the copyright upon 'The Castaway,' obtained on the 18th day of May, 1904, in conformity to the copyright statutes of the United States. Printed immediately below the copyright notice, on the page in the book following the title page, is inserted the following notice:

The price of this book at retail is $1 net. No dealer is licensed to sell it at a less price, and a sale at a less price will be treated as an infringement of the copyright.

The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "That sounds just like a shrinkwrap license on software! Or it sounds like what the giants of the music industry [Sony, Time-Warner, MCA, Polygram, Bertelsmann and EMI Music] do with their 'Minimum Advertised Price' policies, which has resulted in a class-action suit and an ongoing FTC investigation!" Am I right?

So how did the Court look at this particular issue?

What does the statute mean in granting 'the sole right of vending the same?' Was it intended to create a right which would permit the holder of the copyright to fasten, by notice [210 U.S. 339, 350] in a book or upon one of the articles mentioned within the statute, a restriction upon the subsequent alienation [transfer of property] of the subject-matter of copyright after the owner had parted with the title to one who had acquired full dominion over it and had given a satisfactory price for it? It is not denied that one who has sold a copyrighted article, without restriction, has parted with all right to control the sale of it. The purchaser of a book, once sold by authority of the owner of the copyright, may sell it again, although he could not publish a new edition of it.

Software publishers have this in mind. So they don't actually "sell" anything at all. If you make a contract to license something, the terms can be anything that a court doesn't regard as "unconscionable" - whatever the other party demands. So in fact copyright has almost nothing to do with the "sale" of commercial software products - companies could just as easily license to you software written by, say, the Federal Government (which would be in the public domain) They don't need copyright at all, since the contract alone is sufficient to bind your permitted activities, if the courts say a binding contract has been created.

The idea here is to get away from copyright, because copyright has all those nasty exceptions carved out by the legal system such as the "first sale" doctrine. But if you license something rather than sell it... and if you can cripple it with technology so that regardless of what the law says, the product can't be resold... ahhh, then you're in business!

Why have courts permitted software licensing to usurp copyright? Why do book-title-page-licenses not bind you but back-of-a-software-box-licenses do? Why doesn't the purchase of a copyrighted piece of software entitle you to do just about anything with it except sell copies, just like the purchase of a book does? It's a long story, but basically, I think it's because the first cases to hit the court system looked a lot like standard corporate contract disputes rather than mass-market sales. Individuals have only started purchasing software at retail within the last ten years or so. And now that people have caught on that this is a Bad Thing, we get laws like UCITA, designed to expressly legitimize these sorts of licenses. Remember that UCITA applies to software-hardware combinations as well, so your next PC might have a license agreement applying to the hardware.

But back to what started this rant. Microsoft's licensing. Microsoft has wanted for some years to move to a rental system, where not only do you not actually purchase anything for them, you get to pay for nothing every year. (In fact, they delayed the announcement of it so it wouldn't overlap with the anti-trust decision - might look bad to be simultaneously losing an anti-trust suit and announcing how you were going to get millions of people to rent software from you.) That way they can extract truly maximal profits from their operating system - raise the rents when it seems appropriate, cut sweetheart rental deals with some companies and viciously expensive ones with others, depending on whether or not you testified for the DOJ...

Microsoft has a couple of goals here, you see. Getting shrinkwrap licenses validated by the legal system allows them to control pricing in much the same manner as Scribner and Sons' attempt at book-wrap licensing. And building protective technological measures into their software, such as the OEM system-lock for the operating system or Office 2000's single-system registration procedure, allows them to get around the first sale doctrine - you could sell the item, copyright law says you can, but you can't sell it, because the software won't work for anyone else.

At a minimum, you could donate it to a charity or school when you're no longer using it and get a tax break. But that Windows 2000 Recovery CD or an already-registered Office 2000 CD are just coasters. Microsoft, of course, can cheerfully continue to donate software licenses and take tax write-offs for the full retail price of the software, a strategy which saves them hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes every year at a cost to them of approximately zero. And don't you dare to try to circumvent those controls in order to exercise your legal right to resell the software - that's a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I doubt you want to spend five years in prison.

