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This AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies article by Mark S. Nadel is also relevant to showing the case against intellectual property.

http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract .php?pid=302

From the abstract: This article questions the economic justification for copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying. Building on the thesis of Stephen Breyers 1970 Harvard Law Review article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, it contends that not only may copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying (17 U.S.C. 106) not be necessary to stimulate an optimal level of new creations, but that 106 appears to have a net negative effect on such output! It observes that the higher revenues that 106 generates for popular creations are, in the lottery-like entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts (rent seeking), and that such marketing crowds out many borderline creations. The article also identifies and explains how new technologies and social norms provide many viable business models for financing new creations relying on only a heavily abridged version of 106. Hence, the article questions whether the current 106 could survive the intermediate scrutiny standards of the First Amendment, given the lack of evidence that the benefits of 106 exceed its costs.

This is a fantastic paper. It is full of references and numbers a lot of hard work and scholarship obviously went into it.

For support for eliminating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypag e&NodeID=650

and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/i l03.html

You can also see lots of other ongoing discussion here on Lawrence Lessig's blog here http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ and in his two books.

Here are some of my own comments on the situation: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=898 http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889

For support for elimitating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypag e&NodeID=650

and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/i l03.html

You can also see lots of ongoing discussion on Lawrence Lessig's blog http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ which I have been posting at specifically in this Doc's diagnosis topic comments section here: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889

and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/i l03.html

You can also see lots of ongoing discussion on Lawrence Lessig's blog http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ which I have been posting at specifically in this Doc's diagnosis topic comments section here: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889

Well if scientists want public funding for billion dollar experiments they had better have public support...

However one of the interesting aspects of the physics funding situation is the way that there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of funds for large scale particle physics colliders which have no practical application I am aware of while fusion research has to scramble for every dollar while trying to solve the energy problem. This is in large part due to the fission mafia's attempt to sink every competing energy source the way they killed public funding for alternative energy research in the 80s (see Salter's duck).

I think though that Chernobyl has less to do with the problems of physics than the end of the cold war. The gravy train for physics research and in particular particle physics had everything to do with the national prestige attached to 'nuclear' research which had everything to do with the bomb. That is why the US just had to build their own SSC and build it in Texas rather than work on the LHC at CERN or site the project close to Canada who had offered to provide the power if that happened.

Nulcear power was a spent commercial force after three mile island. The incredible stupidity of siting a nuclear plant that close to Manhattan island exposed the industry as negligent and careless. By the time that Chernobyl happened nuclear power was already dead.

The problem with the life sciences is finding out if a Chernobyl has occurred. It took several decades before DDT was identified as the cause of the declining populations of perdatory birds. It took even longer to connect smoking to cancer and heart disease. The problem with genetically modified foods is that nobody knows what adverse effects may be linked to them in 20 years time.

We may even have seen a Chernobyl already. There is an interesting correlation between the sites of the earliest identified cases of AIDS and the testing of polio vaccines cultured on monkey kidneys

This link is of course unproven, but it is not exactly disproven either, nor is the alternative cut hunter theory particularly persuasive given that there have been cut hunters eating monkeys since Homo Spaiens appeared on the planet but AIDS has only appeared in the past 50 years.

The 'scientific' response to this theory would be to examine it as a matter of urgency. Instead the reponse from the biologists has been pretty much the response of the physicists to Chernobyl; no not us, could not possibly happen here, no three mile island was not comparable, it was the fault of those heathen communists, etc.

Instead of examining the polio vaccine theory it was silenced by means of a law suit brought by Koprowski, the leader of the polio trial. I do not consider that to be an adequate standard of scientific proof.

The result is that defamation law is often used by the rich and powerful to deter criticisms. It is seldom helpful to ordinary people whose reputations are attacked unfairly. ...

Law reform commissions have been advocating reform of defamation law for decades. Possible changes include:

* public figure defence so that it's possible to make stronger criticisms of those with more power;

* adjudication outside courts, to reduce court costs;

* elimination of monetary pay-outs, requiring instead apologies published of equal prominence to the original defamatory statements.

In spite of widespread support for reform among those familiar with the issues, Australian law remains much the same. That's because it serves those with the greatest power, especially politicians who make the law and groups that use it most often.

I have a feeling that the answer to this question is going to shock and dismay us all.

