Slashdot Mirror
Open Source, Closed Talk
Internet users who "post" articles using USENET or mailing lists are inherently granting third parties the right to repackage and retransmit their words into various formats. For example, Deja and Remarq take the legal position that they have the right to rate, sort, emphasize and discard USENET posted content, and retransmit what they consider "best", without obtaining any license or permission from the authors of the content. Seems perfectly reasonable, even to their legal departments and investors!
So long as Linux related discussions take place in such open forums, third parties have wide latitude to do the same, potentially adding a lot of value -- identifying highly relevent and instructive postings, questions asked and answered, tips for new users, a record of new ideas and suggestions and more. Enter a site like VA Sourceforge. True, they are providing all sorts of value added services. An open source project conducted there has certain advantages. The general discussion forums there too, may be useful. However, in each case, the participants are asked (in the legal "terms and conditions") to grant the Web site permission to use the forum content, but no permission is requested or accepted on behalf of third parties.
The bottom of every page says "Forum comments are owned by the poster. The rest is copyright VA Linux Systems." Remember that the GPL may apply to code, but it's irrelevent to talk. If I see an insightful discussion taking place on the Web site, or in the site's archives months after the fact, I can't take it, package it, sort or filter it, and retransmit this in another form or medium. Not unless I go back and obtain permission and a license from *each and every participant* in the discussions in question. So, in an important sense, VA is taking ownership of the content; no one else will be able practically to get the rights to reproduce, recycle and extend the content. Open source, but "closed talk".
Is there a solution? Yes. A quick and direct solution would be for a site like VA Sourceforge to permit users to obtain any and all contributed content an automated mailing list facility. Just asking users who are posting content for the right to retransmit, if done properly, could move us back to the status quo ante. However, I suspect they won't, because they want the site traffic. There is potentially a lesson here for Slashdot as well. I suspect that I can't take what's posted at Slashdot and retransmit what I might consider "best" like I could, for example, with the Linux kernel mailing list, can I? This whole trend toward Web site forums and facilities is leaving significant, valuable intellectual property rights in the hands of companies valued in the billions of U.S. dollars, and rendering it uneconomical for others of us to get the rights ourselves. Potentially, this is denying the Linux community valuable future resources.
To provide copies of useful information I'd seen at these sites, I'd practically have to construct an elaborate Auctionwatch or Bidders Edge system, and point people to links at VA Sourceforge or Slashdot. (And then what, will the sites respond with lawsuits like eBay?) Until these sites establish new policies of collecting intellectual property rights for the whole community, instead of just for themselves, some of the most exciting and important content in this "new era" for Linux is no longer open to all -- certainly not the way we all mean when we say "open". "
Some Anonymous Coward writes a moving, compelling manifesto against the MPAA-- concise, easy to comprehend, with easy steps one might take to fight them.
If only the general public would read this post from Anonymous Coward-- why, they'd undestand the issue, their hearts would melt, and public sentiment rally against the dictatorial Valenti and his ilk.
Now, let's say everyone wants to repost this moving article on their web site. Can they do it, legally? Do they have to ask the original poster for permission to print it in its entirety?
And if the author was an Anonymous Coward, how could they ever get permission? What then? Maybe the open content (http://www.opencontent.org) license could be applied to all postings or something (?)
This whole debate is very interesting,
and I am watching with some worry.
In USENET, ppl contribute, their help
, ideas, flames etc, without any sort of
monetary reward for doing so.
The news server you use does not generate
revenue per article read or anything like
that for the company or individual who ran it
either.
Slashdot however generates moey for the ppl
running it, or their company whatever, by
every page impression/view that happens.
Every time someone reads a discussion,
the hits go up, and in this new wacky economy
you read the ad, you might generate some
revenue.
If Slashdot, starts mirroring the discussions
on NNTP, its my true hope that they will
NOT add stupid ads etc to the disussions but
sticking true to the old school USENET style,
and ONLY replicating content.
However, how will Slashdots admins, or their
parent company feel about loosing perhaps
30% (over estimate I am sure) of the page
impressions if the discussion are bidirectionally
replicated to NNTP. That means less ads seen
less revenue.
Slashdot a while back started publishing their
headers via XML, for some reason they update
it very rarly compared to their frontpage.
This is natural since they want ppl, they want
you, to look at their front page, and earn them
money.