In a non-monopoly marketplace, the fact these two products are worth a lot less to you than their predecessors would force a reduction in price. Instead, Microsoft raised the prices on both. Lawyers have considered the interplay of contract, copyright, and technological restrictions - here's a paper, here's another - but the time is long past for this issue to be considered by the public.

And that's why the threats of Adobe chairman Warnock are the last straw. Microsoft and all the other familiar names in commercial software have been increasing their restrictions for years. It doesn't have anything to do with piracy; we're

"...going to have a piece of music that will only play on one Walkman. [We're] going to have a piece of software that will only work on one machine. It will provide enormous inconvenience."

regardless of what the fictitious figures of the Business Software Alliance say about copyright infringement. Listen to what Warnock is saying: if only we evil customers didn't make copies of software, Microsoft wouldn't force computer manufacturers to cripple the Windows installed on their machines. Yeah, right. Tell me another one, John.

But Warnock is absolutely right: it's a failure of the general population that is responsible for this licensing mess we're in. The failure is: insufficient regulation of the software industry.

If you buy a car, you are almost certainly protected by state "lemon laws". They were enacted to prevent the abuses that were extremely common, and so you acquired certain minimum rights in the purchase transaction which cannot be waived: if the car breaks down all the time, you can return it and get a refund plus your expenses paid. No matter what the sales contract says. Similarly there are restrictions on just how small the fine print can be, how egregious the interest rate can be, etc. The laws have had a salutory effect on auto sales - dealers are much less likely to try to cheat customers, and manufacturers have incentives to build better-quality cars. It is, in fact, a win-win situation - even though auto manufacturers screamed that laws like these would put them out of business in a week.

We haven't got anything of the sort with software purchases. And like Adobe's chairman just told us, the race to the bottom - who can have the most restrictive licensing, who can gouge the customer the most - is in full swing. It took a long time to get lemon laws enacted across the country, many years of abuses and horror stories, many years of opposition by the automobile manufacturers doing exactly what the software manufacturers are doing now: dumping buckets of cash into Congress. Are we going to learn from our experiences of the past and put some restraints on these abusive restrictions? Are we going to makes software sales into sales, and make software companies stand behind their products? We are, no doubt about it; abuses like these will only be stood for so long. The question is only this: How long will we stand for it?

What do you mean I don't own my software?
Adobe software is owned by Adobe. When you purchase software, you purchase a license to use the application. The use of the software must be in compliance with the End User License Agreement that is included with the software. Misuse of software is punishable by Federal Copyright Law.

-- from http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/antipiracy/main.html

We can fix that, Adobe.

We've been choking on submissions about Napster and MP3 so here's a selection of them: Alexander Burke shared this ZDNet Article about how TVT Records (the fine folks who bring you Snoop Dogg) is getting into the let's-sue-Napster game. Borodir wrote in about how Suzanne Vega influenced the mp3 compression format, and Slashdot reader Napster Online told us about the Salon interview with Napster iCEO Hank Barry. Here's an editorial by John Perry Barlow about the whole Napster mess and a finally a ZD UK story about MP3 pirates going to jail in the future.

It's been a busy week inside the 40-story glass monolith that is Slashdot, as our cleverly disguised agents manipulate reality to conform with their own twisted idea of how things should be. Just the same, in an effort to defuse suspicion by appearing fallible, here is another thimbleful of spin in the form of Slashback: Episode IV.

Leveling mountains back to molehills ... Mitch writes "I have read further in the Borland license agreement. People need to be more careful before posting news. Twisting words or only giving half the facts can cause problems and does most of time. This, in my opinion, was an unfair thing to do to Borland. If anyone looked at the rest of the agreement, it says:

'Nothing in this license statement permits you to derive the source code of files that Borland has provided to you in executable form only, or to reproduce, modify, use, or distribute the source code of such files. You are not, of course, restricted from distributing source code that is entirely your own. Code which you generate with a Borland code generator, such as AppExpert, is considered by Borland to be your code.'" Michael Swindell from Borland wrote with much the same information. Thanks to both for the level-headed clarification.

deet-de-deet-deet deet HAVANA: Steve Arner writes "On May 18, 2000, the Associated Press ('The AP') declared that it would not pursue legal action against the creators of a widely-viewed parody combining images of the goverment?s recent seizure of Elián Gonzalez at gunpoint with sounds from Budweisers popular 'Whazzup?' advertising campaign."