Actually, I read an article once on how children (boys especially) of programmers and engineers tended to display autistic behaviors, often leading to a misdiagnosis of autism. I was interested because my own nephew, at over two years old, still had not spoken one word. The doctors were heading toward an autistic condition. But the article went on to explain how even though they tend to display these early symptoms that can last from birth to five years old, they are just fine, and tend to end up very smart bordering on genius level. The most common thread under these conditions was that they were children of programmers or engineers. My brother is a programmer, so I thought it was rather interesting. (and yes I do think my nephew (who is now 6) is quite a little genius. He could read some words at two but couldn't talk. A few months in speech therapy fixed that. He bypassed kids books by age four and has been reading encyclopedia style books on anything to do with fish, bugs, snakes or animals of any kind. At 6 he can tell you what an estuary is, knows everything about anything that lives in the deep sea, will gladly explain about any 'aquatic animals' found in a zoo, including their eating and 'reproductive' habits and sound out words like carnivorous'. His hero is Steve Erwin, Crocodile Hunter, of course.

Just search for autism engineer.
Here's a clip
A couple of years ago the UK magazine Professional Engineering published an article entitled "Is there a bit of the Rain Man in every engineer?" linking engineers with children who have autism. Autistic children don't develop normal social relationships and they tend to wander off by themselves and play with mechanical things. The article said that engineers and autistic children shared various characteristics including strong visualisation skills, strong affinity with physical objects and being "less interested in social activities and communication.

Another
Simon Baron-Cohen, an autism researcher at the University of Cambridge, found that there were 2 ½ times as many engineers in the family history of people with autism.

Ah, now it's slashdotted. Try here or here or here or here for more info on this major landmark in film history...

It's an underhanded, but unmistakably capitalist, tactic. Leaving you the only option in a market driven society: vote with your dollars and they'll soon leave this intentionally crummy product for dead.

A good article regarding the concept of planned obsolescence.

The Magna

The Movie

Better yet, when will people realize that patents and copyrights are wrong all together? Sure it isn't an idea that many will agree on. Very unpopular idea actually, but so was the idea of the earth being round. Simply put it, to believe in intellectual property is selfish. When I was young--and selfish as kids are when they are young--I wanted to come up with ideas and make money on them. As I grew older I realized how wrong patents were. Whatever your beliefs, please read some of Brian Martin's material on the subject http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/95psa. html I think about the subject everyday. Not one single day goes by now that I think about patents. It is my strong belief that doing away with patents and copyrights and any form of intellectual property will solve many of our worlds problems. You may think I'm crazy or ignorant, but then again you don't think about the subject everyday. If you do, then try the other side of the coin, you will be surprised how much you will learn.

Additionally, there is now evidence that Chimpanzee tissue culture -- Chimpanzee SIV being the supposed AIDS precursor virus -- was used to passage the seed virus to produce vaccine (something which every opponent of the OPV/AIDS hypothesis claims never happened, but of whom none can prove, given that no protocol for vaccine production has ever been produced for the Koprowski/Wistar vaccines in question), and circumstantial evidence that vaccine produced in this manner may actually have been used in field trials in humans.

So,

1. The people who are claiming that the debate is over are the people with a compelling financial interest in squashing this line of investigation;
2. The people who are claiming that the debate is over are ignoring evidence as they see fit, and are content not to ask for evidence (e.g., vaccine manufacture protocols and lab notes related actual vaccine production lots) which would shed a great deal of light on the issue;
3. The proponents of the theory have no financial interest in the outcome of the debate(even if one could argue book sales, the books will sell even if the theory turns out to be false);
4. ONLY THE OPV/AIDS theory accounts for the extremely high correlation of mass polio vaccinations and early AIDS infection sites, especially in remote, supposedly "isolated" areas in Eastern Congo, Western Rwanda/Burundi;

You might not be aware of the fact but MIT also happens to have a large faculty and many non-faculty research staff. As is pretty well known on Slashdot I was a researcher there about ten years after I got my doctorate.

Your digression on statistics would have more weight if you were familliar with the material. The probability that one HIV strain would wait until 1952 to jump from monkey to human is not high, the probability that the first known case would be discovered in Kinshasa a year after one of the first polio trials occured there is also not high.

But HIV is not one virus, it is two, HIV-1 and HIV-2 are completely different strains. What is the probability of two money viruses changing species within the same narrow geographical area in the same time?

Yes, I have taken a statistics class, and am aware of what statistics can do. You insult my intelligence when you assume that I don't know what I'm talking about.

Pot, kettle, black. You attempt to dismiss statements on grounds of authority you do not posses.

As for the reasons we still operate Nuclear power plants, without them the lights would go out which would be very unsafe indeed. However the plants that are operating are being operated in a very different manner to before TMI. The high cost of maintaining that level of vigilance is the main factor that has changed the economics of nuclear power from cheap to expensive.