They dont really want to give you the content
without having to go through it.
I will be pleasantly suprised if Slashdot sets
up a bidirectional real time replication to
NNTP without any banners though I doubt it
will happen.
I would like a fresh bowl of Slashgrits poured down my pants.
Thanks you.
The idea of getting /. discussions mirrored on to an NNTP server is the greatest idea I've heard in a long time. I sure hope this improvement makes it.
/. in mid-1998, which puts me fairly near the start of the usage curve. My user # is certainly in the top 10%, and by now maybe in the top 1% (this is hardly to brag: I only contribute to threads occassionally, and have only a moderate karma thereby).
/. at the beginning was that the discussion capabilities were *SO FAR* behind the Usenet in terms of speed, usability (in my favorite news client), archivability, searchability, and in all the other things that make NNTP great. Over the last year, /. has added some nice features (the moderation, for a big one). But even still, it doesn't come anywhere close to Usenet in terms of convenience. (slashdot is still occassionally way too slow, and there is no way to browse discussion, respond, etc. offline).
/. style boards are not. And it is an open standard that allows everyone to have their favorite newsreader that encorporates all the features they find most useful (again unlike a web-board). News feeds are easily searchable plain-ASCII, which is wonderful (which web-boards are not, even for comments posted as ASCII).
/.. But all else pales next to NNTP.
I first started reading
Anyway, one of the main hesitations I had in spending much time on
This was discussed recently in the "death of Usenet" thread, and I guess a lot of correct points were made there. But I really think the *open* and distributed format of NNTP is the very best thing the internet has created. It is open in a lot of ways, too. The discussion is inherently public (if not unambiguously "public-domain") in a way even
A distant second here would be a majordomo or listserv type mirror of
Buy Text Processing in Python
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
To do this I used a rather unusual publication policy, as far as I know I've invented it:
By submitting this article you grant Technocrat.net a separate and independent copyright to your posting, and you keep your own copyright. That means that you can do anything you wish with your posting, and so can we.
That allows us to apply a license to the postings after the fact.
However, this doesn't address the complaint, which is that Usenet sites seem to have a more liberal copyright policy that allows them to be filtered and presented differently by various web sites, and weblogs like Slashdot and Technocrat do not. I'm not sure that stands, legally. The Usenet doesn't demand a particular copyright and the default if you don't copyright your posting would be All Rights Reserved.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
There are many, many methods of moderation on Usenet.
/. moderation would be "nocem". nocem messages are advisories in which any reader of Usenet can list message-IDs that they either consider a must-read, or that they think should be immediately trashed.
./ moderation. Choosing between standard discussion, or Natalie Portman posts would simply be a matter of choosing which moderators you trust. Moderators can mark as many posts as they want, even their own, in discussions they're taking part in. If you find the moderator is moderating badly, all you have to do is remove their key from your trust file.
Scoring killfiles are a God-send. Once you've read a newsfroup for a few months, you can tell who is most likely to produce content, and score them up, and score down those more likely to produce noise. Don't have enough time to read the entire group today? Doesn't matter, the cream should have floated to the top of your newsreader. Just read down the list as far as you want, then bin the rest.
The other "plus" of this method is that you know when you load the group and there's nothing with a positive score, it's time to move on and find somewhere else to amuse you.
The most similar to
The difference is that you can verify the source of a nocem using PGP, and you can choose which moderators you trust.
This would dispose of most of the complaints about
This is also something that couldn't be implemented on a web-based forum. Dealing with such fine-grained moderation preferences would bring the site to its knees. The beauty of Usenet is that aside from the spam-filtering, the rest of the work is done by the client, so you can set up your own moderation to your own preferences.
Usenet isn't dead. It's not even dying. Web based forums are incredibly clumsy in comparison, and only good for short-lived discussions.
Look at slashdot for an example. Unless you get in the first hour or two after a topic is posted, the chances of having your post read, or responded to is minimal. The chance of carrying on a discussion that lasts more than a few hours is almost non-existant - everyone will have moved on to the next topic.
On Usenet, on the other hand, discussions can go on for days, weeks, months, years, or occasionally forever. Those who are interested in the thread will continue to read it, those who aren't will just score it down or killfile it, and move on to something new.
I'd like to see how a slashdot/NNTP gateway would deal with this obvious change in mentality would be interesting. Expiring posts after 24 hours would be the obvious, if brutal solution.