Sneaky little devil. Nik would like you to read this Salon article about BSD. Trust him -- it's an interesting overview. It will make you want to spend more time poring through the BSD Section of Slashdot.

No towel-throwing just yet bork bork bork. Audent writes "There's a nice thank you note on the Dialectizer site saying he's still reviewing his options and to check back regularly". You can read his notice here, and since it's on the rinkworks site, you can even read it in psuedo-Swedish or redneck.

Don't line up for tickets yet ... they're still fixing the odds. emmons writes "Judge Kaplan has ordered that the trial concerning DeCSS' legality under the DMCA be moved from December 5th to July 17th. The order is posted on cryptome.org's website." By that time, the law could say that the moon in made of green cheese until proven otherwise, while forbidding lunar analysis.

Aren't you glad you use ... pine? pq writes "John Markoff at the NYT followed up on the Love bug with this story (no login needed). Apparently it simply faxed itself as text to fax numbers in your Outlook addressbook - an interesting article for the Neal Stephenson 'Life imitates Art' angle." Also nice to know that the NY Times writers are reading Neal Stephenson.

drix was the first to write in with this "Standard fare roots of the BSD/hacker movement piece over at Salon. The picture of the FreeBSD devil guy is pretty cool." This is actually another chapter in Andrew Leonard's Free Software Project online book. Well written, but occasional errors (FreeBSD and BSDI have not merged, for example) cast doubt on some of the facts. Informed comment from people who were there would be appreciated.

drix was the first to write in with this "Standard fare roots of the BSD/hacker movement piece over at Salon. The picture of the FreeBSD devil guy is pretty cool." This is actually another chapter in Andrew Leonard's Free Software Project online book. Well written, but occasional errors (FreeBSD and BSDI have not merged, for example) cast doubt on some of the facts. Informed comment from people who were there would be appreciated.

The mainstream media has followed yesterday's story about Microsoft Asking Slashdot to Remove Comments with several stories. These include one from The Washington Post, Salon, news.com Wired, and Linux Journal. Finally, After Y2k has a comic (important, pecs shown in pixels may be larger than those in real life).

Nick writes: "Salon has an interesting interview with Napster CEO Eileen Richardson. She brings up some good analogies about Napster, mp3 and the music industry." And nevertheless points out that the 9th Circuit Northern District court has ruled that Napster is not protected as a service provider by the DMCA: "Judge Patel's opinion is available in PDF form." Napster hasn't lost the suit yet but they've lost what could have been a valuable legal defense.

citmanual wrote in to tell us about a fantastic article over at Salon about Robert Moog, the creator of the Moog and Minimoog synthesizers.

citmanual wrote in to tell us about a fantastic article over at Salon about Robert Moog, the creator of the Moog and Minimoog synthesizers.

TreeRat sent us a Salon story by Simson Garfinkle about legit companies and spam. Its an interesting piece: it talks mostly about Caldera, but mentions several other offenders. The Spam in my INBOX is somewhere aroung 20-30 a day (mind you most of it is press releases from PR firm mailing lists, and random lists that "helpful" slashdot readers subscribed me to). Thank god for filters. But this is a problem we don't think as much about -- normally we think of spammers as slimeballs in basement sending out a hundred thousand emails advertising 'printer toner sale' or 'hot naked sluts want you' featuring 900 numbers and typos, not legitimate businesses.

Slak asks: "Just wondering if the laws under which the U.S. Government is pursuing the DDoS attacks on Yahoo! and Amazon could be applied to telemarketers. I mean, here we have a group that is using a public network to bother end users. " This is a good point. We now have fledgling laws against unsolicited commercial e-mail. What about unsolicited commercial phone calls? They are both forms of harassment. However, protections in the digital world have caught up and surpassed the legal protections we have in meatspace against such annoying practices. Could such laws be written without becoming Draconian in nature? Updated

I should clarify. When I speak of "commercial" phone and "commercial" e-mail, I mean unsolicited contact from a company with the intention of selling you something. Telemarketing has become a large problem in the past decade and I see the spammer as the digital cousin of the telemarketer. However, we now have protections from SPAM yet no protection from the telemarketer (believe me, I've tried ... there was no way I could get an anonymous call block in my area and most telemarketers will not identify themselves via CallerID).

How does the Denial of Service attack fit into all of this? It may not be "commercial" traffic, but it is unsolicited and dealing with it does consume your precious time to get the problem fixed. It's yet another form of harrassment, albeit a different and malicious form. It's like someone calling you up every five minutes and then hanging up. Sure it's harmless, but what happens if someone is trying to make an important phone call to you and can't get through?

Will laws be written to combat such behavior? Can such laws be written?

I'd be interested in hearing what you think.

Update: 04/19 05:49 by C : CuriousGeorge113 beamed us this little tidbit: "There's a very interesting SPAM article over at Salon.com today. The article talks about a new SPAM law soon to be in front of Congress, why it won't work, why people SPAM, and why ISP's dont bother to sue SPAMers." so it looks like our protections against SPAMers although in-place rather ineffective. This situation bears watching.

Slak asks: "Just wondering if the laws under which the U.S. Government is pursuing the DDoS attacks on Yahoo! and Amazon could be applied to telemarketers. I mean, here we have a group that is using a public network to bother end users. " This is a good point. We now have fledgling laws against unsolicited commercial e-mail. What about unsolicited commercial phone calls? They are both forms of harassment. However, protections in the digital world have caught up and surpassed the legal protections we have in meatspace against such annoying practices. Could such laws be written without becoming Draconian in nature? Updated

I should clarify. When I speak of "commercial" phone and "commercial" e-mail, I mean unsolicited contact from a company with the intention of selling you something. Telemarketing has become a large problem in the past decade and I see the spammer as the digital cousin of the telemarketer. However, we now have protections from SPAM yet no protection from the telemarketer (believe me, I've tried ... there was no way I could get an anonymous call block in my area and most telemarketers will not identify themselves via CallerID).

How does the Denial of Service attack fit into all of this? It may not be "commercial" traffic, but it is unsolicited and dealing with it does consume your precious time to get the problem fixed. It's yet another form of harrassment, albeit a different and malicious form. It's like someone calling you up every five minutes and then hanging up. Sure it's harmless, but what happens if someone is trying to make an important phone call to you and can't get through?

Will laws be written to combat such behavior? Can such laws be written?

I'd be interested in hearing what you think.

Update: 04/19 05:49 by C : CuriousGeorge113 beamed us this little tidbit: "There's a very interesting SPAM article over at Salon.com today. The article talks about a new SPAM law soon to be in front of Congress, why it won't work, why people SPAM, and why ISP's dont bother to sue SPAMers." so it looks like our protections against SPAMers although in-place rather ineffective. This situation bears watching.

mpk writes: [snip!] I've eliminated the submitter's entire write-up. So far submissions have been gushing with praise or harshly critical of this article in Salon -- nothing in between. Rather than choosing one side or the other, I'll just point you to the article, say it's well worth reading, and see how the comments fall.

Evro writes "S4l0n h4s 4 f4nt45t1c st0ry 4b0ut 0n3 m4n's tr14lz 4nd tr1bul4t10nz w1th Fr33 S0ftw4r3, 4nd why h3 3nd3d up r3turn1ng t0 M1cr0$0ft pr0ductz -- 4n 1ns1ghtful p0int 0f v13w th4t m4ny Sl4shd0t r34d3rs w0u1d d0 w311 t0 c0ns1d3r." j00 w0u1d b3 4m4z3d h0w m4ny p30pl3 subm1tt3d th1s 4s 4 tru3 st0ry.

The Reverend writes, "Salon has a frightening article about AOL-branded keyboards. There are three hot keys up top (where 'Internet' keyboards generally have a few buttons to automatically go to your favorite Web pages or open your e-mail prog) that link to AOL services. There is a 'better' version due out this fall that has 17 such buttons. I'm scared by this."

Compaq and Dell are among the PC manufacturers who already ship PCs with similar "direct contact" buttons, a calculated bet that convenience and ubiquity are going to beat due diligence on the part of consumers. Embedding a URL in hardware will certainly make alternatives (no matter how easy) just a tad less convenient than the built-in link. I wonder how the linked AOL addresses are embedded in the keyboard, and whether they're alterable. Even if they're not, would it be difficult to set up a layer which "listened" to your keyboard and performed on-the-fly translation when you hit one of those buttons?

At least one of those keys is straightforwardly user-programmable: as the article says, "[D]on't worry; there is one key, with the infantilizing name "My Key," that lets you create a link to any site on the Web." Wow -- users get one key.

AOL may change their mind about shipping these to anyone willing to fork over a few dollars for shipping. For the novelty value, or even for a one-programmable-button keyboard, less than $10 may replace a lot of coffee-ruined keyboards. Then again, the production of AOL come-on CDs doesn't seem to have waned. (But if there's a practical way to hack the pre-set presets, dollars-ta-donuts they pull the deal faster than you can say "Netpliance.")

Be grateful they haven't gotten to "direct-Internet-link" buttons on mice. Yet.

Julian Morrison writes, "An article on Salon shows the dark side of Napster (and implicitly, Gnutella and all the other clones). Artists say they can't make money from t-shirts and touring, and if sales of their CD drop on the auto-indexer, the label says goodbye. Can anyone come up with a distribution model that will work with the new tech rather than being swamped by it? " Also check out the recent Suck article about the "Zapster". Pretty funny.

Shervin Riahi writes, "There's an article in Salon on gene patenting that my genetics lab professor, Judith Tsipis (member of Brandeis University faculty), informed her class of. This is a topic I feel not many people know/care enough about; defend your rights! "

bmc wrote to us about an interview that is currently running over at Salon.com. Salon is talking with Bob Lewin, the CEO of TrustE. Honestly, it's depressing. There's a real dearth of legislation that will protect privacy rights ^[?] and even groups like TrustE have loopholes the size of Mack trucks.

Brian De Palma can direct fun movies, even good movies, but never go into one of his movies expecting too much. Written by the brothers who gave us Predator and Wild Wild West, his awful latest Mission to Mars opened this weekend. YRO authors Michael and Jamie were so appalled by this piece of work that they insisted on panning it together, and Jon Katz added his own, slightly hopeful voice to the flaying. Read more for serious spoilers ...

Review 1: Jamie and Michael

Michael: I don't want to keep you in suspense here: movies just don't get much worse than this. And I've seen both Waterworld and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes , so I think I know what I'm talking about. When Brian De Palma says on the movie's official site, "I tried to avoid all the cliches of science fiction movies and to give a whole new look and approach to this fantastic story," all I can think of is that someone needs to call the FBI because the movie he made was obviously switched with someone else's fifth or sixth-rate NYU-film-school production before it reached the theaters.

Jamie: People are going to say we're taking this too seriously, and maybe I did expect too much going in. But I really hate seeing wasted potential.

Michael: The whole premise of the film is based upon a scene where one astronaut makes a zero-gee sculpture of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies rotating freely and circularly in the shape of a DNA helix. Newton's first law? Anyone? Anyone? Brian De Palma was a physics major? I can see why he switched careers.

Jamie: Thanks for pointing out that URL, Michael. When I read this, I don't feel so bad for slamming the film:

"The various things that happen to the Mars One and Two crews in this film all come out of the physics of what could happen in the situations presented in the story. So, it is realistic and extremely authentic."

Ha. The scriptwriters must have had a quota of a scientific impossibility every ten minutes, and they made their quota easily. Spacesuit thrust jets at shoulder-level. A plot device that depends on the concept of inertia, followed by an attempted rescue that defies the law of inertia.

This was kind of like watching The Poseidon Adventure, and then suddenly halfway through the movie everyone discovers that they can breathe water and eat plankton. No explanation, that's just the way it is. They all swim out of the ship into the Pacific and then climb ashore, wading up onto the Chicago beach.

Michael: We are of course treated to many close-up shots of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies along the way, including several gratuitous close-up and pan shots where we focus in on the "m"'s and the bag to make sure that we do, indeed, realize that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies and not some inferior brand X chocolate candies, but real, honest-to-god, M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies. If you didn't realize they were M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies, we'll later spill them all over the floor and stare at them for about 20 seconds straight, with a statistically unlikely distribution where the vast majority of the candies land with the "m" up, just to make sure that we notice that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Also plugged: Isuzu, Pennzoil, SGI, Barq's Root Beer, Dr. Pepper, several others that I don't recall just now. The product placement was offensive enough that if I was writing this review I'd make a really big deal of it. Oh, I guess I am. Like watching two hours of commercials.

The "plot," if one must call it that, was as exciting as watching paint dry. Or maybe watching a "cinematic blend of texture and movement" as your clothes whirl around in the dryer. There's a lot of stilted acting, some manufactured crises, and a mysterious alien thing. "Hey look! I can spin the camera around so it looks like I'm in a rotating ring! Let's just spin! For about 3 minutes! We're spinning! Whoo-hoo! Just like a dryer!"

Jamie: Yes; there's homage to 2001 , and then there's a dull recycling of a special effect that was cool 30 years ago.

Michael: Finally we meet an alien. It's glowing, it's got baby blue eyes, it smiles at us, some beatific music swells, and then it hands us some M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies to munch on while it explains, with a handy diorama, just why it has been living in a big human face on Mars for the last few hundred million years.

Jamie: Don't forget the tear. The big sad crystal tear dangling sadly from the sad, sad alien eye. Did I mention it was sad? It was crying, it was so sad. You could tell it was sad because it was crying a big crystal tear. Also the fact that we'd just watched its entire planet destroyed in a fiery cataclysm. So there were two ways you could tell the alien was sad: the tear, and the incineration of its homeworld.

I had thought at first that the alien was a hologram, but later, it takes the humans' hands and it looks awfully real. Except for the fact that it looks awfully fake and computer-generated. Or maybe this alien race just happens to look like big nine-foot fake computer-generated holograms.

Inside, by the way, the Cydonia "face on Mars." This is the structure photographed in 1976 by the Viking probe, which caused wild speculation that it was an artificial construct. Unfortunately for De Palma, it was almost two years ago that high-resolution photos from the Mars Global Surveyor showed it was just another rocky plateau.

Let me spoil the big secret: the aliens are us. We're them. Obviously the scriptwriters graduated from a Kansas high school, because it turns out that the Precambrian explosion was actually seeded by DNA from Mars, thereby producing fish, alligators, brontosauruses, woolly mammoths, and (six hundred million years later) humans. But meanwhile, apparently, the Martians are us. We're them.

So there's a big weird mystery that the astronauts have to solve, which they do by looking at a rotating computerized graphic of a DNA molecule on a spacecraft that can't take off because all its computers are fried.

Michael: The electromagnetic pulse was selective, you see. Important things like wave analyzers and radar guns and remote-controlled toy cars were EMP-protected, while unimportant things like navigation computers were not.

Jamie: Right. Anyway, in the future, all astronauts are required to memorize the entire human genome, because they can look at the graphic which shows human DNA at the atomic level, recognize that two chromosomes [sic] are missing, and (I'm not making this up) enter the missing atomic structure of the chromosomes that were left out. They complete the graphic picture and open up the door to the giant white room which ripped off both 2001 and THX-1138 .

How did the Martians know what the proper DNA sequencing for those two chromosomes were? How did they know how many chromosomes humans have?

Because they're us, we're them. They created multicellular life, and apparently evolution is not random natural selection at all because this weird holographic Martian DNA doesn't change in 600 million years.

I can't stand movies that go back and forth between hard science and the worst kind of pseudoscience. Give me one or the other, OK? But don't base the plot around science and then expect me to suspend scientific disbelief every ten minutes.

One more example. There's a tense moment inside the THX-1138-style white room where Gary Sinese takes off his spacesuit. But he knows it's OK because he watched the air pressure rise: 6psi, 7psi, etc., and as he cracks his gloves off, another character is saying excitedly "12psi, 13psi." So they know that 14psi is Earth normal and we're expected to keep in mind the difference between Mars air pressure and Earth air pressure.

But for the last hour, the plot has hinged on this guy stranded on Mars for a year, who has stayed alive and healthy by growing plants in a canvas greenhouse.

OK, forget the fact that there's no water in the Martian atmosphere - none. Forget the sunlight being half Earth's and filtered through canvas. Forget canvas not producing a greenhouse effect by any stretch of the imagination. Forget all that; he has some magic beans that let him grow a splashy leafy warm wet jungle inside a canvas greenhouse. OK.

This canvas greenhouse is tethered to the Martian dirt by ropes. It flaps in the Martian wind. It looks about as airtight as, well, a Boy Scout tent. And everyone inside it gets to take their helmets off because it is an Earth-pressure atmosphere. Inside the canvas tent. Mars-pressure outside. Earth-pressure inside. Pressure differential between the two: one ton per square foot. Canvas and rope are going to (a) hold down a thousand tons of force and (b) flap in the breeze. Right!

Michael: Don't forget the temperature differential: Mars' average temperature is something like -70 Fahrenheit. Much colder at night, of course. But I guess the magic greenhouse can fend off -70 degree temperatures too. I wish my military-issue shelter half had been made of that material!

Jamie: And finally, at the end of the film, the astronauts climb into the return vehicle and blast off for Earth. As the credits roll they begin starving to death, because it's a six-month minimum journey and it's already been established they have no food. What a happy ending.

Robert Zubrin, co-author of The Case for Mars , was an advisor to this film and he must have held his nose all the way through it. Zubrin is a rocket scientist who has spent the last ten years telling anyone who would listen about a very realistic, practical system for getting people to Mars within ten years. I know he must have had his reasons for signing on but he must be a little embarrassed now that he's seen the finished product.

The reason this movie offends me so much is because it treats the red planet, and space travel in general, with disrespect. It tries to be realistic, but whenever the science gets in the way of Hollywood, Hollywood wins. It did have some powerful moments, true, and they were especially moving if you believe (as I do) that space exploration is important. But when a science-fiction film jettisons the science, it turns into campy space opera - which makes the good parts just that much harder to take.

Michael: This movie looks like it was stitched together from a couple of thoughts the director had and thought were cool. (The studio probably thought they were being slick, capitalizing on Mars enthusiasm generated by NASA missions, so they rushed it through production, never figuring NASA would just hurl probes at the planet like a bunch of lawn darts.) There's zero consistency between those parts, not even hand-waving, you just jump from one to the next with no explanation whatsoever.

Maybe you could justify spending $2 on a non-new-release movie rental of Mission to Mars, assuming it's even released on video, which I honestly think would be a sick joke. But $30, which is what it costs for two people to attend a movie and buy a soda in Manhattan? I'd rather gouge my eyes out. This one definitely gets two thumbs down, and if I had more thumbs, they'd be down too, unless they were holding a bag of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Other Reviews:

• Salon: Disney, We Have a Problem
• Rotten Tomatoes has a great pick of choice quotes from dozens of reviewers around the U.S.

Review 2: JonKatz

I had two primary responses to Mission. The first was disbelief that Brian De Palma -- the same man who made Wiseguy, and Scarface, among others -- could have made it. The second was awe at the impact of sophisticated animation on movies. It's now possible for a movie to be beautiful, even awe-inspiring and touching at times, and still be a lousy movie. To me, that was the real fate of Mission To Mars.

The characters were so noble, self-sacrificing and one-dimensional, they were practically cartoons. And what Kubrick and Lucas have done so brilliantly -- remember that space and sci-fi ultimately revolve around very human people and stories -- DePalma forgot. He was so busy evoking awe that any sense of humanity was drowned out.

In fact, DePalma's efforts made me appreciate Lucas especially, who I was beginning to resent for all of his mega-hyping. Whatever Lucas's failings, in all of his movies, you're occasionally blown away by the idea of what might be out there, while still identifying with the hapless humans who are trying to sort it out. DePalma gives us instead some God-like alien life force powerful enough to run the universe, but too dumb to figure out the motives of the encroaching humans. And not a single line of dialogue uttered by any star in this movie made them appear real or relevant. Still, the movie was gorgeous, which is why it will sharply disappoint some people. Three or four space scenes, and some of the scenes on Mars, were really jaw-dropping, and made the movie quite worth seeing.

But DePalma seemed way over his head with the subject matter. High-class science fiction isn't all that easily to replicate, it turns out. In terms of character and narrative, Mission to Mars was a stinker. But I won't be surprised if people with imagination and heart will go see it and be touched.

grouchomarxist writes: "Salon has an article about a cryptograph attributed to a certain W. B. Tyler, possibly a pseudonym for Edgar Allen Poe. There is a $2500 prize for the person who solves the cryptograph." The Gold-Bug , which rates a mention in the Salon article, was by far the most spell-binding story in my old Horace Mann Reader, and it's the tale that first turned me on to The Divine Edgar. Could it be that the reason this cryptograph has remained unsolved for so long is that it is actually insoluble? Now that would be the ultimate posthumous practical joke. Even if you have no intention of trying to solve it, take a look -- the cryptograph itself is strangely hypnotic.

grouchomarxist writes: "Salon has an article about a cryptograph attributed to a certain W. B. Tyler, possibly a pseudonym for Edgar Allen Poe. There is a $2500 prize for the person who solves the cryptograph." The Gold-Bug , which rates a mention in the Salon article, was by far the most spell-binding story in my old Horace Mann Reader, and it's the tale that first turned me on to The Divine Edgar. Could it be that the reason this cryptograph has remained unsolved for so long is that it is actually insoluble? Now that would be the ultimate posthumous practical joke. Even if you have no intention of trying to solve it, take a look -- the cryptograph itself is strangely hypnotic.

ICANN has been in the news quite a bit recently. Although new TLD's have been in the works for more than five years now, ICANN has given in to the lobbying of its patron mega-corps and stated that no new TLD's would be created unless trademark holders got first dibs on them. So much for a personal TLD exempt from trademark considerations... ICANN is currently pushing its At-Large Membership, which everyone should join, even though the system has been carefully rigged so that the public cannot make meaningful changes in the composition of ICANN's Board. All these and more will be discussed in their Cairo meeting, which will be Webcast starting 2 a.m. EST on March 8.

suix was the first person to write about Salon's new section. They are calling it the "The Free Software Project", which apparently is also the title of Andrew Leonard ^[?] 's new book. From what I can tell the section is simply a collection of the Free Software articles published on Salon, most of which are by Leonard, with a couple other people thrown in there. I dunno - it just like it's an archive to me, but hey, it does get its own section name now. *grin*Update: 03/06 03:39 by H :Thanks to Salon for pointing the new sections that are online - I sit corrected.

suix was the first person to write about Salon's new section. They are calling it the "The Free Software Project", which apparently is also the title of Andrew Leonard ^[?] 's new book. From what I can tell the section is simply a collection of the Free Software articles published on Salon, most of which are by Leonard, with a couple other people thrown in there. I dunno - it just like it's an archive to me, but hey, it does get its own section name now. *grin*Update: 03/06 03:39 by H :Thanks to Salon for pointing the new sections that are online - I sit corrected.

awaterl writes "Salon Magazine is featuring an interview with MPAA president Jack Valenti, who has never downloaded an MP3, but does 'have staff members who have.' An interesting interview that provides insight into the mind of an aging guy who is honestly doing what he believes to be right, but cannot see why others might consider him clueless. "

genehckr writes "Salon has an article about how JWZ has been spending his time since leaving Netscape/AOL/Mozilla -- he's working on buying a nightclub in San Francisco. The article also delves into JWZ's personality, and some of the history behind the JWZ/RMS Lucid Emacs/emacs split -- an interesting read. " Ok, I put it under the Mozilla icon because I don't have a 'San Francisco Nightclub Icon'. Interesting article covering stuff that we don't usually see around here.

BigTed writes "Webmonkey has got an interesting article up about the VA Linux takeover of Andover and its effect on *gasp* Slashdot and the Open Source Community." Personal note: I almost quit when I heard about the merger, because I had exactly the same worries Jay Greenspan expresses in this editorial. Since then I have been personally reassured by Larry Augustin that VA Linux has no desire to mess with the content on any Andover site, including Slashdot. I'm posting this story, even though we've been over this ground before, primarily so that we don't get accused of bias by not posting it. And yes, we will continue to post news of Red Hat, Penguin Computing, and others in the Linux corporate community, same as before. Everyone who works on Slashdot, and everyone in Andover.net management, has sworn to defend Slashdot's editorial independence. Period. - Robin 'roblimo' Miller, Editor-in-Chief, Andover.net. Update: 02/09 05:16 by CT : here is a Salon Story by Andrew Leondard expressing the same concerns as the webmonkey bit.