I got a kernel panic- no support for ext3 in the standard kernel, and for some reason the support wasnt caried over from make oldconfig.

BTW, if you don't want to wait for the official release of 2.4.15, you can always get a patch for 2.4.14.

Already is one.

You are behind the times.

Actually, I heard of this one, and one that has a tracking/emergency system in case of mugging/kidnapping. Seriously!

You're looking for this.
I've been running ext3 since kernel 2.4.11 with these patches.

here.

Right now ext3 is not in the official kernel but it is in Alan Cox's which is also synched to the latest version, of course you can patch the official to use ext3 with patches from here. They usually lag a couple of days behind for a patch to be available for the latest kernels , but a cvs snapshot should work fine if you can't wait that long for them to release an official patch.

If you're wondering what the heck a preemptive kernel entails, then here's some background.

Also, if you don't like Robert Love's implementation, then Andrew Morton maintains a patch with a similar low-latency goal.

The only trouble I've had is with different behaiviour of e2fsck, it now checks if the fs is mounted before an auto-clean, but it's wrong if you crashed... So now I don't run fsck at all at bootup. :)

Any system that runs a Linux 2.4.x kernel works. Check out the documentation on the ext3 homepage. It's really very easy to patch a 2.4.10 kernel and compile it with ext3 support. After you're done, just add journal data to your existing ext2 partitions. I did this from a readonly root partition, but you could also use a boot floppy. Make sure your /etc/fstab has entries with updated filesystem types, and reboot. Done.

Any system that runs a Linux 2.4.x kernel works. Check out the documentation on the ext3 homepage. It's really very easy to patch a 2.4.10 kernel and compile it with ext3 support. After you're done, just add journal data to your existing ext2 partitions. I did this from a readonly root partition, but you could also use a boot floppy. Make sure your /etc/fstab has entries with updated filesystem types, and reboot. Done.

Have you read the using ext3 page? If you think you did things okay, look at the output of the mount command; it should report the filesystem types as ext3.

But there will be patches for 2.4.10, I am sure.

Yeah, we've been using ext3 for some time (and in an embedded product!). It's cool. Here's the 2.4.10 patch. It's a cinch ... :)

Pete C

how much faster is the performance?

Its not exactly faster, just more smooth. Consequently it won't make your boot time shorter or improve startup times of applications, or improve game framerates (I think, although I could be wrong). It will make your mouse pointer move more smoothly while your system is under load (though enabling DMA on your hard drive gives a bigger improvement), it will allow you to set a lower latency on your sound programs, giving you faster response, and it will in all likelihood help videos (I'm on a modem connection and have very few videos to try it with).

As for links, Google is your friend. A search for Low-Latency Kernel Patches reveals many interesting links, the most interesting being a site with history about low latency in Linux and a link to Andrew Morton's scheduling page where you can download patches for many 2.4.x kernels.

If you haven't done it already, enabling DMA on your hard drive will probably make a bigger difference than these patches, though, and without a kernel recompile too! Definitely look into that.

When was Scientific research ever unbiased? Be careful how much you believe in what you read. [1] [2]

The Real Time Scheduler does not really make Linux an RTOS because in and of itself it does not provide kernel pre-emption - the ability for the kernel to interrupt kernel-space code to deal with incoming events that _must_ be processed. This is a requirement of a 'proper' hard-RTOS because such an OS must be able to guarantee a response time, and if it cannot interrupt kernel code the OS scheduler may be stuck waiting for kernel code to return before it can go on to deal with the input. The rtsched patches do appear to integrate with MontaVista's kernel pre-emption patches however, and together they would indeed form a proper hard real-time OS.

Kernel pre-emption does not come without a price though - it can make a significant dent in overall performance, and it is tricky to implement in a clean way, and this is why kernel pre-emption will probably stay out of the mainstream kernel for the forseeable future. It also isn't necessary for 99.9% of people, who, as long as the latency, the time to respond, is on average less than a few ms, are happy. This is called 'soft' real-time and is more than adequate for any video or audio work.

Linux is actually pretty bad at soft real-time as standard, with typical latencies around the 100ms mark, which is rather worse than any version of Windows 9x or NT, and a lot lot worse than BeOS, which has latencies in the sub-5ms realm. Andrew Morton's Low-Latency patches deal with this quite nicely, taking typical latencies down to the 1.5ms mark by improving various kernel algorithms and adding a few points where the kernel can reschedule itself during long periods in kernel-space code. This represents the best latency in just about any OS that does not do hard real-time with kernel pre-emption (QNX, vxWorks etc.) and does not hit performance in the way that pre-emption patches do.
What would be very interesting is to combine the low-latency patch with the improved scheduler in the rtsched patches...

As for GetRewted patches... well, I'm not entirely convinced about the value of a non-executable stack. The problem is whether they actually do any useful good - they give a warm fuzzy feeling of security while only actually preventing a limited subset of attacks. In addition, it's in the wrong place. It's a kernel-space fix for what is really a user-space problem - and certainly I think it's better to fix problems at source than patch them up elsewhere - otherwise you end up with code spaghetti.

My own personal favourite anti-stack-smashing add-on is libsafe, originally a Bell Labs project, which overrides dangerous libc functions with its own, safe functions, either by using the LD_PRELOAD feature of ELF shared objects to protect existing binaries, or by being linked in to a binary at compile time, preferentially to the existing libc functions. In addition, version 2 of libsafe now includes protection against format-string attacks that appear to be the new scourge of unix. Of course, the best place for this protection is in libc itself, and glibc 2.2 does include some protection like this, but it is a compile-time option only, and further, is primarily designed to help developers fix overflows during program testing rather than helping sysadmins in the wild - it causes more of a performance hit than libsafe does.

Anyway - as for 2.4.5, nice to see the VM is sorting itself out - I was that close to turning my desktop machine's ext2 partitions into UFS. I think I might convert them to ReiserFS now. :)

Below is the introduction to the chapter Against intellectual property:

This should be a line of dashes to divide what I wrote from the quote. Lamness filter won't allow it though. Isn't it lame that the lameness filter is making this post more difficult to read?

Brian Martin presents the case against intellectual property, approaching the issue from a different background to most of us in the free software movement. (You'll note that Martin confuses "freeware", "free software", and "public domain", but that's my fault, since I should have picked this up in my proofreading.)

This is chapter three of Brian Martin's book Information Liberation, which is now online in its entirety. (Other chapters cover defamation, privacy, whistleblowing, and more.)

Against intellectual property

There is a strong case for opposing intellectual property. Among other things, it often retards innovation and exploits Third World peoples. Most of the usual arguments for intellectual property do not hold up under scrutiny. In particular, the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas provides no justification for ownership of ideas. The alternative to intellectual property is that intellectual products not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience, promotion of non-owned information, and fostering of a more cooperative society.

They want the best of both worlds. They want to be able to use cheap third world labor and slack third world environmental laws to cheaply create products that they can sell in different parts of the world, for the maximum price that that part of the world will pay.

They want to stop us from importing electronics, movies, CD's and such from parts of the world where they sell the exact same items for 1/2 the price.

Free trade is not something the common man is supposed to be able to take advantage of. It is supposed to be something the corps can use to increase their profits.

Against intellectual property chapter three of Information Liberation

They want the best of both worlds. They want to be able to use cheap third world labor and slack third world environmental laws to cheaply create products that they can sell in different parts of the world, for the maximum price that that part of the world will pay.

They want to stop us from importing electronics, movies, CD's and such from parts of the world where they sell the exact same items for 1/2 the price.

Free trade is not something the common man is supposed to be able to take advantage of. It is supposed to be something the corps can use to increase their profits.

Against intellectual property chapter three of Information Liberation

The article takes a legal perspective: the compatibility monopolies section fails to acknowlege the connector conspiracy principle that we all know from the famed JARGON file. It completely misses vital necessary points that are common knowledge among the technical elite, and in the bias the conclusion falls on the wrong side.

When I read things like

... in the 20th century, certain monopolies focused on providing the best product and price to their customers. Microsoft did just that, and judging from their economic success, they accomplished this extremely well.

What I am afraid this article may suggest (to the wrong people) is that the Microsofts and IBMs of the world deserve the right to "innovate" new interfaces, but they must be mediated by a central authority. I fear this authority who will guarantee nothing about the under the table licensing schemes and pre-release engineering samples, but *will* guarantee that software patents worm their way in like a liver fluke as a safeguard for the incentive MS and IBM had to create all that superior technology.

Then again, this is preaching to the choir of "Standards" people. Just remember: standards are created by consortiums of big corporations when and if their legal departments see fit. Also remember to use free software: it rules (and The Law just drools).

If the standard really calls for copy control, then the people who thought it up are not being very smart, I think. Do they really think that there's anything they can put in the file format that is sufficient to prevent copying/altering of files? (remember CSS?)

At the risk of sounding paranoid, this looks to me like another atttempt to take away our freedom.

Besides, I think that Free Software should not acknowledge software patents. See Brian Martin's piece on information liberation.

So the GIMP developers could do several things:

1. don't support JPEG2000 if it uses patented algoriths.
2. crack eventual safety algorithms, and support it anyway (civil disobedience)

The first is politically most correct, but the second has more hacker appeal, I guess :-)

I think the previous poster is right in assuming that Free Software will not get a license.

Roland

Danny.

Danny.

Danny.

Ashleigh Brilliant is a "professional epigrammatist." He creates and copyrights thousands of short sayings, such as "Fundamentally, there may be no basis for anything." When he finds someone who has "used" one of his epigrams, he contacts them demanding a payment for breach of copyright. Television journalist David Brinkley wrote a book, Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion, the title of which he attributed to a friend of his daughter. Brilliant contacted Brinkley about copyright violation. Random House, Brinkley's publisher, paid Brilliant $1000 without contesting the issue, perhaps because it would have cost more than this to contest it.

A full text of this article, from Wall Street Journal, 27 January 1997, is available here

From it, you will note that "Random House, which published Mr. Brinkley's book, paid him $1,000 for the rights without agreeing to or contesting Mr. Brilliant's claims.

Copyright subsists - exists within, and does not have to be claimed by any author, of an original artistic or literary work. In UK and US code, titles, epithets and bon mots do *not* gain protection as they are not of themselves considered artistic works.

You cannot copyright things as simple as this. But you can, apparently get the occasional (stupid)publisher to pay up to stop you wasting their time.

Personally, I would have contested in court if necessary this man's claims over ownership of title to a book with which he had no connection. (his this sort of claim which might easily be thown out, or at least loose quickly on case law)

Moreover, in the UK there is the concept of a "vexatious claim" in which it can in certain cases become a criminal offence to attempt in bad faith to extract payment not due by means of coercion, including by means of jumped up legal threat. Also in the UK I could apply to the court that any claimant post bond for costs (including mine) in the event he looses and this application usually scares the harassers away :-)

The author of "Information liberation" uses this example as supposedly one of the more egregious happenings in copyright abuse. Awww, come on Mr Brian Martin, it was a simple thing for the publisher to work out that their lawyer's time even in typing a proper response could cost more than the thousand bucks they paid. But I find, from experience, that people who make claims such as Mr Brilliant did do not usually press these in court, as they _know_ how weak they are. I would have acted differently from Random House, especially how you see now how these decisions become grist to the misinformed mill of people working against fair rights in works (Mr Martin)

Then of course there's the article Against Intellectual Property by Australian academic Brian Martin (which was a /. article a few months back).

Danny.

Also, I believe macrovision messes with the data that never gets displayed on the screen? (see here) Watermarks are are embedded in the low bits of the audio/picture data itself, rather than using an unused part of the data stream that was never intended to be presented to the user.
--

What you are proposing would end up as an Oligarchy. Power would eventually end up in the hands of just a few people, and they would make sure that it stayed that way. You might want to look into the democratic alternative of Demarchy, "a political system without the state or bureaucracies, and based instead on randomly selected groups of decision makers."

"Elections serve to legitimize the system of rule by the state. Because people believe they have participated in choosing their rulers, they are much more willing to accept the system of rule itself. In fact, one explanation for the introduction of elections in the Soviet Union was to provide legitimacy to a failing system."

I know this goes against the prevailing "We'd have Nirvana if only everyone voted" attitude on /., but everyone who thinks Democracy is the final solution in the quest for "better government" needs some sense (and a dose of reality) knocked into them. Everyone points to ancient Greece as an example of when democracy worked, but their experiment didn't last very long. There are alternatives to the Holy Democratic Society, Demarchy being one of them. So, in reply to your post, having most people vote through online voting is just like asking for some serious social unrest.

1. "The first argument for intellectual property is that people are entitled to the results of their labour. Hettinger's response is that not all the value of intellectual products is due to labour. Nor is the value of intellectual products due to the work of a single labourer, or any small group. Intellectual products are social products.
2. 
   Suppose you have written an essay or made an invention. Your intellectual work does not exist in a social vacuum. It would not have been possible without lots of earlier work - both intellectual and nonintellectual - by many other people"

• First of all, this is not a paper: it's a chapter of Martin's book, "Information Liberation".
  
• It's hosted in Danny Yee's site site; he proofread it. The rest of the Free Software Advocacy section has other interesting things. He also has a review of the book.
  
• I've been repeatedly trying to submit this to Slashdot, and it got rejected again and again! What was that all about? Jesus.
  
• Finally, considering the above, am I the only one who thinks it's ironic that only one chapter of the book is actually "liberated"?