Charles Miller
--
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
In both USENET and the various discussion Web sites, the comment poster owns the copyright, so, technically, you should have to get permission to redistribute in either case.
Due to the nature of USENET, it can reasonably be assumed that the poster allows redistribution freely. However, there definately is untested waters for services that "package" USENET postings and then resell them, since they are using the original copyrighted material in methods that could be argued are different from the implied "license to distribute". Now, no one has challenged this in court, and hopefully, no one will, since it seems to be a good arrangement for both sides, and it would hurt everyone involved. Everything I just said about USENET seems to apply to mailing lists, too.
The major problem with Web sites is the lack of easy-to-access archives of material, not the legality of redistribution. Yes, technically, you should ask for permission to redistribute, but that's the same as under USENET. It's a matter of perceptions. The problem sited here is that 3rd-parties can't get at the archives in an efficient method to do repackaging. This is a problem, and one I'm not sure is easy to solve.
However, it's also a problem with mailing-lists: if the list maintainer doesn't make a digest or archive available, it's not easy to get back articles. Sure, you can subscribe and get everything from that moment on, but you don't get "back issues".
I don't really know what the answer is, but at least it doesn't seem to be a legal problem.
:-)
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
I am proposing that Slashdot and VA Sourceforge immediately make available their web hosted forums via a majordomo style mailing list, with every participant at the web site giving up as many legal rights as any participant in any mailing list. Permit users access to the full ascii content of whatever is posted to forums via e-mail, without ever having to visit the site (except maybe to sign up).
Different 3rd party "mailing list archiving" sites, which use html interfaces (ugh), already take the position they have the inherent right to be one more manner of the redistribution contemplated by the mailing list method of moving content around.
One can squabble about whether this would hold up in court, but let's move back to status quo ante: put web hosted forums on the same playing field as majordomo mailing lists.
This is a much more direct solution than writing a new GPL something or other licence, although maybe that would be useful in the longer term.
Bruce Perens' site, techoncrat.net has packaged all last's years content & comments and made them available (somewhere - I couln't find a URL)
Bruce, if you are reading - what's the licence, and do you require permission of the comment posters to make their comments available for redistribution?
I'm sorry I have to be the one to say this, but USENET sucks. I've used it to varying degrees of success, and certainly obtained and published my meager knowledge of Linux, but by and large, USENET is spam and porn.
/. my inane Linux questions), but /. does provide a publicly moderated forum for discussion. In many ways, /. is better than USENET, one, because it is moderated by the members of /. and therefore not subject to the whim of a single USENET moderator, and two, /. ACTUALLY GETS MODERATED. Many usenet groups I've seen cannot keep up with the garbage that is posted there. /. moderators eliminate the Natalie Portman troll posts almost as quickly as they are posted.
/. moderation scheme, the moderated messages are not actually removed, they are just lowered to an ignorable level. The burden of the moderation is on the /. community, and I have to say that the /. community has gone above and beyond the call of duty on this one! Good show, give yourselves a pat on the back!
/. community to moderate the moderators. I occasionally find a comment moderated down that shouldn't be, and have the priviledge of being able to do something about it.
/., so don't make it out to be an evil that it isn't.
I've recently become interested in distributed computing, and looked on USENET for a dist comp group. I did find ONE, with about a dozen messages in it. About three of those messages were valid. The other 80% was divided equally betwixt spam and porn.
Sites like Slashdot, while not providing the same forum as USENET, (i.e. I cannot just post on
Also, with the
And let's not forget the ability of the
I've never seen a better public forum than
Elf Sternberg, an long-time personality on Usenet, anticipated some of the growing problems with it and has put this proposal on his web site for a distributed solution. It is worth reading, especially in light of the idea for a Slashdot/NNTP gateway.
This article may be copied and distributed under the terms of the OpenContent License (OPL) Version 1.0, July 14, 1998.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
...those `GPL for Books' kind of licenses?
Combine that with an option below the Comment window (like Slashdot's) to `Include comment in SCPL (SlashComment Public License)'. That way, the poster still owns the comment *and* gives permission for others to use it in a manner consistant with the SCPL.
This would also allow people to opt in and out, legally, and at will. Make the option avaliable to all (AC and those with accounts) and, voila! Problem solved.
This would also make things easier for posters. Remember the _Jane's_ happening? There were people who were quoted and not given credit (at first. IIRC, all of those problems got sorted out). With something like the SCPL, the license writers could include a clause that made it mandatory to give due credit.
The best part about this is that it's a vouluntary system. Since it's a contract that you knowingly enter into, there's no problems with comments beig `stolen', taken out of context, or abused.
Comments?
Here's my copy of DeCSS. Where's yours?
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
USENET has a number of problems, starting with the picky nature of its users. While it can do HTML to present an opinion in rich text, it is frowned upon.
If you have a newbie/basic question for a newsgroup, there's a chicken and egg problem. If you have a basic question for alt.foo.foobar, how do you find the FAQ? You're stuck with the choice of two stupid threads: "Where's the FAQ?", or "My foobar is broken". The former is the best choice of course, but it kind of lessens the usefulness of a FAQ, because someone still has to reply, and hopefully they won't flame you with RTFM's, too. The latter is also likely to get you the link, though it may get you a few extra flames. While I haven't seen it implemented, the web interface can preemptively point someone in the right direction before they start a "junk" thread.
Forums based on Slash or UBB feel more like communities. If you're interested in the person who made such-and-such a comment, there's an easy way to find out who/what they are -- you just click the link to their user information, and if they want to share anything, they've put it into their forum profile directly or by a link.
Usenet is moving to the Web because the interface, content, and interactivity can be done better there.
--
E2 IN2 IE?
The whole point of posting to a forum is to release your memes on the collective consciousness. Anyone who would stop posting because of a public release isn't really interested in the discussion anyway.
/. moderation structure?
So the answer is simple - a public release and redistribution license accepted by hitting the "submit" button. Part of it could be the user id attached in any redistribution.
On another point - anyone know of a political discussion board using the
Back around 1989, I wrote a short history of USENET and made fun of all the people who kept predicting for years that it would soon die. I ended up coining the phrase "imminent death of the net predicted" in the history.
/. and others as the place to go for online conferences.
/., compared to a good newsreader. I rarely read the boards here. It's too slow, too cumbersome, even over a fast link. My newsreader is an order of magnitude faster.
But today I've joined the doomsayers. The net won't die, but it's already in decline, finally for real, but for a long time simply compared to the web. You see USENET was growing, but it wasn't growing nearly as the net itself. During the 80s it grew faster. Now all the mindshare belongs to the web, and more and more people think of web boards like
Too bad because frankly they suck in most ways, including
So much better yet it manages to die, while Andover gets valued at 800 million dollars (or whatever) of VA Linux Stock. Why?
Many reasons, but prime among them resistance to change. USENET is the example of open source at its worst. To change and evolve, it needs the cooperation of *everybody*. It's hard to lead, and no matter what you do, there will be more people who will think it's a bad idea. Every new suggestion is met with "Go to the web to do that" or "Go start your own hierarchy."
Well, I did start my own hierarchy once. It's not easy, and it's stupid it should be necessary to do something new.
I helped start the usenet-format IETF working group to help improve the USENET standard. It's been going for over 2 years and gotten nowhere. There are perhaps 2 or 3 new features in it, all because I pushed for them, but frankly nothing. Because of the need for too much agreement there is no change.
USENET people fear the web and the internet as the enemy when they should embrace them. Slashdot works because doing it on USENET would be hard. USENET still lacks real support (other than robo-moderation) for the idea of short-term, moderator-created topics that are within themselves unmoderated, or retro-moderated. That's how almost every online service and BBS has worked for a long time now.
USENET people fear the web because of the things that are wrong with the web -- it's too pretty, to inefficient, requires permanent connectivity -- but in turn they reject all the good it has to offer.
The last new feature in newsreaders was MIME, which is almost 10 years ago, before the web. One new feature in 10 years? 10 Internet Centuries they would now call that.
Even though over 50% of users now read with Netscape or Outlook Express and can do full MIME and HTML, even good uses that don't involve the feared abuses of the web are shouted down if people try them. Even somebody like myself, a reasonably respected old hand and moderator, has trouble suggesting new things. If I can't do it, I don't know who can.
I've about given up on the usenet-format working group as a means to improvement. My battle cry at the end was that we bring USENET into the 90s before they were over. Start-of-Decade-debates notwithstanding, I lost.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation